Catalina not allowing me to read-write from remote host? How to fix?

I'm trying to download some files from my remote host using scp and proxyjump, however, I keep getting the dread read-only file system anywhere I try to download my file to... initially I couldn't even touch any files to my directory however I managed to run killall Finder and that fixed the latter, however, I still cannot download the necessary files to my directory of choice... does anyone know how to fix this?

scp -r -oProxyJump=I R:remote_file localfile

The above is what I'm using for downloading a file. Where I is an intermediate host, R is the remote host and remote_file is the directory and localfile is my directory, all I get is:

localfile: Read-only file system

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I had to move out of my root directory and scp somewhere else (Applications folder in my case).