La migra spread across MacArthur Park yesterday morning like a platoon ready for war.
Federal agents on horseback with a white steed in the middle trotted through a soccer field. Others dressed like they were ready for Fallujah walked across lawns that just minutes earlier hosted a kid’s summer camp. Humvees complete with gun turrets parked on Wilshire Boulevard.
A Black Hawk helicopter buzzed above.
It was meant to be a show of force. It was more of a farce.
The park was mostly empty thanks to social media posts that had been warning Los Angeles about the coming incursion since Sunday. A furious Mayor Karen Bass arrived, got on the phone with U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino — who was strolling around while a photographer took glam shots — and told him to pull back. Activists showed up instead of the regular crowd to laugh at and film la migra and cuss them outta there.
It was like the climactic scene in “Blazing Saddle,” when incompetent villain Hedley Lamarr tried to invade a small town with the baddest of hombres besides him only to find a Potemkin village. The Non-Battle of MacArthur Park even had a “cowboy” (those quote marks are getting some serious “air” time as I write this) — its own buffoon: With his straw cowboy bat and rifle slung over his shoulder, Assistant Chief Border Patrol Agent David Kim seemed to be channeling his inner Alex Villanueva, the ex-L.A. County sheriff who wore Stetsons anywhere and everywhere in urban L.A. because he thought that showed power.
This was the Battle of the Photo Op. Written in D.C. and paid for by taxpayers.
For the past 30 days, President Donald Trump has laid siege to L.A. like a potentate trying to quash a far-away rebel province. Over 1,600 people detained, citizens and noncitizens alike. A parade of his lackeys — Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, Vice President JD Vance, border policy advisor Tom Homan — parachuted in to lecture L.A. about how out of control it is and vow retribution. California’s senior U.S. senator, Alex Padilla, briefly handcuffed for daring to question Noem during a press conference.
Trump and his troupe keep squawking about getting “the worst of the worst,” but they’re mostly not. This operation doesn’t seem to make much of a distinction between snatching an immigrant with a criminal record or a guy armed with a stockpile of tamales he’s trying to sell to make a living.
Masked men grabbing anyone and everyone in the fashion of paramilitary squads from countries we deem uncivilized. Straight-up invasions of workplaces and residential neighborhoods, parks and street corners. Thousands of members of the National Guard and hundreds of Marines called up.
What the city is weathering is supposed to be a warning to all other immigrant-friendly municipalities across the country: submit, or else.
Well, L.A. chose the something else. And Trump and his goons are getting more and more angry — and reckless.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks to the National Guard before their lunch at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles on June 12.
(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)
People are scared, sure — even terrified. That’s part of Trump’s strategy, along with making life so miserable that he hopes Angelenos will turn on each other. Instead, they’re uniting and hunkering down for more. Support networks and neighborhood watchdog groups are blooming across the region. Everyone with a smartphone and a social media account is now a reporter, capturing la migra at its worst and letting the world know what’s really going on. Lawsuits are being filed. More and more average citizens are joining the resistance.
What’s happening reminds me of the concluding line Lisa Simpson sang when Springfield Nuclear Power Plant workers went on strike against Mr. Burns and his heavies:
They may have the strength, but we have the power.
I get it, America: You think what’s happening in L.A. will never come to you. And you sort of like seeing the big, bad City of Angels getting smacked around with promises of even worse things to come. There’s a reason sports fans chant “Beat L.A.” and not “Beat Salt Lake City” or even New York.
But what happened yesterday at MacArthur Park is a microcosm of Trump’s vision for the rest of the country: a massive show of nada that does absolutely nothing to make life better for Americans. A gigantic waste of money. Spectacle over substance. Venom for anyone who dares speak out.
That should concern anyone who cares about a functioning democracy. Including L.A. haters.
The last month of raids across Southern California has shown that when the going gets tough, Trump goes for the easy. Sure, the Department of Homeland Security and its toxic alphabet soup of agencies participating in Trump’s deportation deluge are churning out social media posts featuring grainy photos of some of the people they’ve caught along with their alleged crimes. But that’s a way to mask the reality that these people taken in raids are mostly not criminals. A Times analysis of data obtained by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law found that nearly 70% of those arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from June 1 through June 10 had no criminal convictions.
The sad irony about what happened yesterday in MacArthur Park is that if ever there was a place in L.A. that might have welcomed a helpful assist from the feds … it’s MacArthur Park.
As my fellow columnista Steve Lopez has written about for years, it’s a jewel of a green space with serious problems that city officials have allowed to fester over the decades and has made it a no-go zone for many Angelenos. Gangs have long extorted businesses in the neighborhood and terrorized everyone else — including immigrants. Too many unhoused people pass through with nowhere else to go. Drug use is as prevalent as sunbathing: When I walked through it earlier this year on the way to Langer’s for lunch, I saw a man smoke a meth pipe within eyesight of an LAPD officer who didn’t even blink.
But this wasn’t about saving MacArthur Park from the bad guys. Instead, the deployment of masked troops in tactical gear showed Trump and his berserkers only care about optics, up to and including a man on horseback leading his fellow cavalry in a straight line while holding an American flag as colleagues whipped out their smartphones. The charade looked like something out of a Western movie — American military subjugating yet another Native American tribe.
Federal immigration agents near MacArthur Park on July 7.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
More is going to come, most likely worse. Trump’s Bloated Bullplop Bill has allocated $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Homan is relishing the idea of increasing the number of ICE agents from 5,000 to 15,000 — as if all that migra will improve the economy or make up for the rise in taxes and loss in Medicaid that millions of American citizens will suffer in order to support an agency whose increased budget will put it above the military of most of the world’s countries.
Are you paying attention yet, America?
After the MacArthur Park action, Trump’s disciples proclaimed victory. Bovino bragged to Fox News reporter Bill Melugin — the de facto media stenographer for Trump’s migra mission — that he told L.A. Mayor Karen Bass during their phone call, “Better get used to us now, ’cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went on Fox News later to thunder, “The Democrat Party’s objective is to flood the West with millions upon millions of illegals from the developing world” as footage of what happened earlier that day rolled next to him.
Big words from little men who act like they’re living some “Apocalypse Now” fantasy.
I preferred what L.A. councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — whose district encompasses MacArthur Park — said shortly after the sweep at a City Hall press conference, something as true as the sun rising in the east: “We are the canary in the coal mine. What you see happening at MacArthur Park is coming to you.”
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