This will attack the literal mentalities as illogical, but I think that the mayor of Huntington Park, Arturo Flores, a veteran sailor from Iraq and Afghanistan, had a point just when he declared at a press conference with the mayors of southern California that immigrants who were being rounded by immigration and the application of customs They don't. “
“The president is still talking about a foreign invasion,” Flores told me Thursday. “He keeps trying to paint us like the other. I say: 'No, you are dealing with Americans.”
California estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who have lived among us for years, for decades, who work and pay taxes here, who have sent their children born in the United States to schools here, have all the responsibilities of citizens except many of the rights. Yes, technically, they have violated the law. (In the case, President Trump has also done, a criminal, and continues to violate the Constitution day after day, as attest to his losses of the growing court).
But undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants in our region are inextricably integrated into our lives. They take care of our children, build our houses, dig our ditches, cut our trees, clean our homes, hotels and businesses, wash our dishes, collect our crops, sew the clothes. Many small companies have mortgages, attend universities, ascend in their professions. In 2013, I wrote about Sergio García, the first undocumented immigrant admitted at the California Bar Association. Since then, it has become a American citizen and has a law firm of personal injury.
These Californians are much less likely to violate the law than native Americans, and do not deserve the reign that terror is inflicted by Trump's administration, National Secretary of National Security Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has called the Marines.
“So we start listening to the administration wanting to go after the violent criminals, drug traffickers,” said the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, who organized the press conference of the mayors last week, “but when you attack Home Depot and workplaces, when we wear out the parents already separated children, and when you run the armed caravans through our streets, you are not trying to be sure. trying to cause fear and panic “.” “.” “.”
And, please, let's not forget that when Congress joined and resolved a bill of bipartisan immigration reform under President Biden, Trump demanded that the Republicans kill him because he did not want a rational policy, he wanted to be able to mark the Democrats on the subject.
But it seems that it is happening more than rounding undocumented immigrants and terrorizing their families. It seems that we have entered the “Punishing of California” phase of Trump 2.0.
“Trump has a hyperfoco about California, on how to hurt the economy and causing chaos, and is really doubling that campaign,” Flores told me. He has a point.
“We stayed here to free the city of the Socialist and the Gurado leadership that this governor and this mayor were placed in this country,” Noem told journalists on Thursday at a press conference in the Federal building of Westwood, during which California senator Alex Padilla was fought against the ground and handcuffed face to face for daring to ask him a question. “We are not going to go.”
So now we are talking about the regime change? (As the former Harvard Law teacher Laurence Tribe put it in Bluesky, the use of military force aimed at displacing democratically chosen leaders “is the very definition of a blow.”
The harmful mixture of NOEM of intentional ignorance and inflammatory rhetoric is almost too ridiculous to make fun. He goes hand in hand with Trump's silly statement that our city has been set by the protesters, who without the military being able to patrol our streets, Los Angeles “would be a crime scene as we have not seen in years”, and that the “paid insurrectionists” have fed anti-reef protests.
What we are seeing in the news and in our neighborhoods is the deliberate infiction of fear, trauma and intimidation designed to cause a violent response and the deformation of reality to soften the land for more incursions of the Trump administration in the blue states, the United States bulco against its autocratic aspirations.
For weeks, Trump has been planning to deprive California, probably illegally, of federal funds for public schools and universities, citing resistance to his executive orders on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, on immigration, environmental regulations, etc.
And yet, because he is perhaps the most ignorant state of the world, he seems to have suddenly realized that paralyzing California's economy could be a bad policy for him. On Thursday, he suggested in his own way that perhaps deporting thousands of farm workers and the hospitality of the State could cause pain to his friends, his employers. (The producers of Valle Central and the PAC of Agribusiness, for example, overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024).
“Our farmers are being very hurt by, you know, they have very good workers. They have worked for them for 20 years,” Trump said. “They are not citizens, but they have turned out to be, you know, and we will have to do something about it.”
Like many Californians, I feel helpless in front of this assault on immigrants.
I thought of a Guatemalan, a father of three young children born in the United States, who has a prosperous business transporting garbage. I met him a couple of years ago in my home depot, and hired him several times to take domestic debris. Once, after I could not get the city to help, the sand of a small dune was removed at the end of my street that had become the urine pad of local dogs.
I called it this week: I have more things that I need to get rid, and I was quite sure I could use the job. The early morning of Friday, he arrived on time with two workers. He said he had not been able to work in two weeks, but he hoped to be able to return to Home Depot soon.
“How are your children?” I asked.
“They care,” he said. “They ask: 'What will we do if they deport you?'”
He tells them not to worry, that things will soon return to normal. After he left, he sent a text message: “Thank you very much for helping me today. God bless you.”
No, God bless you. For working hard. For being a good dad. And to continue believing, against probabilities, in the American dream.
@further.bsky.social @rabcar
