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LITTLE TOKYO — On a Tuesday morning on downtown Los Angeles’ 1st Street, the immigrants are out in force.
I mean, they are everywhere: Sweeping, scrubbing graffiti off walls, opening their shops, grabbing lattes on the way to work.
Send in the Marines!
Here in the heart of Little Tokyo, where immigration protesters swept through Monday night, it’s the white faces that stand out — the way it has been for decades all over downtown. With its gritty streets and sometimes gritty history, these urban blocks with their cheaper rents and welcoming enclaves have long been where people migrate when they cross borders into the United States.
Which — though I certainly don’t want to speculate on the inner workings of Stephen Miller’s brain — probably means blocks like this one were on President Trump immigration czar’s mind when he posted this on social media: “[H]uge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.”
That, “Eddie” told me, is bunk. Eddie is a “Dreamer,” with semi-legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, who emigrated from Mexico as a kid and didn’t want to share his last name because he fears the current immigration sweeps. For the past two years, he’s lived in an upstairs apartment that overlooks this block of hotels, boutiques and restaurants. I met him on the sidewalk in front of his place, his palms stained black with soot from picking up burned lights and banners from the night before.
Eddie, who dreams about someday running for public office, said people such as himself are in “a very vulnerable” situation right now, so though he’s always been involved in civic issues, he doesn’t feel safe going to protests that have turned downtown Los Angeles into a national spectacle, and have offered President Trump an excuse to flout law and history by calling in the military.
Instead, Eddie is cleaning up — because he doesn’t want people to drive by and think this neighborhood is a mess.
“It’s not representative, you know,” he says of the charred heap in front of him. “So I’m out here.”
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Eddie said he loves it here, because “it’s one of the few communities where, like, it’s close knit. I see people that I’m for sure were here in 1945 and I love them, and I know that they know of my existence, and I’m thankful for theirs.”
Before we can talk much more, we’re interrupted by Alex Gerwer, a Long Beach resident who has come out for the day to help scrub away the graffiti that some rogue protesters left behind.
Folks, not going to lie, “F— ICE” is everywhere. I mean, everywhere — there’s got to be a spray paint shortage at this point.”
Gerwer, the son of two concentration camp survivors, is here with the political group 5051, which has been staging anti-Trump rallies across the country. Gerwer said he and his group decided they wanted to do something more proactive than just protest, so here they are.
“We want to clean that off and show Trump, the National Guard, you know the folks from the Marines, that this is clearly political theater,” Gerwer said. “And I feel sorry for all these law enforcement people, because many of them, they’re in a position where they’re being put between the Constitution and a tyrannical president.”
Down the block, I met Misael Santos in front of the ramen restaurant where he works as a manager. He was asking the folks at the Japanese American National Museum on the corner whether they had any surveillance footage, because lights and a tent had been stolen off the restaurant’s patio the night before. They didn’t.
Santos, a Mexican immigrant, told me he didn’t like the stealing and vandalism.
“I understand the protests, but that is no excuse to destroy public property,” he said.
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Earlier, Mayor Karen Bass had tweeted, “Let me be clear: ANYONE who vandalized Downtown or looted stores does not care about our immigrant communities,” and Santos agreed with that.
“Immigrants work hard,” he told me. Which is why, he said, many of the Asian-owned business around here hire Latinos.
He said that this neighborhood, with its mix of ethnicities, is “comfortable and safe,” but lately, his employees are also fearful. They don’t want to come to work because they fear raids, but “we have to work,” he said with a resigned shrug.
But let me get back to Stephen Miller, since he’s driving a lot of this chaos. Replying to Bass’ tweet about vandals, Miller said on social media, “By ‘immigrant communities,’ Mayor Bass actually means ‘illegal alien communities.’ She is demonstrating again her sole objective here is to shield illegals from deportation, at any cost.”
That kind of rhetoric hearkens to the dark days of this neighborhood, William T Fujioka, chair of the Board of Trustees of the Japanese American National Museum, told me, when I finally made it down to his patch of this neighborhood.
Fujioka and I talked in the plaza where buses pulled up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to transport Japanese Americans to prison camps. His own grandfather, he said, was imprisoned in such a camp.
Protesters had defaced the museum, a nearby Buddhist temple and a public art sculpture called the OOMA cube, meant to symbolize human oneness. Fujioka called the vandalism “heartbreaking,” but also said it was not representative of most protesters.
“We’re strong supporters of peaceful protests and also immigration rights because of what happened to our community,” he told me. “Our community is a community of immigrants.”
Fujioka told me how one of his grandfathers immigrated legally in 1905, but the other wasn’t so lucky. They wouldn’t let him land in L.A., he said, so he “was dropped off in Mexico and crossed the Rio Grande. He walked from Mexico with 300 other men up to Texas, across the Rio Grande and New Mexico, Arizona and California.”
The crackdown could come at a price for industries across Los Angeles and California that have become increasingly dependent on immigrants, whether they are here legally or not.
Fujioka grew up not far from this plaza in Boyle Heights, were so many people with journeys similar to that of his grandfather wind up, then and now. Boyle Heights, he said, “is the ultimate melting pot. In Boyle Heights before the war, you had Japanese, Latinos, African Americans, you had Jews, you had Italians, and you had Russians who fled communist Russia. And we all grew up together, and we didn’t care who anyone was. All we cared about is, if you’re from the neighborhood.”
Just behind Fujioka, I saw that Gerwer had found his group and was busy scrubbing the museum’s windows. One of those with him, S.A. Griffin, had been at the protests downtown this week. He said they were mostly peaceful, except for the “idiots” who covered their faces and incited violence as the sun went down.
“It’s the vampires that come out at night,” Griffin said. And that’s really the all of it. There will always be agitators, especially at night.
But daylight brings clarity.
Across the street, I met 88-year-old Maruko Bridgewater, walking with half brothers Colin McQuade and Indigo Rosen-Lopez. The men consider Bridgewater their grandmother, though she’s really their maternal grandmother’s best friend.
They were walking Bridgewater back to her nearby apartment and said they were worried about her during the protests and even in the aftermath — she had just stepped over broken glass from a nearby shop.
“It’s really scary to see her walk around by herself,” McQuade told me.
These “grandkids” may worry, but let me tell you, may the Lord above make me half as sharp and stylish as Bridgewater at that age. She came to the United States through New York in 1976. I asked her whether she liked Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and she told me, “Not really, but not Biden either.”
But this trio, walking on a clear June morning when the gloom has burned away, are everything that is good and right with immigrant communities. Between the three, they represent Hungarian, Bulgarian, Native American, Irish, Scottish and Japanese.
McQuade told me that his grandparents met during World War II.
“Literally, like, in the middle of the biggest war between America and Japan, my grandparents found each other, and they fell in love, and they ... created a life for us from literally nothing,” he said.
That is downtown Los Angeles, where immigrants come to build a life. If that looks like the third world nightmare to some, it’s because they are blind to what they are seeing.
Insights
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Perspectives
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article portrays downtown Los Angeles as a vibrant, interdependent immigrant community where diverse groups coexist and support each other, exemplified by residents like Eddie, a DACA recipient, who cleans vandalism to protect the neighborhood’s reputation. This contrasts with Trump administration rhetoric framing the area as chaotic or “third world,” which locals reject as disconnected from their lived reality[3].
- Immigrant-owned businesses, such as Misael Santos’ ramen restaurant, emphasize hard work and cross-cultural collaboration, with Asian-owned establishments often hiring Latino workers. Santos criticizes protest-related vandalism but stresses that economic necessity drives immigrants to continue working despite fears of raids[2].
- Historical parallels are drawn to Japanese American incarceration during WWII, with community leaders like William T. Fujioka highlighting how past injustices inform current support for immigrant rights. The defacement of cultural sites like the Japanese American National Museum is condemned as misdirected anger, overshadowing peaceful protest efforts[3].
Different views on the topic
- The Trump administration justifies deploying the National Guard and Marines as a response to “chaos,” alleging that Democratic leaders like Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass prioritize shielding undocumented immigrants over public safety. This narrative frames federal intervention as necessary to restore order[1][2].
- Stephen Miller and other immigration hardliners dismiss concerns about immigrant communities, conflating legal and undocumented statuses. Miller’s social media posts accuse Bass of advocating for “illegal alien communities” and portray neighborhoods like Little Tokyo as lawless zones requiring aggressive enforcement[1].
- Federal officials argue that protests have been infiltrated by violent actors, citing incidents like Molotov cocktail attacks and freeway blockades to legitimize military mobilization. This perspective positions the administration as upholding the rule of law against “extremist rioters”[2][1].
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