The real siege of Los Angeles
ICE raids are shredding the city’s social fabric of immigrant lives.
I’ve been at the protests in Los Angeles this week, and I have news for you: The city is not facing an “insurrection.” In the vast expanse that is Los Angeles County, the rallies barely register as a blip. The protests are confined to a very small area of downtown.
The protesters I spoke to weren’t anarchists bent on burning down the system. They were mostly young people — first- or second-generation U.S. citizens — protesting the persecution their immigrant parents are enduring. They are certainly not “insurrectionist migrant mobs.”
And for the most part, yes, the protests have been peaceful. There have been isolated — and reprehensible — incidents of looting and vandalism, but nothing near the scale of past riots in Los Angeles. The notion that the situation is under control thanks to the National Guard is simply false. The LAPD has been managing the response very well.
Los Angeles isn’t a “ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.” It is not “occupied territory.” It certainly isn’t experiencing the consequences of an “invasion.” What Los Angeles, this vibrant, pluralistic city where dozens of languages and nationalities coexist, is experiencing is an attack on its most essential social fabric — a concerted campaign of terror. Since last Friday, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement began its operations, the immigrant community in the city that best embodies the immigrant experience in the United States has been paralyzed.
It’s no coincidence that ICE started its ugly work in downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where members of the Hispanic community gather every day. It’s even less of a coincidence that agents descended on the parking lots of Home Depot, targeting day laborers just trying to earn an honest living — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.
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Since then, ICE has continued to target the spaces at the heart of everyday immigrant and Hispanic life: schools, churches, gas stations and even the fields of Oxnard, where farmworkers — essential during the pandemic and still essential today — keep California’s agricultural engine running, feeding the entire country.
On Tuesday, I visited a shopping center in East L.A., a cornerstone of the local Hispanic community filled with clothing stalls, spices and small restaurants. Normally it would be packed at lunchtime. This time, it was empty. In my 15 years reporting in Los Angeles, I’d never encountered what I saw there: people asking not to be identified, even requesting that I not name the place itself. The atmosphere was one of being under siege.
A butcher who has run his shop for over two decades told me that if business didn’t recover soon, he might have to shut down.
“It’s because of the raids,” he said. “There are rumors all around. People say Immigration is here. People get scared, afraid their relatives will be taken.”
The biggest fear among his customers, he said, is that the person who provides for the household will be deported.
“We all live day-to-day,” he said.
A young vendor told me she wakes up every day in fear. Her children are begging her not to go to work, to avoid the risk.
“I pray that Immigration doesn’t catch me. But I need to work. For rent and for food. I can’t afford to stop working,” she said.
I asked her about her future. All she wanted was to make sure her children went to college.
“I want them to study, not end up like me, working. I want them to have what I couldn’t.”
At the end of my visit, a woman who owns a clothing stand stopped me. She wanted to say something to Donald Trump. The president of the United States, she said, needed to take a closer look at whom he was targeting.
“There are a lot of hardworking people — those are the ones he’s going after,” she told me.
The protests will eventually fade. All protests do. What will remain are the stories of broken families, of immigrant lives destroyed, of deepening roots suddenly torn out from American soil by an aggressive nativist administration.
A recent Post poll found the public is split. There are approximately as many Americans who buy the government’s narrative — that Los Angeles is facing “mostly violent” protests and that the National Guard and Marine Corps were needed to restore normalcy — as there are those who think the administration is tearing apart communities and inventing a security crisis to justify a military presence among civilians.
That even divide should worry us. But many have not yet made up their mind. Only a clear, sustained focus on the reality of what is happening can possibly tip the balance toward truth.