A year after Trump unleashed his deportation machine in L.A., we can’t let his goons win
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A year ago this Saturday, I was enjoying a beautiful day in Pacific Palisades when President Trump unleashed his deportation deluge in Los Angeles, setting off a chain reaction that would roil cities across the United States.
I was at the reopening of the Thomas Mann House, shut down for months of cleaning after it had miraculously survived the Palisades fire. As speaker after speaker hailed the author’s prescient warnings about the slow burn of totalitarianism in his native Germany, text messages overtook my phone with news of immigration raids near downtown on a scale and number not seen in decades.
Masked federal agents soon spread across Southern California. Protests followed.
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When my father was crossing the U.S.
Many of the people arrested had no criminal record, but that didn’t stop the White House from depicting the sweeps as a vacuuming of hardcore criminals. Some protesters were charged with federal crimes on scant evidence. Masked agents asked U.S. citizens of Latino heritage to produce ID to prove they were in this country legally.
Janitors, veterans, students. Workplaces, residential streets, courthouses. MacArthur Park, Home Depots, Dodger Stadium’s parking lot. No one and nowhere was safe from a toxic alphabet soup of federal agencies tasked with ridding the country of people without papers, damn the cost. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even deployed the National Guard and Marinesto quell dissent in a show of imperial might better suited to a “Star Wars” Sith lord.
The raids rendered large swaths of L.A. as quiet as the coronavirus shutdown days; some areas still haven’t rebounded and might never. That’s why commemorations will happen this weekend across the Southland to remember the people and tranquility we’ve lost over the past 12 months to Trump‘s immigration war. Although the official caravan of cruelty — led by former Border Patrol commander at large Gregory Bovino — departed L.A. after a few weeks for other U.S. cities, including Chicago and Minneapolis, deportations and detentions here have never completely stopped.
In fact, border czar Tom Homan recently vowed that much more is just over the horizon.
“You ain’t seen s— yet,” he bragged last month in opening remarks for the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. “This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming.”
An orange whistle hangs from my rearview mirror to make sure I never forget the horrors of those first few weeks of raids. Tear gas canisters and pepper balls tossed at activists. Businesses shut down out of fear. My social media timeline transformed into a newsreel of sobbing men and women chased down by anonymous agents. Telephone poles covered in fundraising pleas for families whose breadwinners either rotted in faraway detention center or were sent back to their home countries.
No one in my immediate circle of family or friends has been detained, thank God — the people in my life who were once undocumented legalized their status long before Trump poisoned our country. And yet even I’ve had nightmares about ICE taking away loved ones — and myself. My passport has never left my side since last summer. It probably never will again.
I picked up the orange whistle last fall while visiting Chicago. At the time Bovino — who has since become an apostle for deporting 100 million people, as if anything remotely close to that many undocumented people lived in the U.S. — was overseeing operations there. Windy City residents adopted the whistles as a cheap, accessible warning in case la migra was rolling in. They also represented a call to action.
That’s why I can’t only think sad thoughts on the one-year anniversary of the raids.
I’m sure the Trump administration, bolstered by a historic 2024 win that saw even Latinos embrace his mass deportation plans, banked on public apathy or tacit approval when his Leviathan landed in L.A. That was our track record, after all.
Many Angelenos either applauded or stayed quiet when the U.S. government rounded up Japanese Americans during World War II and when the Eisenhower administration deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals in the 1950s during the caustically named Operation Wetback. Only Latinos and progressive allies seemed to care when ICE’s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Service, launched its own raids throughout the 1980s, or when politicians passed or proposed anti-immigrant resolutions and propositions in the 1990s. Even the immigration marches of 2006, among the largest rallies the United States had seen up to that time, attracted people from just some parts of the city.
This time, it seemed as if all good Angelenos rose up. That couldn’t literally be true, of course — but at least, at long last, it kind of felt so.
Barrio Power, a grassroots collective, found immigrant families were stressed about the holidays. So, they called out to the community for help. After 900 gifts and nearly $15,000 were donated, the organization provided Christmas gifts to over 130 families.
From the Westside to Boyle Heights, Wilmington up to Sylmar, people who had never engaged in street-level resistance bought out street vendors so they wouldn’t be exposed to possible detainment and set up mutual aid societies and neighborhood patrols. People accompanied immigrants to court hearings or took them into their homes or handed out know-your-rights cards at businesses, like my wife does at her restaurant. No one bought Trump’s lies that he only wanted to go after the worst of the worst because we saw beloved neighbors, favorite street vendors and even high schoolers nabbed.
That’s why ICE’s reputation, never particularly positive around here, is now somewhere between hantavirus and rush hour on the Sepulveda Pass.
More importantly, Angelenos created a template that others followed nationwide. Chicago activists got the idea for whistles after speaking to Angelenos who told them how they communicated when cellphone service went down around the Metropolitan Detention Center that first weekend of raids. Local organizers also did something thought impossible: They largely set aside the egos that far too often torpedo the left and relied on collective action instead of singular heroes to lead the way — because, like the finale of “Spartacus,” it’s far harder to cut down a movement when everyone’s a leader.
This weekend, people will say “Never again.” I also urge people to say, “Bring it on.” We can’t think the worst is behind us and we can’t be inured to what happened and will happen again. Just yesterday, the U.S. Senate approved $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol over the remainder of Trump’s term. As Thomas Mann so memorably put it, “Tolerance becomes crime, if extended to evil.”
L.A. is more ready than before to face off, once again, against the dark thugocracy of Trump and his confederacy of goons.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article portrays Trump’s Los Angeles raids as part of a vastly expanded “deportation machine” that has made mass arrest, detention and deportation of immigrants a central feature of U.S. governance, echoing legal and advocacy analyses that describe Trump’s second-term agenda as an attempt to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.[4][5]
It emphasizes that many people swept up in these operations had no criminal record and that even U.S. citizens of Latino heritage were questioned and told to prove their status, paralleling broader criticisms that recent enforcement drives have increasingly targeted people without criminal histories and have stripped lawful residents or long‑time visa holders of their status, rendering them suddenly deportable.[1][4]
The column frames the LA raids as a militarized show of force—featuring multiple federal agencies and even military deployments—to suppress dissent as much as to enforce immigration law, a picture that aligns with reporting and legal commentary describing an enforcement system flush with new funding, personnel, and detention capacity and empowered by an aggressive expansion of executive authority.[1][4][5]
It places these events in a longer historical arc, comparing contemporary mass deportation campaigns to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and to Operation Wetback in the 1950s, while invoking scholarship that describes a “deportation machine” built over decades through laws and practices that normalized large‑scale expulsions of Mexican and other migrants.[2][3]
The article argues that what is new is the breadth and intensity of local resistance: it highlights Angelenos across neighborhoods forming mutual‑aid networks, court‑accompaniment groups, neighborhood patrols, and low‑tech warning systems such as whistles, reflecting the kind of grassroots strategies immigrant‑rights movements have historically used to push back against raids and encourage people to know and assert their rights.[2][4]
It underscores the psychological damage inflicted on immigrant communities and even U.S. citizens, describing pervasive fear, economic disruption, and personal nightmares about detention, reinforcing accounts from lawyers and advocates who say the administration’s strategy relies on creating a “maelstrom of fear and chaos” intended to drive people to self‑deport or abandon legal claims.[1][4]
The piece contends that ICE’s local reputation has sunk to that of a public scourge and presents the LA experience as a template of resistance that other cities have already begun to emulate, mirroring national civil‑liberties critiques that Trump’s enforcement build‑up has produced a quasi‑permanent paramilitary presence in daily American life that demands organized civic opposition.[1][4][5]
Finally, the column insists that commemoration of the raids must be paired with preparation for future confrontation, warning that new multibillion‑dollar appropriations for ICE and Border Patrol and ongoing efforts to harden asylum and detention rules mean mass deportations will intensify, and arguing that, in the spirit of Thomas Mann’s warning about tolerance of evil, Angelenos should be ready to confront what the article describes as an emerging “thugocracy.”[1][4][5]
Different views on the topic
In sharp contrast to the article’s framing, Trump and close allies present mass deportation as a lawful and necessary response to what they describe as a breakdown of border control, with the campaign and subsequent policy documents promising “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and arguing that only large‑scale removals can restore the rule of law and national sovereignty.[5]
Supporters of this agenda contend that dramatically expanding ICE’s capacity and authority, including building large detention camps and vastly increasing the number of arrests, is justified to end what Trump calls “catch and release” and to ensure that people ordered removed do not abscond, a rationale reflected in his insistence on detaining virtually everyone arrested during the removal process.[5]
Some policymakers cited in immigration research and advocacy reports argue that the recent influx of migrants and asylum seekers has overwhelmed border infrastructure and strained city budgets in places such as New York, Chicago, and Denver, and they point to crowded shelters and fiscal pressures as evidence that the United States has admitted “too many people” and must sharply restrict access to asylum and increase deportations to relieve local governments.[4]
Historically, federal officials who oversaw Operation Wetback in the 1950s portrayed mass roundups, rapid expulsions, and fear‑based “self‑deportation” campaigns as efficient, cost‑effective tools for “clearing out” unauthorized Mexican immigrants from cities such as Chicago, a perspective some contemporary enforcement advocates cite to argue that aggressive interior sweeps are a legitimate, previously used policy choice rather than an unprecedented slide toward authoritarianism.[3][2]
Additionally, elements of Trump’s broader immigration strategy have been defended by some officials and commentators as necessary deterrence: policies that pause or slow asylum adjudications, impose new fees, and expand mandatory detention are justified by proponents as tough but needed steps to discourage fraudulent claims and reduce overall migration, even as critics say these same measures are designed to make conditions so harsh that people abandon lawful avenues and leave the country on their own.[1][4]
Beyond the executive branch, there are members of Congress and segments of the public who either support or acquiesce to heightened enforcement, viewing protests, local resistance networks, and “sanctuary‑style” practices with skepticism and instead emphasizing, as summarized by civil‑rights advocates, that Congress has repeatedly funded expanded detention and enforcement and that many elected officials continue to call for tougher interior crackdowns as a core component of immigration policy.[4][5]
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