A quick report from Los Angeles

Immigrants and the rule of law in the world's 4th largest economy

Most of you aren’t from LA, and since I grew up here, went to college here, and have worked here for the past 20 years, I thought I could provide some information and context about what’s going on right now.

I think this information is important because the major media outlets in the country, which are operated by oligarchs, are getting this wrong. The feds and police are also working to prevent accurate information from being published, as they are intentionally and illegally targeting journalists with violence and detention. Everything I’ve heard from federal agencies about this is straight up false, and our media is not fact-checking of the stream of lies coming. So, let me tell you who were are, what has happened, and where we are.

There is no immigrant invasion. Los Angeles is a tapestry of immigrants, and we all live here and are all Americans. Some folks have more documentation than others of their immigrant past and present, but we live alongside one another peacefully. At the moment, we are standing up for one another when ICE is entering our community and illegally snatching people from their work and their homes and shipping them off to concentration camps in Central America. This overtly is breaking basic protections of human rights guaranteed in our Constitution. There is zero legal recourse, and the lawlessness of federal agents is a danger to our community.

So when ICE came in, Americans in Los Angeles have stood up against these lawless federal forces by protecting our neighbors and friends from illegal seizure and kidnapping. We are doing this in a peaceful manner by blocking ICE’s access to the members of our community who are being targeted on the basis of their (assumed) ethnicity.

The violence in this struggle against ICE is coming from federal agents and the Los Angeles Police Departments. They’re assaulting peaceful demonstrators, firing “less lethal” objects that sometimes kill, and are doing everything they can to provoke a response from protestors. In a very small area of a small part of town, some folks have been lighting some Google self-driving vehicles (Waymo) on fire, and some scattered meyhem. The extraordinary violence is coming from the Department of Homeland Security and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Meanwhile, anybody in LA who isn’t looking at the news would have no idea any of this is happening. People are going to the park, going to work, shopping at the grocery store, taking kids to school, going for evening runs, hanging out in restaurants, and doing the normal stuff that happens everywhere and there’s no sign of any unrest.

Anything you hear about LA being unsafe, invaded, violent, or whatever is patently false. These immigrants aren’t invading our city, they are our city, we are one and the same.

Clear-eyed observers see what’s going on in Los Angeles: The authoritarian regime in the White House has sent in their gestapo in large numbers to kidnap people away from us with no cause other than racism and xenophobia. We resist against these unlawful acts by the feds, and in turn, they used this as a pretext to send in our armed forces to invade our own cities, against the wishes of local leaders and local law enforcement.

If you have concerns about violence happening here, then keep your eyes on the ball and focus on ICE and those giving them orders for wielding violence as a means of disassembling our government and shipping people into concentration camps. The defenders of the rule of law — who are the residents of Los Angeles who are beseiged by the lawless federal agents — should not have to be held accountable for every single random dude who might choose to light a car on fire. Meanwhile, ICE is kidnapping thousands of people every day without cause other than to further federal power and doing this without any judicial backing and in direct violation of our Constitution. That’s the violence we’re worried about.

So what’s going on in LA? The rule of law is generally still at work in the United States, and in Los Angeles, except when it comes to federal agents who are disobeying the law at the behest of the president.

Los Angeles is a multicultural tapestry of immigrants, that’s why we are where and that’s the source of our strength and beauty. We will continue to fight against the lawless federal forces that are targeting members of our community for harm.