Politics
L.A. hotel’s homeless residents forced school to shut down, lawsuit says
All across the Academy of Media Arts, there are signs of an active campus life.
School projects are still plastered on the walls; books are strewn on tables; apples sit uneaten in the cafeteria.
What is missing are the students — some 50 ninth- through 12th-graders, many from low-income Black and Latino families, who were forced to scramble after the private high school in downtown Los Angeles abruptly shut its doors Jan. 15.
The school occupied the first three floors of the L.A. Grand Hotel, which since 2021 has been used as temporary housing for hundreds of homeless Angelenos. The school’s founder, Dana Hammond, filed a breach of contract lawsuit in January against the building’s owner, claiming that the presence of so many homeless people made the campus unsafe, forcing it to close.
A syringe on the ground outside the Academy of Media Arts school, housed in the L.A. Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
In an interview, he also blamed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for repeatedly extending the city’s lease at the property for her Inside Safe interim housing program.
“Human poop on sidewalk. The smell of urine across campus. Outburst from ‘Inside Safe’ tenants. Break-ins by ‘Inside Safe’ tenants. Drug paraphernalia found on campus. ‘Inside Safe’ tenants found in trash bins,” read comments left on a classroom whiteboard.
Asked about Hammond’s allegations, Clara Karger, a spokesperson for Bass, said in a statement that the city heightened security at the Grand by installing more fencing, conducting on-site visits to address the school’s concerns and collaborating with the academy’s security personnel to respond to urgent calls.
When Hammond signed the lease to move his school into the L.A. Grand in 2022, it was the culmination of nearly two decades of work.
His school, which began in a South Los Angeles church, now had its own space where the students could have access to state-of-the-art facilities.
After an aggressive recruiting campaign pushed the student body up to 250, a mass exodus began, dropping the enrollment to around 50. Hammond said that by mid-January, he was unable to pay the $100,000 monthly rent.
Reports compiled by school security and reviewed by The Times describe incidents involving the hotel’s residents, including a man threatening to fight security outside the school’s gate; a woman exposing herself to students at 9:30 a.m.; another woman lying completely naked behind the school, who threatened to “shoot and stab” a security officer when confronted; a man who broke into the school through the back.
Academy of Media Arts school principal Dana Hammond stands in the school’s outdoor amphitheater.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Empty classrooms at the Academy of Media Arts school, which has temporarily closed down.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“Our students’ lives were in jeopardy because of the Inside Safe residents,” Hammond said. “We’re not enemies of the homeless shelter, we just can’t put them in the same building as a high school.”
But records reviewed by The Times show that the school had long struggled with problems not directly connected to the homeless presence.
For years, the academy operated as a Los Angeles Unified School District charter school, which meant it received funding from the California Department of Education but maintained a level of autonomy over its operations. As a private school, the school obtained funding through donors and tuition.
The academy had been scrutinized by LAUSD for failing to meet academic standards as students fell behind in subjects such as math and English. The school also failed to do proper criminal background clearances for teachers and had seven different principals over a four-year period, according to LAUSD records.
“The charter school’s current academic performance levels are not meeting the academic needs of its students,” the LAUSD’s Charter School Division wrote in a “notice of violation” report on the Academy of Media Arts in April 2023.
While Hammond disputed the allegations, the school converted from charter to private later that year.
LAUSD officials did not respond to requests for comment on the district’s former relationship with the academy.
Hammond didn’t directly respond to The Times inquiry about the notice of violation, sharing instead a document from 2020 that detailed how the academy would address concerns over teacher credentialing.
In the lawsuit, Hammond claimed that the hotel’s owner said the homeless residents would be moved out soon after the school moved in. But that did not happen.
The hotel is owned by Chinese billionaire Wei Huang, whose real estate company, Shen Zhen New World I, was found guilty of fraud and bribery charges in connection with the corruption case involving disgraced former Councilmember José Huizar.
A judge fined Shen Zhen $4 million.
Huang was charged with bribery and fraud in the case. He fled the country after the FBI began executing search warrants in 2018 and is considered a fugitive by the U.S. attorney’s office.
“Huang repeatedly made false and misleading representations to suggest that the L.A. Grand Hotel would cease to be a homeless shelter in the near future, despite the fact that Huang had no intention of terminating the lucrative agreement,” wrote lawyers for Hammond and Dennis L. Smith, who hopes to open a nightclub on the roof of the hotel and joined Hammond in the lawsuit.
Russ Cox, a representative for Huang’s company and himself a defendant in the case, declined to comment.
Dennis L. Smith is trying to open the Rome Nightclub on the roof of the L.A. Grand Hotel downtown. He is disappointed because he has all the necessary permits, but there are delays.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
Huang acquired the Grand in 2010, operating it as a four-star, 14-story hotel described on social media as an “urban oasis.”
In 2021, the Grand became a site for Project Roomkey, a federally funded program that provided shelter to unhoused people at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The city has paid Shen Zhen more than $25 million since the academy opened at the site in 2022, according to city records.
“The mayor’s office does not condone the behavior of the fugitive owner of the Grand,” Karger, the mayor’s spokesperson, said in a statement to The Times.
The city continued operations with L.A. Grand — and added more residents — after Bass took office in late 2022, even with the academy already present at the building.
The city extended its lease to continue operating the shelter through the end of July. The extension will cost $20 million, including $13.9 million for the lease and food and $6.8 million for services, according to the city records.
The mayor’s office did not respond directly when asked by The Times whether it might seek further extensions beyond July 31. In a statement, Karger said the L.A. Grand’s residents are expected to begin moving to the Mayfair Hotel in May.
“The L.A. Grand has brought hundreds of unhoused individuals inside from the tough elements of living on the streets. The work continues to save lives every day,” Karger said.
Around the school the sidewalks are strewn with garbage, empty liquor bottles and even discarded syringes. The sign welcoming visitors to the Academy of Media Arts is graffitied over.
Graffiti, trash and an abandoned scooter in front of the Academy of Media Arts school.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“We moved from the church to the hotel, which I thought was a wonderful idea before I found out about the homeless shelter,” said Mary Tascian Williams, who worked at the school from June 2022 until it shut down.
Williams said she used to spend much of her day walking the floors making sure no one broke into the school.
On Jan. 10, an intruder broke into the school lobby just minutes after students had gone to lunch in a different part of the campus.
When approached by the security guard, the man said, “They are trying to kill me,” according to an school incident report.
It took numerous LAPD officers to subdue him, the report said.
Hammond said the episode left students afraid and him at a loss for how to protect the teens. On Jan. 12, Hammond and more than a dozen students went to a City Council meeting to speak about the problems.
Academy of Media Arts school principal Dana Hammond walks up a stairwell toward a homeless shelter in the same building. Residents of the homeless shelter have caused numerous incidents, which led the school to temporarily close down.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
He met with Councilmember Kevin de León, who spoke about the issue at the meeting and toured the school that night.
“The location raised legitimate and serious concerns for students, faculty, and staff, especially regarding breaches into the school by the residents of the Grand,” De León told The Times in a statement. “It was my hope in meeting with parents and administrators that we could avoid the school’s closure which has become a real tragedy for Black and Brown students and parents alike.”
At the hearing, De León questioned the mayor’s office on when it planned to exit the Grand and move Inside Safe participants into the Mayfair Hotel. Officials did not provide a timeline.
“When the mayor first took office in December 2022 we were very much aware there were security concerns, public safety concerns,” Lourdes Castro Ramírez, the mayor’s chief housing and homelessness officer, said at the council meeting. “There were immediate actions taken to increase security, bring in service providers. … I take their concerns very seriously and plan to follow up to better understand how to resolve these issues.”
Her comments came after three students cried at the council meeting. Others spoke about how much they loved the school and how sad they would be to lose it.
A security guard patrols the halls of the L.A. Grand Hotel’s Project Roomkey homeless shelter housed in the same building as the Academy of Media Arts on Jan. 30 in downtown Los Angeles.
(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)
“I’m not against the Inside Safe program. I want all the homeless people to have a safe place to live. But they can’t be doing that while my education and the education of my peers are at stake,” student Alex Hernandez said. “I feel threatened because this is very dangerous.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
Doug Burgum highlights American innovation at Great American State Fair
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum joins ‘Fox & Friends’ live from the Great American State Fair in Washington. He emphasizes America’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship, discussing the impact of AI and free markets. Burgum also addresses recent vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on June 22 and the upcoming July 4th opening of the Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is defending President Donald Trump’s many initiatives to address infrastructure in Washington, D.C., calling it a visible reminder that the country needs to actively press back against decline.
“Nations don’t crumble by fate — they decline by choice,” Burgum told Fox News Digital.
“From rehabilitating and installing historic memorials, statues, and fountains to removing hundreds of instances of graffiti and cleaning up crime on our streets, this administration is proving that American greatness is built through action,” he continued.
Burgum’s reasoning, which came ahead of the United States’ 250th Independence Day anniversary, addresses criticisms of the administration that have surfaced in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether Trump’s many renovation and construction initiatives in Washington, D.C. have been worth their price tag.
WHITE HOUSE SEIZES ON DELAYED OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTER OPENING TO CROWN TRUMP ‘BUILDER-IN-CHIEF’
Split of sample tests in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social)
As part of the 250th celebration, Trump has spent $14.7 million to restore the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, allocated $250 million to restore the Kennedy Center and is on track to spend over $400 million on the construction of a ballroom at the White House.
Trump, in a Truth Social update about the reflecting pool, framed the efforts as part of a larger effort.
“We’ve cleaned, renovated and beautified over 45 monuments and memorials, 28 statues and 22 fountains in Washington, D.C. Things are really looking good in our nation’s capital. Add to that the fact that when I became president, crime was rampant. And now Washington, D.C. is one of the safest cities anywhere in the United States,” Trump wrote.
REPUBLICANS QUESTION TRUMP’S ‘PRIVATELY FUNDED’ BALLROOM AFTER REPORT POINTS TO TAXPAYER BURDEN
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reacted during a meeting with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez at the Miraflores Presidential Palace on March 4, 2026, in Caracas, Venezuela. (Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images)
The Department of the Interior, which has overseen many of the improvements, further updated its accomplishments ahead of July 4.
The city has removed 510 instances of graffiti, removed 154 homeless encampments, applied 212 tons of repair materials to roads and parkways, restored 280,000 square feet of roadway paving, rehabilitated 1,301 benches and fixed 1,913 lights.
Burgum said the repairs were emblematic of the administration’s aggressive posture towards addressing problems that had gone ignored in the past. In addition to these major improvements, DOI has restored and cleaned dozens of monuments and statues around DC.
DOI also recently helped transform Meridian Hill Park, which got high praise on social media by DC residents, into a desirable place to visit with a restored fountain that had been under construction for years with very little movement. They also cleaned and restored some of the statues in the park, including the Joan of Arc statue and the James Buchanan Memorial.
FIRST ON FOX: TRUMP ADMIN TRANSFORMS DC HOTSPOT ONCE ROCKED BY GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN SYMBOLIC REVERSAL
Washington DC city workers dismantle tents and remove personal belongings during a sweep of a homeless encampment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, DC, on August 14, 2025. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
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“While others accept decline, President Trump and the Department of the Interior are restoring the heart of our nation’s capital,” Burgum said. “The Golden Age of America isn’t just a slogan, it’s being rebuilt, one landmark, one street and one victory at a time.”
Politics
Commentary: Birthright citizenship ruling was a win for democracy — and a warning about erasing history
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
President Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Signs sit available for protesters to demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court as President Trump arrives to attend oral arguments on April 1 in Washington, DC.
(Heather Diehl / Getty Images)
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
More chilling, and direct, were more comments from Miller.
“It’s an abomination,” he said of the ruling.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
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President Donald Trump marked the eve of America’s 250th anniversary with a sweeping patriotic address at Mount Rushmore on Friday, declaring the United States the “most exceptional nation ever to exist” and vowing that it would “never be a Communist country.”
Speaking beneath the granite likenesses of four of his predecessors — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt — Trump touted American exceptionalism as festivities marking the nation’s 250th anniversary ramped up across the country.
“In all the chronicles of the ages, never before has any nation celebrated so magnificent a triumph as this one,” Trump told the crowd.
TRUMP KICKS OFF FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND WITH SYMBOLIC SALUTE TO AMERICA’S LEGACY
President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“At 250 years, America is the oldest republic on earth,” he continued. “We are the freest people on earth. We have the most righteous and enduring Constitution on earth. We are the strongest and most powerful country on earth. And by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”
Trump praised the nation’s history and argued that no other country had achieved as much as the United States.
“The birth and survival of the American nation under God is, quite simply, the best and most incredible thing ever to happen on this planet by human hands, ever,” he said. “No other country has done more good for this world than the United States of America.”
AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN
Fireworks explode after President Donald Trump spoke at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Before Trump took the stage, the new Air Force One flew over Mount Rushmore as spectators cheered. After his remarks, the president stayed to watch a fireworks display over the Black Hills.
Trump argued the country was facing what he described as a growing communist movement that sought to undermine America’s “exceptional character” and “alienate us from our history.”
The president said the movement had raised the question, “What does it mean to be an American?”
MAMDANI BLASTS ICE AGENTS, ELON MUSK AND ‘SUPREMACY’ IN AMERICA 250 SPEECH AHEAD OF JULY 4 WEEKEND
President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Friday, July 3, 2026, near Keystone, South Dakota. (AP Photo/Matt Gade)
Trump described communism as “the greatest threat” facing the United States.
“It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11,” Trump said. “We’re not going to let this happen to us. Believe me, we’re not letting it happen, because communism is the enemy of free people.”
“Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — it is death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil,” he continued.
“But we will not let them win,” he added. “They have no chance against us.”
Trump issued a clear directive: “You can be loyal to Karl Marx, or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
President Donald Trump speaks beneath Mount Rushmore during a celebration ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
As Americans face those choices, Trump pointed to the nation’s past sacrifices as a guide for its future.
“Our American ancestors did not shed their blood at Concord and Trenton, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Midway and Normandy, just so that a band of thieves, radicals and lunatics could come in and loot, pillage our nation,” he said.
Trump also highlighted the four presidents carved into the mountain behind him, saying they represented America’s founding ideals.
“They were men of action, men of ambition, men of daring, men of destiny, and men of truly great intelligence,” he said. “Above all, they were great men of history. Tonight, on the threshold of our 250th year, we stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people. And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants.”
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Trump is scheduled to deliver another speech Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. before a fireworks display celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary.
“We know that this is not an ending,” Trump said. “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”
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