The Brief

Wayfarers Chapel may have found a new home that would keep the beloved landmark in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Accelerated land movements forced the dismantling of the Lloyd Wright building last year, with the intention of reconstructing the chapel in a new location.

Its future seemed uncertain for months, but days ago the popular glass clifftop chapel said it’s zeroed in on a spot outside the city’s landslide zone for a rebuild.

‘An ideal site’

Next to the Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall sits Battery Barnes, a former military site once housed guns for the Coast Guard. The four acres of land has gone unused for decades. If everything goes according to plan, it will house the restored Wayfarers chapel, as well as a new visitors center, museum, cafe, and gardens.

An artistic rendering of the new Wayfarers Chapel campus on the Battery Barnes in Rancho Palos Verdes.

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Wayfarers Chapel

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Robert Carr, the administrative director of Wayfarers, says the land is “the ideal site.”

“The coastal views and the hilltop location match the original location in an uncanny way,” he says.

He adds the re-location is a win-win for Rancho Palos Verdes, who helped scout the site and have been wanting to develop the old military buildings near City Hall.

“They’ve really lacked a compelling kind of draw to help bring the public in and also help finance some of the rebuilding, and Wayfarers Chapel can solve both those problems,” Carr tells LAist.

To rebuild the chapel alone, Wayfarers needs to raise at least $10 million.

A portion the historic Wayfarers Chapel has had many glass panels removed while it is being disassembled in Rancho Palos Verdes on May 29, 2024.

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As to the expansion of the site, an estimated $20 million would need to be raised for additions like a visitor’s center and a cafe.

He says preliminary architecture work was done in the last few months to determine the exact location where the chapel would sit. However, some pieces still need to fall into place before Wayfarers can break ground.

“We’re confident that we’ll be able to raise enough money to rebuild at least the chapel quite soon after we get titled to the land,” Carr says.

Not a done deal

An artistic rendering of the front of Wayfarers Chapel on the Battery Barnes in Rancho Palos Verdes.

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The Battery Barnes is still owned by the military, and a land transfer needs to take place for the project to commence.

“It’s certainly not a done deal and we don’t want to get out ahead of that,” Carr says.

According to Carr, city leaders in Rancho Palos Verdes have already started reaching out to the federal government about the transfer.

Something for everyone

Carr says the Battery Barnes site is one of the last unbuilt areas on the peninsula that’s “surrounded literally on all sides by nature preserve land…you see hardly any buildings at all”.

He says Wayfarers has spoken with the Rancho Palos Verdes School District about potentially using the new site for education purposes.

“We were talking about including museum displays…for school groups to come and spend a few hours learning about the local history…go for a walk on the nature preserve land, learn about nature,” he says.

Although a lot needs to happen, Carr says all those original parts are still safe in storage, and detailed architectural designs of the building are expected to be finished by next winter. When the time comes to rebuild, they want to be ready.

“Our services have always been open to all comers. The Wayfarers is really a traveler. Anyone who is coming by and needs any kind of succor or pause or rest, that’s fundamental to our theology,” he says.

An artistic rendering of the view from the highway of the Wayfarers Chapel in its new home. The Point Vicente Lighthouse is seen below the chapel.

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Long before the Trump administration started deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many with school-age children, public schools nationwide faced a massive and accelerating drop in student enrollment caused mostly by shrinking families.

"Birth rates here in Los Angeles County have been declining for decades, which means fewer children enrolled in our schools," said Kelly Gonez, a board member in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest in the country, which lost more than 300,000 students over the last two decades.

L.A. isn't alone. The population of children under age 18 began to fall nationwide after 2010, according to U.S. Census data, dropping by roughly 2.1 million kids through 2025.

With public schools in much of the country facing a demographic cliff, the Trump administration last year began detaining and expelling large numbers of foreign residents. A study by the Migration Policy Institute found as many as 1.9 million people left the U.S. during the first 18 months of Trump's second term.

As part of the crackdown effort, federal officials weakened restrictions that prevented ICE agents from operating near public schools. "Many of our families immediately went into hiding," Gonez said. "We were predicting a 2% drop in enrollment. It was double that."

Researchers who study education and population trends aren't surprised. This is the first time in nearly a century, since the era of the Great Depression, that birth rates and immigration levels are low at the same time. Large-scale deportations mean even bigger and more rapid changes in areas with large immigrant communities.

"The U.S. isn't alone in facing the challenges of demographic decline," said Thomas Dee, an economist who specializes in education policy at Stanford University. "To stop or slow immigration really exacerbates those problems. Communities are now confronting very painful decisions about closing schools."

Special needs teacher Deja Nebula sets up an art installation displaying names and faces of people who have been detained or deported during ICE raids in Southern California, at Olvera Street Plaza in Los Angeles, July 2025.

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The scale of decline is daunting. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of kids in public schools nationwide peaked in 2019 and fell by roughly 1.5 million students as of the 2024 school year.

Based on data gathered before Trump's immigration crackdown began, federal researchers project enrollment will decline by at least another 2 million students by 2030. That would mean a 7% national decline in roughly a decade.

40 states see public school enrollment declines

An empty classroom is seen at Hollywood High School in L.A. The school district has begun a process aimed at closing and consolidating schools.

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It's unclear how large or sustained the impact of Trump-era immigration policies will be on enrollment trends. Dee and other researchers say that depends on how long ICE crackdowns and other restrictions remain in place.

In the short term, the blow to many districts could be severe. When Dee studied public schools in communities hit by ICE raids in California's Central Valley in 2025, he found student daily absences spiked more than 20%.

Texas, meanwhile, saw the number of kids in classrooms plunge statewide last year by more than 76,000 students. The vast majority of that drop came among Hispanic kids and the children of immigrant families, according to a study by the Texas Education Agency.

Florida, home to a large community of Haitian refugees who were stripped of temporary protected status by the Trump administration in July, saw a big drop in enrollment this year. The state's two largest public school districts, Miami-Dade and Broward County, lost roughly 30,000 children combined in a single year.

"It's really the effect of both the exodus of the existing families and stopping the inflow [of foreign migrants and children] that normally would have occurred," Dee said.

A report published in June by two education think tanks, Bellwether and WestEd, warned that public schools have entered an era of "sustained" enrollment declines which are already reshaping districts in 40 states.

The analysis found the "primary overall driver of declining enrollment is a sustained drop in birth rates" followed by a "national slowdown in immigration."

"At the local level, enrollment decline may permanently reduce available resources and will significantly reshape public education systems for years to come," the study concluded, while predicting a loss of $11 billion a year in public school funding linked to falling enrollment.

Other factors have spurred public school enrollment losses, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift of more students to private and homeschool learning. But the U.S. Department of Education projects private schools, too, will lose more than a million students by the end of this decade.

'We had over 200 students that didn't show up'

Guadalupe Cardona, a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, said kids vanished from her public school after ICE raids surged in 2025.

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While debates over immigration policy play out in Washington, D.C., teachers, parents and students say ICE crackdowns already mean more empty classrooms and less vibrant neighborhoods around schools.

"This street right here is actually where the ICE standoff happened. It was right before school," said teacher Guadalupe Cardona, who stood recently outside Santee Education Complex, a high school in South Los Angeles as school buses rumbled past.

In October 2025, an ICE agent opened fire here. No children or school employees were injured, but a man from Mexico without legal status and an ICE agent were struck by bullets. Cardona believes fear following that clash and other raids caused enrollment to plummet.

"In my school alone, we had over 200 students that didn't show up on the first day of school," she said.

"We found that a lot of them were just [gone], no longer living where they had put their address down. We lost two teachers at the beginning of the school year because of it. It is something that hurts beyond just, like, putting your job at risk."

Guadalupe Pineda, a parent, works in a shop just down the street from Santee High. She says dread of ICE, combined with fewer students coming and going, have hurt her community. "There's definitely less sales, less traffic, less everything."

Declines in enrollment at Santee Education Complex, a high school in Los Angeles, intensified after immigration raids started in the city last year. Education experts say public schools nationwide are being hit hard by low birth rates and aggressive Trump-era immigration policies.

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After growing up in LA and attending public school here without legal status, Pineda told NPR she was able to secure U.S. citizenship a few years ago. She said she understands why people are pulling their kids out of school and, in many cases, leaving the U.S. altogether.

"People are still scared, very much scared to go out to do everyday things. I feel like if I didn't have everything set [with my immigration status], I would probably leave. I would be afraid of being separated from my family."

White House celebrates deportation campaign

NPR asked White House officials about the impact on public schools of ICE crackdowns and other federal immigration policies, including the revocation of temporary refugee status for hundreds of thousands of people living in the U.S. legally.

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis sent a brief email response saying deportations "make American classrooms less crowded." Bis also pointed to a September post on the social media platform X, where administration officials celebrated the overall drop in the number of legal and undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

"The total foreign-born population declined 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026," the statement said. "The huge recent decline in the foreign-born population indicates that net migration to the United States was negative in the last year and a half for the first time since the 1930s."

Advocacy groups that support sharply reduced immigration view these trends as a necessary correction after years of what they describe as lax border security. Ira Mehlman with the Federation for American Immigration Reform said he's not troubled by the prospect that many public school districts will have to downsize.

"We don't guarantee the school system X number of kids," Mehlman said. "That is not the job of our immigration system, that you're going to have X number of kids every single year and if you don't, we're going to go find some for you."

But research suggests it's not only foreign-born children disappearing from classrooms. According to Brookings Institution estimates, as many as 4.6 million school-age kids, including many U.S. citizens, live in homes with family members vulnerable to deportation.

Vanessa Salazar was one of them. She was 18 years old, a U.S.-born senior in LAUSD last year, when her mother was detained and deported to Mexico. "It really threw me off balance," she said. "Coming home without my mother there to be my anchor, really affected my performance in school."

Salazar dropped out to cope with what she describes as her family's trauma and now lives in Mexico with her mother. "It's like, why am I going to be in this country that doesn't really want my people, my community or my culture?" she said.

With birth rates hitting another record low last year and ICE now arresting as many as 50,000 people each month, future school district losses could soar.

A study released in August by state officials predicted public schools in California alone could lose another 710,000 students over the next decade "if current trends in fertility and migration hold."

LA school district board member Kelly Gonez said she thinks many of the demographic changes hitting her community are irreversible and will bring big changes, even if the Trump administration's immigration policies ease.

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With LAUSD now facing a second school year in a row with 4% enrollment declines, the district announced a citywide effort in September aimed at identifying buildings and campuses that will close.

Kelly Gonez, the school board member, told NPR she expects cuts to be deep and painful. "When your district is roughly half the size of student population it was 20 years ago, it's hard to find a sustainable path to keep campuses open," she said.

Copyright 2026 NPR

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Were you affected by the Lineage warehouse fire this summer and have something to say? 

CASA 0101 Theater is calling on community members, regardless of writing experience, to express themselves through storytelling in the wake of environmental disasters on the Eastside.

A free, six-week playwriting workshop will guide participants through writing monologues and formatting short plays about their experiences during the fire or their feelings about the history of other environmental disasters on the Eastside, including the March oil spill in East L.A. and the years of toxicity caused by the Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon. 

Ten works will be produced and featured in “Fire in the Eastside,” a short play festival at CASA 0101 Theater in spring 2027.

The idea, by CASA 0101 Artistic Director Josefina López, will focus on the personal experiences of people who lived them, said Ignacio Gonzalez, a stand-up comedian and playwright who will lead the workshops. 

“Rather than just point the finger and say Lineage is bad, the government is bad … we want to tell the stories from the individual people and how they were impacted,” Gonzalez said. “We hope that people can look at these and say, ‘You know what, I never thought about that. I never thought that people would have to take these measures or be impacted in this way.’”

For Gonzalez, there is power in performing a 10-minute play in front of a crowd. Though the performances will be short, participants will have the undivided attention of an audience to share an experience that has deeply impacted them, he said. 

Gonzalez recalls watching the aftermath of the Lineage warehouse fire unfold through news reports and updates on his phone and thinking about the residents living nearby. 

“We can put the phone down and go about our business, and we have clean air, and there are no flies, and everything’s fine. But I just understand there are human beings living there with stories to tell,” Gonzalez said.  

More about the workshops

The free workshops will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. every Monday from Nov. 9 to Dec. 14 at CASA 0101 Theater, located at 2102 E. 1st St. 

All levels of experience are welcome. Spanish-speaking participants can also attend and write their work in Spanish. 

How to sign up

To register for the workshops, fill out the form on CASA 0101’s website here.

If you cannot attend the workshops but still want to share your play or monologue, CASA 0101 will be accepting individual submissions. To be considered, submit your work by sending an email to classes@casa0101.org by Dec. 14 at 11:59 p.m. 

Any works that are not chosen can still be performed during a public reading at CASA 0101.

President Donald Trump said Friday that Stephen Miller was replacing Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, mere days after Republicans lost control of Congress in the midterm elections.

On his social media site, Trump praised Wiles and said she’d continue to work for his political organization. Wiles also released a social media statement Friday.

“Serving President Trump in the White House has been the honor of a lifetime. I’m so proud to have been a part of what we’ve accomplished together from securing our border and cutting taxes to strengthening our economy and putting America First,” Wiles said in a social media post shortly after Trump’s announcement. She added that her commitment to “the President and the mission” will not change.

Miller, long a key member of Trump’s inner circle, is a key architect of the administration’s hard-line immigration policies.

Wiles, the steely political operator and longtime adviser to Trump, was the first woman to ever serve in that post.

Wiles’ departure comes almost immediately after the GOP’s midterm thrashing on Tuesday. She will be replaced by Miller, a longtime trusted aide to Trump.

The departure also came months after Wiles indicated she no longer showed evidence of breast cancer after she underwent months of treatment for the disease, a diagnosis she went public with in March 2026.

Wiles is the longest-serving White House chief of staff for Trump, who cycled through four of them during his first four-year term.

Miller is one of Trump’s closest and longest-serving advisers, jumping on board during his longshot 2016 presidential campaign as a speechwriter. He currently serves as White House deputy chief of staff, and though he has a wide-ranging portfolio, Miller is most closely aligned with Trump’s immigration policy and rhetoric on immigration.

Miller is a former aide to hardliner former Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who would go on to serve as Trump’s first attorney general.

Wiles brought order to Trump’s campaign

The veteran Florida operative joined Trump’s team during his 2016 presidential bid to run the campaign in his adopted home state. She performed the same role again in 2020 before overseeing the entire 50-state effort in 2024. She is the second woman to lead Trump’s presidential campaign to victory, although she never embraced the formal title of campaign manager.

Wiles, 69, has been credited with steering the most disciplined of his three presidential bids, and Trump himself has said he was often told that Wiles led his “best-run campaign.” Often called the “ice maiden” by the president, she was seen as the no-brainer choice to serve as White House chief of staff at the start of his second term.

She cut her reputation as someone who brought discipline to the president’s chaotic style and shunned the spotlight, so much so that at Trump’s 2024 election night victory party, she repeatedly shook her head and avoided the microphone as Trump tried to coax her to speak to the crowd.

Wiles showed unusual candor in an interview

But in December 2025, nearing the end of Trump’s first year back as president, Wiles became the headline when Vanity Fair magazine published a series of interviews with her and other top Trump administration officials conducted by the author Chris Whipple, an expert on White House chiefs of staff.

The Wiles interviews stuck out for their candor, which is unusual for a sitting White House chief of staff. She said Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” although the president does not drink, and said then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had “whiffed” in her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files while remarking that Vice President JD Vance has been a “conspiracy theorist for about a decade.”

Trump and other administration aides rushed to defend Wiles, who in turn disparaged Vanity Fair for publishing what she called a “disingenuously framed hit piece,” although she did not deny making the comments that were attributed to her.

In the interviews, which were conducted over a period of several months, Wiles also revealed a bit of her management style, saying she was “not an enabler.”

“I try to be thoughtful about what I even engage in,” Wiles said. “I guess time will tell whether I’ve been effective.”

Trump grinded through four chiefs of staff in his first term: Reince Priebus, who Trump fired after just six months; John Kelly, who served the longest at 17 months; Mick Mulvaney, who held the role for a little over a year in an “acting” capacity; and Mark Meadows, who served as gatekeeper for the 10 months before Trump left office.

Wiles overcomes personal health struggle

In March 2026, Wiles revealed she had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and she juggled surgery and treatments alongside her demanding job.

Six months later, she said she was “cancer-free,” indicating she no longer showed evidence of cancer after her pathology results came back clear. On social media, she thanked her family, friends, doctors and “everyone who prayed for me, checked in, and supported me along the way” and gave special thanks to Trump for his “unwavering support.”

“She’s tough,” Trump said of his chief of staff in an October 2026 event at the White House. “She’s a tremendous fighter.”

In a rare October 2026 interview, Wiles told Fox News Digital that she hadn’t been planning on getting the mammogram that ultimately detected her cancer, because she wasn’t due for one for several more months. Her doctor suggested she do the exam anyway, because a mammogram machine was available that day and her schedule was too busy and unpredictable.

“Had he not encouraged me to do it that day, I would have gone back to work and probably not thought about it again until July,” Wiles told the outlet. “We would be having a very different conversation in that case. Four months may not sound like a long time, but with cancer, early detection matters. I will always be grateful to my doctor for knowing me well enough to insist.”

Wiles is a seasoned political operative

In addition to Trump, Wiles also ran incumbent Sen. Rick Scott’s 2010 campaign for Florida governor and briefly served as manager of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s 2012 presidential campaign. She spearheaded Ron DeSantis ’ successful run for governor in 2018, but DeSantis would eventually urge the Trump campaign in 2020 to cut ties with Wiles, creating a rift that led to a particularly vicious effort by those in Trump’s orbit to mock DeSantis throughout his failed run for the Republican presidential nomination against Trump in 2024.

Wiles, the daughter of the late NFL player-turned-broadcaster Pat Summerall, also worked in the offices of former Jacksonville mayors John Delaney and John Peyton. Her first White House job was as a scheduler for President Ronald Reagan.

In addition to her government and campaign positions, Wiles has worked as a lobbyist. She was a partner at Florida-based Ballard Partners, which rose to prominence in Washington during Trump’s time in the White House. Her varying list of clients included General Motors, a trade group for children’s hospitals, homebuilders, and the city of Jacksonville.

She was also registered as a lobbyist for the Venezuelan television network Globovisión, which was owned by businessperson Raúl Gorrín, who was charged in Miami with money laundering. The firm later called its work for Gorrín a mistake and said Wiles had almost no role in managing the relationship with Gorrín.

Production of Tesla's Cybertruck, a stainless-steel electric vehicle with a polarizing allure for potential buyers, will wind down next year.

In a post on social media, CEO Elon Musk said, “Tesla will be winding down production of the Cybertruck at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of next year to make room for increased Cybercab production.”

The Texas facility is the only location where the Cybertruck is produced.

Teslas, and the Cybertruck in particular because of its unorthodox profile, became a political touchstone as Musk allied himself with President Donald Trump and some right-leaning causes amid a widening political divide in the U.S. and Europe.

European sales of Tesla vehicles tumbled 49% in the first two months of 2025 even as overall sales of EVs grew. Musk’s endorsement of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party in national elections drew broad condemnation.

The vehicle was also plagued by quality-control issues, with a handful of recalls within months of its debut.

Despite enormous anticipation, the Cybertruck never caught on with most buyers, and sales declined almost from the moment it hit the market.

While Tesla does not break out sales of its vehicles by model, Kelley Blue Book estimated that Cybertruck sales declined 48% from 2024 to 2025. From January through September of this year, sales were down 28%, according to Kelley Blue Book.