Before June, when the ICE raids began in Los Angeles, Daniel Sosa had not been active in the immigrant rights movement. A cannabis dispensary owner, he had previously directed his political energy toward fights over legalization and the implementation of California's onerous regulations surrounding marijuana dispensaries.
However, on June 6, the first day of major and aggressive ICE raids across Los Angeles County, something changed in him.
“ICE really started snatching people off the streets in Los Angeles,” Sosa told me Thursday. “These are just people that are in my community and people that I know.”
That night, Sosa joined hundreds of protesters at the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center, the federal prison located on Alameda Street next to the Roybal federal building. It has been, and continues to be, the site of constant protests against ICE. Some protesters painted graffiti on the building, some threw water bottles and, according to news reports, some threw rocks and broken concrete at police vehicles.
“I don't dedicate myself to those things,” Sosa told me. But he was still caught in confusion. A stun grenade that exploded near his ear that night sent him to urgent care the next morning, where he was diagnosed with a swollen cochlea and given prednisone.
That next night, undaunted, he returned to the protests. By nightfall, once again, things got ugly.
“Describe what happened to you,” encouraged a KCAL News reporter at the scene, holding a microphone toward Sosa, 42, who was wearing dark glasses and a hat pulled down over his ears.
“I felt a little bit of tear gas,” Sosa said. “It tasted like fascism.”
A few days later, Stephen Colbert aired the clip, which has been viewed millions of times, and pronounced Sosa “the most Angeleno guy ever.”
What's happening in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and, of course, Minneapolis, seems like something out of a dystopian novel about the unraveling of the American experiment. Unidentified masked men carry weapons of war in residential neighborhoods. Her irascible temper and violent responses to “disrespect” have resulted in the shooting deaths of Renee Good, a mother and poet, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, and now widespread calls to abolish ICE.
“State terrorism has arrived,” columnist M. Gessen warned last week in the New York Times. Gessen, a Russian dissident, has written extensively about authoritarian regimes.
The trampling of the Constitution and the disregard for due process have, in fact, made a mockery of America's vision of itself as a democracy where the rule of law reigns.
Soon, Americans will be able to express their discontent at the ballot box (if given the chance). But until then, we must exercise our rights to freedom of expression and assembly. What alternative is there but to go out into the streets?
Obviously, most people—even those with strong feelings about President Trump's immigration crackdown, the egregious tactics of ICE agents, and the Justice Department's overzealous prosecutions of sandwich-wielding protesters—won't get off their couches. There's no need.
In a 2017 Washington Post essay on the extraordinary national turnout in Trump’s misogyny-inspired “Women’s Marches,” political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman explained why the turnout of about 1.3% of the U.S. population (a seemingly insignificant number) was so significant.
“Marching requires a much higher level of commitment than voting,” they wrote. “It requires more time, is not anonymous, often involves financial costs, and could put the protester in danger or at risk of arrest or retaliation.”
Chenoweth is well known for popularizing the “3.5% rule,” which posits that almost “no government has withstood the challenge of having 3.5% of its population mobilize against it during a peak event.”
The rule applies to campaigns aimed at overthrowing an unpopular government or achieving territorial independence, but many (including organizers of the current No Kings marches) have adopted it as an aspirational figure. About 342 million live in this country today; Almost 12 million people would have to come to try the rule.
In any case, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in the New York Times in 2017 that mass protests should be considered “a potential first step.”
“A large protest today looks less like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus,” Tufekci wrote. “What used to be an end point is now an initial spark. More than ever, the importance of a protest depends on what happens next.”
So something is starting to change. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe ICE raids are doing more harm than good. Nearly half support abolishing ICE. And on Friday, the Justice Department announced that it had opened a civil rights investigation into Pretti's murder.
And in response to last week's events, Trump pulled his Nazi-disguised border boss, Greg Bovino, out of Minneapolis. Democrats are urging Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to be removed. Some Republicans are urging Trump to fire her. Some are even demanding that Trump's virulently anti-immigrant adviser Stephen Miller, who falsely suggested that Pretti intended to massacre federal agents, have to go.
Meanwhile, Sosa has returned to the Metropolitan Detention Center dozens of times and does not plan to stop. On October 10, he was there with a personalized banner that read “F—ICE.”
According to Sosa, he was holding his sign when officers chased a protester through the crowd and then ripped the sign out of his hands. Sosa went to his car, took out an identical banner and returned. “It was my way of saying, 'Are you going to violate my First Amendment right to speak? Are you going to seize my property without reason and without due process? You can't stop me.'”
He was arrested, held for about an hour and a half in a cell and now faces two federal criminal charges for Class C misdemeanors: obstruction and failure to comply with a lawful order. The maximum penalty per charge is 30 days in prison. He has also been arrested six times by Los Angeles police during protests, but never charged with a crime.
At Sosa's arraignment, he was offered a deal: plead guilty to one of the charges, pay a $35 fine, receive one year of probation and stay 100 feet away from the detention center. He refused.
“It's important, really important, to exercise our right to speak and assemble,” Sosa said. “It's fundamental to what America is. We can't take it for granted just because it's written on old paper. We have to exercise our rights if we want to keep them.” His trial is scheduled to begin April 2. He plans to represent himself.
Blue sky: @rabcarian
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