Those us of elsewhere shouldn't lose sight of the Trump regime's martial law play acting and real raids on immigrants in the Southland. We can learn a lot about what Stephen Miller and Tom Homan want for our future. And we can mourn and take heart from our California siblings.
When South African, naturalized-American, medical entrepreneur and newspaper magnate, Patrick Soon-Shiong cancelled the Los Angeles Times' endorsement of Kamala Harris, I cancelled my subscription to the paper. Since then, I've watched the paper bleed interesting journalists, much as the Washington Post has. It's sad. Unlike a lot of northern Californians, I am fond that overwhelming megalopolis to the south. So interesting and so varied. And -- as so often -- where it is happening.
In today’s divided media world, these events were instantly cast as either a dangerous erosion of democracy or grandstanding by politicians searching for a viral clip, depending on your source.
But they underscored a clear message from our summer of ICE: Los Angeles isn’t afraid anymore.
A lot of very dark things have happened in Los Angeles over its 244-year history, events driven by misguided zeal, greed, bigotry and intolerance.
But they are always abetted by fear.• One of the most notorious lynchings in American history occurred not in the Deep South but in 1870s Los Angeles, when a mob killed 19 Chinese people and some in the city were driven by blood lust.
• An estimated 170,000 Japanese Americans — many in California — were rounded up and taken from their homes, farms and businesses and held in prison camps. Both the right and the left put aside their differences to eagerly back the internment.
• A year later, in 1943, the streets of Los Angeles became the scene of shocking mob rule as scores of Mexican teens and young men were beaten, stripped of their ornate “zoot suits” and left bloody and naked on the sidewalk. Police officers laughed, encouraged the beatings, then arrested the victims. Politicians and the papers blamed the Mexicans.
Shelby Grad continues:
Fighting our fears
California historian Kevin Starr wrote eloquently about that part of the Los Angeles psyche that sets the city into “a state of psychosis, surrendering itself to the dream-fear.” Real events become magnified into anxiety that no one is willing or able to control. In 1993, Starr wrote about the paranoid rumors sweeping the city in advance of the verdict in the Rodney King civil trial. (More riots! Military occupation! A gang invasion of the Westside!) He thought immediately of the city’s past sins.
“Future historians will look back to these days and struggle to interpret a time in which fear became fact and rumor became the basis of policy,” he wrote. “It became its own horrible reality, and the City of the Angels, as it always feared it would, dreamt itself out of existence.” A city of dissent
There are a lot of reasons for L.A. to fear criticizing the sweeps and stay silent. It just gives Trump more ammunition. What will he unleash on us next?
But that is not happening this time. The protests, the aid efforts, and the many individuals speaking out against the arrests happening before their eyes show that dissent is alive and well here. Yes, living in a deep blue state gives them some cover. But isn’t it better to speak your mind and not fear the consequences? Isn’t that one of the things supporters love about Trump?
Taking a stand can also bring change.
The 1871 Chinese massacre occurred in an L.A. still ruled by vigilante justice, which made dissent hazardous to your health. But as John Mack Faragher chronicles in “Eternity Street,” the killing of 10% of the city’s entire Chinese population brought shame to L.A. — and forced some to finally speak for change. A few brave voices led to a larger movement that established L.A.’s first real criminal justice system and police force, marking an end to the vigilante era.
It didn’t curb racism or injustice, but it was a start.
• • •
Today's Angelenos are not a cooperative bunch when it comes to Trump's attempts to suppress speech in the city. From Talking Point Memo:
A major new development out of Los Angeles, where the LA Times reports that U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli has been no-billed by grand juries in some attempted prosecutions of ICE protestors:
The three officials who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity said prosecutors have struggled to get several protest-related cases past grand juries, which need only to find probable cause that a crime has been committed in order to move forward. That is a much lower bar than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard required for a criminal conviction.Citizen jurors sometimes do speak for the people.
• • •
Politico notes that the Trump/Miller/Homan invasion merely reinvigorates California Latino revulsion against the Republican party, just as each wave of bigoted nativism has done for the last 30 years.
“Grabbing people with criminal histories, I think there’s a lot of support for it,” [Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based GOP strategist] said. “But catching people who have been here for 30 years, have family, work, contribute to the economy — and the only reason they’re undocumented is because America has failed to provide a program for them to be here legally — I don’t think there’s going to be a whole lot of stomach for that.”
• • •
The New Yorker found an oblique angle from which to approach the city's struggles, a profile of the local consul-general of Mexico, Carlos González Gutiérrez. After a long, distinguished diplomatic career, he finds himself in the midst of an emergency for people he serves in a place that is their home and in some ways also his.
... The weekend after the Presidential election, he said, consuls-general across the United States called him to express their concerns about what the second Trump Administration would mean for Mexican nationals. ...
In June, González Gutiérrez began to see enforcement tactics that seemed unprecedented during his time in Los Angeles. ICE had begun raiding workplaces, snatching people off the streets, and arresting them as they waited to enter immigration courts. The government was apprehending people without criminal records, many of whom had been members of the community for decades.
... On June 7th, he advised Mexicans with immigration hearings to inquire about the possibility of moving them online, and reminded them that, if they got detained, they should stay calm, not sign any documents they don’t understand, and, last of all, “remain silent and be in touch with your consulate.” Three days later, he still urged calm, and told people to protest peacefully if they protested at all. “In Mexico,” he said, “we’re deeply proud of you—of your work, your bravery, your dignity, and your identity as Mexicans. It is absolutely compatible to be a citizen or resident of this country who is both loyal and honest, and at the same time feel proud of your country of origin.”
... As of early July, staff from the Mexican consulate had interviewed three hundred and thirty Mexicans who had been detained there during the previous month. Fifty-two per cent had lived in the United States for more than ten years. Thirty-six per cent had lived here for twenty years. Several more had been in the country for thirty years, and some for forty. Sixty-four of the people they’ve interviewed have already been deported, some forcibly and some voluntarily.
Three hundred and nine of the interviewees were men; twenty-one were women. Immigration raids typically target men, but George Sanchez—a historian at U.S.C. who is perhaps the foremost scholar of L.A.’s Mexican and Mexican American communities—made the point that these latest raids have been particularly “masculinist.” “ICE has gone to Home Depots, not the transportation centers where buses pick up women every morning in East Los Angeles, taking them to the west side where they care for white people’s children,” Sanchez told me. “The Administration doesn’t want complaints from these families, whereas the day laborers at Home Depot conjure an image of the supposedly threatening foreigners they claim to be after.”
... González Gutiérrez told me about two men who have lived in Los Angeles for forty years but had never applied for citizenship. Now they face deportation. “The fact that so many people have established roots in this country, that they have kids here, that they are a full part of communities they’ve helped prosper, that they still have to live in the shadows as undocumented people—this is the tragedy of this community,” he said.
... González Gutiérrez cannot ultimately shape the outcome of immigrants’ cases. As a diplomat, he told me, he, too, is just a guest in this country. Like all other diplomats, he said, he abides by the rule of reciprocity: he can only do here what he would want an American diplomat to do in Mexico. ...
... “When you are here, if you are a Mexican national, you realize that you belong, that, to a great extent, this is a Mexican city. I don’t say that in a chauvinistic way,” he told me.
“What I mean is that L.A. celebrates diversity.” In a ten-minute drive, he noted, you might pass through Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Koreatown, the Maya Corridor. “L.A. belongs to everybody,” he said, “but Mexicans are part of it in a very central, essential, structural way.” ...
... Los Angeles, as González Gutiérrez described it to me, is still the “political capital of the Mexican diaspora.” That’s why the Trump Administration’s actions there, and the resistance against them, have been so fierce. ICE officers will soon be bolstered by the billions that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gives them. With infinitely fewer resources, the protesters are becoming more organized, too.
... On the morning that I met the consul-general, I had breakfast at La Chispa de Oro, in the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Boyle Heights, with the Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. He told me that “at first people were scared, but now they’re pissed. You get masked agents with guns pulling random people in public, that’s terrifying. Too many people in L.A. know that type of terror from our ancestral countries. You think it can’t happen here, then it does. So you feel sad about it, but then you’re, like, ‘No.’ ”I weep for the city of the angels and I applaud its people. That's what this season of nativism is like.
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