deportation

At 8 o’clock on a stormy weeknight in the chilly Chinatown offices of L.A. Taco, Memo Torres finally was worn out.

Since President Trump unleashed his deportation deluge on Los Angeles in June, the 45-year-old has chronicled nearly every immigration enforcement action in the region in three-minute “Daily Memo” videos for the online publication. He and his colleagues track down film footage and photos, reach out to officials to verify what they’ve found and hammer out a script for Torres to narrate.

The audio that played from Torres’ double-screen computer and smart phone as he reviewed the evidence on the day I visited contained snippets of the Southland’s sad soundtrack under what he continually calls the “siege” of ICE. Men pleading to la migra to stop hurting them. Activists cursing out agents. Whistles, screams, honks and sirens. Sobbing family members.

“If I wanted to cry, I don’t think that I could,” Torres said when I asked how he coped with seeing such videos ad nauseum.

“It’s not healthy, I know. It’s not mature. But what I go through is nothing like what the people I’m seeing are going through … Today was hard, though,” he continued, pounding his hand with his fist. “They went … extra hard today. They’re starting to get worse. Numbers that used to be a week’s worth of abductions are now a day.”

He sighed. His deep-set eyes were bleary. Reading glasses did nothing to help with 12 hours of staring at screens. Torres wiped his hands over his face as if washing off the horrors of the day and pressed the record button.

“Today, Border Patrol targeted Long Beach, swarming the streets again and taking gardeners, old men and a 12-pack of beer that they had,” he began. He talked over footage of masked men piling on top of a gardener at a Polly’s Pie in Long Beach as a police officer looked on with hands in pockets and a deer-in-headlights look.

In another clip, federal agents detained an elderly man sitting on the sidewalk near a liquor store, “making sure to put a handcuff on his hand as they helped him up.”

“Remember to stay safe and stay vigilant, folks,” Torres concluded.

He turned off the camera, blasted hardcore punk and began to splice his reel together.

“Daily Memo” has become the diary Los Angeles never asked for but which is now indispensable, documenting in real time one of the most terrifying chapters in the region’s history. Filling the camera frame with his broad shoulders, full beard and a baritone that alternates between wry, angry, calm and reassuring, Torres has been described by fans as the Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite of L.A.’s deportation days — legendary broadcasters he acknowledges never having heard of until recently.

“When you’re in the midst of everything, you forget someone has to keep an archive so we can go back to reference, and you think, ‘Damn is someone is doing that?’ Yeah, Memo is doing that,” Sherman Austin said. The Long Beach-based activist runs the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network, which sends out text alerts with the locations of raids to more than half a million people nationwide. “Memo puts a human face to what’s happening, and that resonates with people in a different way.”

“He’s a neighborhood hero,” said Rebecca Brown, supervising attorney for the Immigrants’ Rights Project of Public Counsel. The public interest law firm has filed or joined multiple lawsuits against the federal government this year over its deportation agenda. “A lot of these stories of people who are getting picked up can fall through the cracks. But their voices are getting captured by his recording.”

While “Daily Memo” is chronicling a city under attack, it’s also bringing comfort to an unexpected person: Torres.

The son of a Mexican immigrant from Zacatecas who came to this country without papers, Torres never had a full-time journalism job until this year, living a “Forrest Gump kind of life.” He estimates he has worked in at least 25 different trades, from butcher to taquero to sound engineer, social media manager and nonprofit worker, none really fitting his life’s goal to do something “meaningful.”

Nothing lasted longer than landscaping. A third-generation jardinero — his grandfather also worked in the U.S. — he at one point employed 28 workers and had contracts across the city, with Hollywood studios among his biggest clients.

Torres, who has two college-age children, sold the business in March to focus on journalism for good.

“My life has prepared me for this s—. There’s nothing that scares me anymore,” Torres said as he began to layer video clips over his “Daily Memo” narration. “So I bury my head into work. My escapism is the cruel reality of the city right now.”

Torres grew up in Culver City and Inglewood. At Loyola High he absorbed the Jesuit maxim of being a man for others. But after graduating from UC Berkeley with a sociology degree, Torres found himself back in the family business, unable to find a job that satisfied him.

“Relatives would make fun of me by saying, ‘There he goes with a degree and a lawnmower in the back of a truck,” he said. “I hated it, but I was good at it.”

His landscaping routes across Southern California inadvertently prepared him for journalism. He started an Instagram account, El Tragón de Los Angeles (The Glutton from Los Angeles), to share his eating adventures. That caught the attention of L.A. Taco in 2018, which was revamping at a time when the city’s indie publications were shuttering or faltering.

“Their mission of street-level reporting called to me,” Torres said. He volunteered to connect L.A. Taco to local restaurants so the publication’s members could score free food and discounts. He soon became director of partnerships, then took over L.A. Taco’s social media accounts, then started to write articles and shoot videos — mostly for free.

“I call him the Mexican Swiss Army knife — and not those small ones but the big ones with all the weird things,” L.A. Taco publisher Alex Blazedale said as he and Torres smoked outside during a short break. “Memo could literally do anything we asked him to, and he wanted to do it and followed through.”

Torres’ taco knowledge earned him appearances on the Netflix show “The Taco Chronicles” and a regular slot on KCRW’s “Good Food with Evan Kleiman.” Blazedale suggested this year that he do a daily news recap under the “Daily Memo” banner. But Torres found the title “cheesy and didn’t know what it was for.”

Then came the raids.

“I grew up on the History Channel,” Torres said. “They would always have these documentaries where they said they were finding new footage that had been thought lost. That’s what’s happening right now. So much stuff is being put up that quickly goes down. We need to document it for history.”

L.A. Taco editor Javier Cabral credits “Daily Memo” with bringing in so many new members that the publication is now financially sustainable.

“He’s not your average aspirational journalist who is either a hobbyist who wants to write more or someone who just got out of [journalism] school,” Cabral said. “He’s just a real paisa” — a working-class guy.

While Cabral finds Torres’ lack of reporting experience “refreshing,” he sometimes has to remind Torres not to editorialize too much.

“It’s that ‘Show, don’t tell’ thing in journalism, you know? But then I had to just check in with myself — am I being jealous by power-tripping at him?” Cabral said. “It was a hard conversation to have, but Memo took it [on] the chin and raised it up.”

Blazedale and Cabral believe so much in Torres that they recently hired a part-time assistant for “Daily Memo” and plan to turn an office at their headquarters into a proper studio. They got Torres a video editor, but the person quit after five minutes of viewing deportation footage — so Torres continues to put together the final product.

“We just can’t have Memo burn out,” Cabral said. “He’s too important to have that happen.”

Torres is unfazed, for now.

“It’s just like when I mowed lawns — let’s seize the day and make it your routine,” he said.

Besides, swimming in the chaos of the times is how Torres has dealt with a tough personal year. He sold his landscaping company, not just because of his increased L.A. Taco duties — he’s officially the publication’s director of engagement — but because the Hollywood writer’s strike and Trump’s deportations decimated his business. Two of his former gardeners have since been deported.

Torres started smoking again “to deal with all this.” He recently broke off an engagement after a 10-year-relationship with a woman whose family members were avid Trump supporters. On Election Night, Torres said, one of them told him to go back to Mexico. The couple’s Glendale home recently sold for far less than they paid. Soon, Torres plans to declare bankruptcy.

L.A. Taco’s offices are filled with boxes of his mementos as he settles into a new apartment. One is a laminated La Opinión story about him trying to recruit more Latino students to Berkeley after affirmative action ended.

“I always envisioned I would be useful for something,” he said before mentioning a letter from his mother he unearthed during his move. She died of cancer in 2006.

“She said, ‘I’m so proud of you. You’re trying to fight for what’s right. Don’t forget it.’ She saw it in me way back then.”

Torres uploaded his finished reel to L.A. Taco’s social media accounts. It was 10 p.m. — early for him. Outside the rain was pouring down harder than ever.

“I hope I can go back to writing about tacos,” Torres said with a laugh that betrayed he knew it wouldn’t happen for a while. “Just give me a break from reporting on the trauma and tragedy. But who knows if the future needs me? Maybe I’m just good for this moment, and I’m good with that.”

He stepped into the storm. Eight hours later, he would be back.

Myanmar citizens march in protest against the military coup in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Sunday, February 28, 2021. Despite a civil war continuing in the Asian nation, the Trump administration on Monday announced it was terminating temporary protection status for Myanmar. File Photo by Xiao Long/UPI | License Photo

Nov. 25 (UPI) — The United States announced it was ending deportation protection for those from civil war-torn Myanmar, the latest nation to have Temporary Protected Status terminated amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of TPS for Myanmar on Monday, saying it will be in effect in 60 days, on Jan. 26.

Some 3,670 Myanmar nationals were in the United States under the TPS program, according to the National Immigration Forum nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

The previous Biden administration designated Myanmar for TPS in May 2021 in response to civil conflict that erupted in the country following the Feb. 1, 2021, military coup. The designation has been repeatedly renewed until Monday.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Myanmar, the junta has killed at least 7,488 people, with 30,013 others arrested, and nearly 22,700 still detained.

Since the coup began, more than 275,000 Myanmar nationals have sought refuge or asylum in neighboring countries, according to United Nations statistics.

In terminating deportation protections for those from Myanmar, Noem said the situation in the country “has improved enough that it is safe for Burmese citizens to return home” and conditions no longer meet TPS statutory requirements.

“Burma has made notable progress in governance and stability, including the end of its state of emergency, plans for free and fair elections, successful cease-fire agreements and improved local governance contributing to enhanced public service delivery and national reconciliation,” she said in a statement.

The announcement comes less than a week after the United States co-sponsored a resolution on the situation facing minorities in Myanmar, with Michael Heath, U.S. senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific affairs, stating they “remain deeply concerned” by evidence of human rights violations and abuses continuing to be committed by both the military and other armed groups engaged in the civil war.

The Trump administration has sought to end TPS for nine country, affecting more than 675,000 immigrants in the United States, according to Carolyn Tran, executive director of Communities United for Status and Protection.

Nov. 22 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said he is “immediately” ending deportation protections for more than 400 Somali immigrants living in Minnesota.

Trumo made the announcement on Truth Social on Friday night.

The East African nation has had protection since 1991, and it was renewed on Sept. 18, 2024, through March 17, 2026, when Joe Biden was president.

“I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota,” he wrote. “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!”

He did not offer evidence related to the allegations of terrorist gangs in the state.

In addition, he blamed Democratic Gov. Walz of overseeing a state that had become a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” — also without proof.

“It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community. This is what he does to change the subject,” Walz, who was Kamala Harris‘ vice presidential candidate in the 2024 election against Trump, said less than two hours later in a post on X.

TPS was created in 1979 to allow migrants who escaped “civil unrest, violence or natural disasters” from being deported from the United Stats.

Somalia, which for decades has experienced civil war and instability, is among 17 migrants’ countries with protection. Somalia’s population is 20 million.

There are 705 Somali immigrants approved for the status as of March 31 with 430 in Minnesota, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

The Cedar-Riverside neighborhood east of downtown Minneapolis is nicknamed “Little Mogadishu” because of its large Somali population.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat representing Minneapolis and born in Somalia, blasted the decision.

“Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate. We are here to stay,” Omar wrote on X, noting that most Somalian immigrants are U.S. citizens.

Trump in the past has been at odds with Omar.

“I look at somebody that comes from Somalia, where they don’t have anything – they don’t have police, they don’t have military, they don’t have anything,” Trump said in a Nov. 11 interview with Laura Ingraham on Fox News. “All they have is crime — and she comes in and tells us how to run our country.”

Since 1979, more than 26,000 Somali refugees moved to Minnesota, according to the state Department of Health.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said his office is “monitoring the situation and exploring all of our options.

“Somali folks came to Minnesota fleeing conflict, instability and famine, and they have become an integral part of our state, our culture and our community,” Ellison wrote on Facebook. “Donald Trump cannot terminate TPS for just one state or on a bigoted whim.”

“I am confident that Minnesotans know better than to fall for Donald Trump’s scare tactics and scapegoating,” he added.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also spoke out with a Facebook post that he is “standing with our Somali community today. Minneapolis has your back — always.”

Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuthg, who is running for governor against Walz, applauded the decision.

“The unfortunate reality is that far too many individuals who were welcomed into this country have abused the trust and support that was extended to them, and Minnesota taxpayers have suffered billions of dollars in consequences as a result,” Demuth said in a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Minnesota Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer adding a post posted on X that “accountability is coming.”

Emmers post linked to a report from right-wing Breitbart about a letter he wrote to Daniel Rosen, U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, urging him to “open an investigation into reports that Minnesota taxpayer dollars are ending up in the hands of the al-Shabab terrorist network in Somalia.”

The move was criticized by Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“This is not just a bureaucratic change; it is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric,” Hussein told CBS News. “We strongly urge President Trump to reverse this misguided decision.”

He added that the protection provided “a legal lifeline for families who have built their lives here for decades.”

Trump has also ended TPS protections for Afghan, Venezuelan, Syrian and South Sudanese nationals. Those actions from each have been challenged in courts.

When millions of European immigrants came to the United States in the 19th century only to be scorned by mainstream society, it was the Catholic Church that embraced them, taught that keeping the customs of one’s native lands was not bad and created systems of mutual aid and education for the newcomers that didn’t rely on the government.

The 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, an Irish American Catholic, showed that the U.S. was ready to expand its definition of who could become president. Labor organizers like Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day and Mother Jones pushed for the dignity of workers while frequently citing the woke words of Jesus — the Sermon of the Mount and the Beatitudes among the wokest — as the fuel for their spiritual fire.

Catholicism is the faith I was baptized in, the one I embraced as a teen and that’s the bedrock for my moral code of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. My work desk covered with statues and devotional cards of Jesus, Mary and the saints is a physical testament to this.

But I’m also one of the 72% of U.S. Catholics that a Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year. found don’t attend weekly Mass, which we’re obligated to do.

I stopped going early on in my adulthood because the Church became something I didn’t recognize.

The bishops and cardinals who preached we should follow Jesus’ admonition we should tend to the least among us presided over a child sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and 2000s that cost parishioners billions of dollars in legal settlements and their ethical high ground. The obsession that too many of those same church leaders had over abortion and homosexuality — which Christ never talked about — over social justice matters during the Obama administration left me disappointed. Their continual condemnation of pro-choice Catholic Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden for taking Communion while staying silent about Donald Trump’s constant violations of the Ten Commandments was rank hypocrisy.

The Pew Research Center found 55% of my fellow faithful voted for Trump. Key Catholics have blessed Trump’s uglier tendencies: A majority of them rules over our revanchist Supreme Court while the president’s team features a vice president who’s a convert and a rogue’s gallery of influential insiders that bear surnames from previous generations of Catholic diasporas — Kennedy, Rubio, Bovino, Homan among the worst of the worst.

Yet I remain a Catholic because you shouldn’t turn your back so easily on institutions that formed you and you don’t cede your identity to heretics. The election of Pope Leo XIV, the first American to head the Holy See, to succeed Pope Francis stirred in me the sense that things might change for the better as our country worsens.

Now, without naming him, the U.S. Catholic hierarchy has rebuked Trump on his signature issue and one close to my heart in a way that shows my hope hasn’t been in vain.

This week the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released a so-called “special message” to blast Trump’s deportation Leviathan, decrying its “vilification of immigrants” “the, indiscriminate mass deportation of people” and how hundreds of thousands of residents have “arbitrarily lost their legal status.” Citing passages from across the Bible — the Gospel, the Old Testament, the Letters of Paul — to argue for the human worth of the undocumented and the holy mandate that we must care about them, it was the first time since 2013 that American bishops collectively authored such a statement.

Even as a majority of U.S. Catholics have gone MAGA, support for the special message was overwhelming: 216 bishops voted in favor, 5 against, and there were 3 abstentions. Their missive even concluded with a shout-out to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the brown, pregnant apparition of the Virgin Mary who’s the patroness of the Americas for Catholics.

Talk about someone who would get deported if la migra saw Her on the street.

The cruelty this administration has shown throughout its deportation campaign — families torn apart as easily as the Constitution; U.S. citizens detained; wanton federal violence that a federal judge in Chicago described as “shock[ing] the conscience” — has become one of the most pressing moral issues of our times. The call by Catholic bishops to oppose this wrong is important — so like a voice crying in the wilderness, the church must set an example for the rest of the country to follow.

This example already is being set in parishes across Southern California.

Priests and deacons have marched at rallies and prayed for those detained and deported from Orange County to downtown L.A. and beyond. Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights has let local activists stage know-your-rights workshops since Trump won last November. While L.A archbishop José H. Gomez and Diocese of Orange bishop Kevin Vann, the two most senior Catholic prelates in the region, have spoken out forcefully against immigration raids, some of their local brother bishops have pushed harder.

Diocese of San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas has allowed Catholics who are afraid of la migra to skip Mass since July after immigration agents detained migrants on church property, arguing “such fear constitutes a grave inconvenience” for his flock. In San Diego, Bishop Michael Pham — who’s been in his seat for only four months — helped launch a program encouraging religious leaders to accompany migrants to immigration court to bear witness to the injustices inside and has participated himself.

Expect to hear gnashing of the teeth from the conservative side of church pews about how everyone should respect the rule of law and to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s as if there ever was a Pope Donald. Already, Trump border czar Tom Homan has cried that the bishops are “wrong” for issuing their pro-immigrant letter and suggested they focus on “fixing the Catholic Church.”

But Homan’s dismissal and that of his fellow travelers doesn’t make the bishop’s admonition against Trump’s policies any more prophetic. The president’s immigration dictates are out of Herod — no less an authority than Pope Leo described them in October as “inhuman,” told a delegation of American bishops that “the church cannot remain silent” on those outrages and stated in a separate speech that such abuse was “not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”

The Catholic Church never will be as progressive as some want it to be. Even as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released its message, the group elected as its next president Diocese of Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley, whose public politics have so far mostly aligned with those of his deep-red state. But on the issue of dignity for immigrants during the Trump era, U.S. bishops have been on the right side of history — and God. They criticized Trump’s Muslim ban and his move to separate undocumented parents from their children during his first administration and have kept a watch on his attempt to cancel the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows some people who came to this country as children to legally remain in the U.S.

We’re about to enter the Christmas season, a holiday based on the story of a poor family seeking shelter in an era when their kind was rejected by the powers that be and ultimately had to flee home. It’s the story of the United States as well, one too many Americans have forsaken and that Trump wants all of us to forget.

May Catholics remind their fellow Americans anew of how powerful and righteous standing up for the stranger is.

In September, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, depicted as Lt. Col. Kilgore, the gung-ho warmonger memorably played by Robert Duvall in Francis Ford Coppola’s messy masterpiece, “Apocalypse Now” — except the graphic bore the title “Chipocalypse Now.”

Trump sent out the message as his scorched-earth immigration enforcement campaign descended on the Windy City after doing its cruelty calisthenics in Southern California over the summer. Two months later, the campaign — nicknamed “Operation Midway Blitz” — shows no sign of slowing down.

La migra has been so out of control that a federal judge issued an injunction against their use of force, saying what they’ve done “shocks the conscience.” Among other outrages, agents shot and killed an immigrant trying to drive away from them, ran into a daycare facility and dragged out a teacher and tear-gassed a street that was about to host a Halloween kiddie parade.

I had a chance to witness the mayhem it has caused last week — and how Chicagoans have fought back.

The University of Chicago brought me to do talks with students and the community for a couple of days, including with members of the Maroon, the school’s newspaper. Earlier in the week, Fox News put them on blast because they had created a database of places around campus where la migra had been spotted.

Good job, young scribes!

In Little Village, pocket Patton meets his match

After my speech at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, I noticed someone had hung whistles around the neck of a bronze bust. Whistles have become the unlikely tool of resistance in the city, I wrote in a columna — something that I argued Latinos nationwide had also employed metaphorically with their election night clapback at Republicans.

When I woke up Thursday morning at my tony hotel, the Chicago Tribune’s front page screamed “Use of Force Under Fire” and focused on the actions of commander-at-large Gregory Bovino. You remember him, Angelenos: he’s the pocket Patton who oversaw the pointless invasion of MacArthur Park in July and seemed to spend as much time in front of cameras as doing his actual job.

Bovino has continued the buffoonery in Chicago, where he admitted under oath to lying about why he had tossed a tear gas canister at residents in Little Village, the city’s most famous Mexican American neighborhood, in October (Bovino originally said someone hit him with a rock).

I Ubered to Little Village to meet with community activist Baltazar Enriquez so we could eat at one of his neighborhood’s famous Mexican restaurants and talk about what has happened.

I instead walked right into a cacophony of whistles, honks and screams: Bovino and his goons were cruising around Little Village and surrounding neighborhoods that morning just for the hell of it.

From L.A. to the rest of the country, and back

“Every time Trump or la migra lose in something, they pull something like this,” a business owner told me as she looked out on 26th Street, Little Village’s main thoroughfare. Customers were hiding inside her store. Over four hours, I followed Enriquez as he and other activists drove through Little Village’s streets to warn their neighbors what was happening.

The scene played out again in Little Village on Saturday shortly after I filed my columna, with Bovino holding a tear gas canister in his hand and threatening to toss it at residents, openly mocking the federal judge’s injunction prohibiting him from such reckless terrorizing (Monday, the Department of Homeland Security claimed agents had weathered gun shots, bricks, paint cans and rammed vehicles). And to top it off, he had his officers pose in front of Chicago’s infamous stainless steel bean for a photo, just like they did in front of the Hollywood sign (Block Club Chicago reported the funboys shouted “Little Village” for giggles).

Given ICE just received billions of dollars in funds to hire more agents and construct detention camps across the country, expect more scenes like this to continue in Chicago, boomerang back to Southern California and cut through the heart of Latino USA in the weeks, months and years to come. But I nevertheless left Chicagoland with hope — and a whistle.

Time for us to start wearing them, Los Angeles.

Today’s top stories

The government shutdown

• Senators approved a deal that could end the shutdown on a 60-40 vote, a day after Senate Republicans reached a deal with eight senators who caucus with Democrats.
• Democrats in the House vowed to keep fighting for insurance subsidies.
• Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is facing pressure to step down as Senate Democratic leader after failing to prevent members of his caucus from breaking ranks.
• States are caught in Trump’s legal battle to revoke SNAP benefits after a federal judge ordered full funding.

A brief bout of summer weather

Courts protect LGBTQ+ rights

More big stories

Commentary and opinions

• California columnist Anita Chabria argues that Democrats crumbled like cookies in the shutdown fight.
• Gov. Gavin Newsom is still writing his path to the presidency. Columnist George Skelton points to Zohran Mamdani for inspiration.
• President Trump’s effort to rename Veterans Day flopped — and for good reason, argues guest contributor Joanna Davidson.

This morning’s must reads

Other great reads

For your downtime

Going out

Staying in

Question of the day: What’s one special dish your family makes for Thanksgiving?

Judi Farkas said: “An old Russian recipe that has descended through 5 generations of our family, Carrot Tzimmis was traditionally served as part of the Passover meal. It’s perfect with a Thanksgiving turkey. Tzimmis is sweet, as are so many of the Thanksgiving dishes, so I pair it with a Jalapeño Cornbread dressing and a robust salad vinaigrette so that no one gets overwhelmed. It connects me to my family’s heritage, but repurposed for the holidays we celebrate now.”

Email us at [email protected], and your response might appear in the newsletter this week.

And finally … the photo of the day

Today’s great photo is from Juliana Yamada of a surfer at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point.

Have a great day, from the Essential California team

Jim Rainey, staff reporter
Hugo Martin, assistant editor
Kevinisha Walker, multiplatform editor
June Hsu, editorial fellow
Andrew Campa, weekend reporter
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters

How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to [email protected].

Nov. 11 (UPI) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Harris County for allocating $1.35 million to help fund legal defense of those facing immigration deportation hearings.

Harris County, which includes Houston and forms the core of the Greater Houston Area, has historically ranked among the top U.S. counties for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers, according to reporting by The Texas Tribune.

Paxton accused the Harris County Commissioners Court of illegally allocating more than $1.35 million in taxpayer funds to “radical-left organizations” that use the money to “oppose the lawful deportations of illegal aliens.”

He called the fund “blatantly unconstitutional” and “evil and wicked” in a news release announcing the lawsuit Tuesday.

“We must stop the left-wing radicals who are robbing Texans to prevent illegals from being deported by the Trump administration,” Paxton said Tuesday in a news release.

“Millions upon millions of illegals invaded America during the last administration,” Paxton said. “They must be sent back to where they came from.”

He said the Harris County Commissioners Court recently voted 4-1 to allocate $1.35 million to several non-governmental organizations that are “dedicated to fighting the deportation of illegal aliens.”

Recipients include the Galveston-Houston Immigrant Representation Project, Justice for All Immigrants, Kids in Need of Defense, Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, and BakerRipley.

The allocations serve no public purpose and amount to illegal grants of taxpayer dollars to pay for the legal defense of those who should not be in the country, Paxton said.

He said the Texas Constitution prohibits allocating taxpayer funds to individuals or groups that do not serve the public interest and filed the lawsuit in the Harris County Judicial District Court on Monday.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said the county will oppose the state’s lawsuit in court, The Texas Tribune reported.

“This lawsuit is a cheap political stunt,” Menefee said in a prepared statement.

“At a time when the president has unleashed ICE agents to terrorist immigrant neighborhoods, deport U.S. citizens and trample the law, it’s shameful that Republican state officials are joining in instead of standing up for Texans.”

Although Menafee accused the Trump administration of deporting U.S. citizens, the Department of Homeland Security said that is a false accusation and no U.S. citizens have been deported.

“We have said it a million times: ICE does not arrest or deport U.S. citizens,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Oct. 1 in response to a New York Times article accusing ICE of deporting citizens.

Before becoming the Harris County attorney, Menafee’s biography says his private practice “focused heavily on pro bono work, including advising the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, advising immigrants and their families at Bush Intercontinental Airport during the ‘Muslim ban’ and working with Texas Appleseed on expanding alternatives to involuntary commitment for the mentally ill.”

LITTLE VILLAGE, Il. — The moment I got out of my Uber ride in this West Side Chicago neighborhood, the noise was everywhere.

Honks. Cursing. Screeching tires. Revving engines. Whistles. So many whistles.

Immigration authorities were sweeping through — again. And people weren’t having it.

Old, young, Latino, Black and white, folks shouted warnings from cars and from businesses like a game of Telephone across 26th Street, the heart of this historic Latino community. One of them was Eric Vandeford, who glanced in every direction for any sign of la migra.

“We all surrounded them earlier trying to get someone and they just left,” the 32-year-old said. He looked down 26th. “I gotta go,” he snapped and jogged off.

I arrived at 9:30 in the morning hoping to grab breakfast before interviewing Baltazar Enriquez. He’s president of the Little Village Community Council, a long-standing nonprofit that has added to its mission of organizing food drives and fighting against environmental racism to face off against Trump’s deportation machine.

Instead, I found myself in a chase to keep up with immigration agents.

Over the last two months, la migra has swept throughout Chicago but has swung its hammer with gusto on Little Village, known as La Villita by residents and considered the Mexican heart of the city. Imagine the density of Pico-Union with the small-town feel of Boyle Heights and the fierce pride of South L.A., then mix in murals and nationally known Mexican restaurants — Carnitas Uruapan, Taqueria El Milagro.

It’s a charming barrio, and it’s been under siege, like many other neighborhoods in the Windy City.

Immigration agents have staged operations in the parking lots of local schools before grabbing undocumented immigrants and citizens alike. When Border Patrol commander-at-large Gregory Bovino swung by in late October, he tossed a tear gas canister toward a group of protesters filming him, a move so reprehensible that a federal judge issued an injunction banning such force the morning I was in Little Village.

Now, the rumor was that Bovino was cruising around with a caravan.

He’s the man the Trump administration tasked with its deportation deluge in Southern California this summer before moving on to Chicago. In L.A., Bovino mostly mugged for the cameras, like the time he oversaw an invasion of an emptied MacArthur Park in July with the National Guard parked on Wilshire Boulevard. Bovino said it was necessary to stop transnational gangs, but he nabbed no one.

In Chicago, Bovino has dialed the cruelty and spectacle to 11. Residents have responded in kind in a way I haven’t seen in Southern California. Sure, Angelenos have organized block patrols and group chats and enlisted the help of politicians and nonprofit leaders just like Chicago.

But we don’t have the whistles.

They’ve become the fall soundtrack of the Windy City to the point organizers are holding “Whistlemania” events to hand them out by the thousands. Chicago has a radical legacy that predates L.A. by decades — anarchists, socialists and immigrants were fighting back against government-sponsored thugs when L.A. was still a relative cow town.

The suburban apathy that has kept too many Southern Californians on the sidelines as immigration agents sweep into our cities was nowhere to be felt in Little Village. People poured out of businesses and their residences. Others looked out from rooftops. The intensity of their pushback was more concentrated, raw and widespread than almost anything I’ve seen back home.

It wasn’t just the activists on call — block after block was ready.

Honks and whistles went off toward the west. I ran toward them and met Rogelio Lopez Jr. He was going inside grocery stores and discount marts to let people know that el hielo — ICE — was nearby.

The 53-year-old Little Village resident was enjoying lunch with his father at Carniceria Aguascalientes the day Bovino unleashed his mayhem nearby. He and other customers bolted to confront the Border Patrol bigwig.

“I’m sure he was thinking, ‘Here’s this guy standing in front of my force with a stupid little whistle in my territory.’ No, you’re in our territory.”

A minivan stopped near us and rolled down its window. “We lost them by Central and 26th!” shouted 32-year-old Mariana Ochoa from the back seat as she held her son on her lap. Joining us now was a masked 18-year-old college student who went by Ella and is a U.S. citizen along with her parents. She rattled off all the locations where her WhatsApp group had spotted ICE that morning. Lopez texted them to his own group.

Ella took a call from her mother.

“I’ll be back home soon, Ama,” the college student said in Spanish. “Love you. Stay inside.”

Angry residents gathered on street corners. Many had whistles — pink, black, orange, green — around their necks. Lopez handed one to Juan Ballena, who immediately used it — a shrill, reedy blast soon answered by others.

He waved up and down 26th Street. “Look at the buildings,” said the 61-year-old. “Closed. Closed. Closed. These migra are ruining a beautiful town.”

Nearby, 64-year-old Flavio Luviano stood outside his wife’s bistro with a whistle in one hand and a laminated know-your-rights card in the other. Business is down — and so is trust.

“I always have the door locked,” said the dual Mexican and U.S. citizen in Spanish. “People will come who aren’t from here and say, ‘Let me in’ and I tell them, ‘No, only with a warrant.’ They get angry, and I say, ‘I don’t care, we need to protect the people we know.’”

Three blocks toward the east, the horns and screams and whistles I had heard an hour ago were going off again. ICE had just passed by.

The stocky Enriquez stood in the middle of the street trying to clear cars whose drivers had tried to block off what they said were undercover immigration agents. People around him were scrambling in every direction while on their phones letting others know what had just happened. “I got their … license plates on my phone!” a woman yelled to no one in particular.

Most had whistles around their necks.

Wearing Crocs, a puffer jacket and sweats, Enriquez looked like a defensive end about to start a training session.

Soon, we were off again.

Esparza and the driver, Lissette Barrera, sped up and down Little Village’s narrow tree-lined streets, many with signs that read “Hands Off Chicago” inside the city’s flag scheme. They alternated between blowing their whistles, pounding on the car horn and yelling “¡Anda la migra!”

Immigration agents always seemed a few minutes ahead. Reports via texts said they were asking people about their legal status. Some were detained.

We finally parked underneath the Little Village Arch, a colonial-style gateway crossing over the part of 26th Street where Uber dropped me off earlier. A crowd was waiting for Enriquez to hear his game plan: “No ramming, no throwing, no nothing. Just follow and film.”

A Chicago police officer passed by. “Ya se fueron [They’re gone],” he told Enriquez very matter-of-factly. “The whistles worked.”

Steven Villalobos pulled up in a raised truck with a giant Mexico flag flapping from its cab. It was his first-ever protest.

“I’ve been seeing this for months and enough was enough — I had to join,” said the Little Village lifer. Near him, Amor Cardenas nodded.

“It sucks that my mom can’t even go to … Ross, bro,” said the 20-year-old. She was still in her pajamas. “You don’t understand this feeling of terror until it’s in front of you. Then, there’s no turning back.”

Barrera and I jumped in the back seat of another car as Enriquez took the wheel. She opened a bag of Sabritones and passed it to two other passengers. The four of them had just returned home on an overnight bus from Washington, D.C., where they participated in an anti-Trump protest at the National Mall.

Enriquez drove slower. He and a volunteer named Lille logged on to Instagram and livestreamed from their respective phones to an audience of about a thousand.

“Those who have papers, come out and patrol,” he said in Spanish in a deep voice. “Those who don’t, stay inside.”

“Tell Baltazar that I’m going to buy him a caguama,” Lille said someone had commented. A tall boy of beer.

For the first time all morning, Enriquez smiled. “Make it two.”

The 46-year-old Enriquez was born in Michoacán, came to Chicago without papers as a child and received his American citizenship thanks to the 1986 amnesty. He cut his activist teeth with the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, before becoming the Little Village Community Council vice president in 2008.

Espinoza said the idea of using whistles to alert people about ICE in Chicago started in Little Village but came indirectly from Los Angeles. During a June Zoom call, Enriquez heard activists say they couldn’t communicate with one another while protesting outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. after their cellphones suddenly stopped working.

“So I thought we needed low tech to beat that if it happened here,” Enriquez said as we cruised past a city-owned lot where ICE had staged operations weeks earlier. Signs now said immigration agents weren’t allowed. “People at first thought the whistles were a joke. But then we used them once and la migra took off — and it spread like wildfire.”

We were now in nearby Brighton Park. He was following a tip that Bovino was approaching residents himself.

“They just tear-gassed someone!” someone yelled over the phone. “They’re taking people right now.”

The call cut short.

Enriquez tried to speed back to Little Village but hit construction traffic. Barrera jumped out of the car to grab two traffic cones. “To trap pepper balls when ICE fires them,” she explained.

Another call. “They got my son,” a woman quietly said in Spanish.

“Go to the [Little Village Community Council] office and we’ll help,” Enriquez replied.

“I can’t go out. I don’t have papers.”

When we passed an elementary school off Western Avenue, Barrera screamed in Spanish, “Take in the kids because la migra is driving around!” Teachers immediately blew their whistles and rushed their students inside.

ICE was out of Little Village — for now. Enriquez logged back on to Instagram Live.

“Good job, guys. Stay on their ICE nalgas.”

We took a right on 26th toward the Little Village Community Center’s small office. “We’re going to take a break,” Enriquez told his audience. We’ve gotta get pizza for everyone.”

Bilingual signs taped to the storefront window read “ICE OUT!” and “Free Whistles.”

“It was just supposed to be the bad people that they were going to target, they told us, but that didn’t happen,” said Nayeli Girón, a 24-year-old student. She wore a jacket that read “Southwest,” the name of a nearby neighborhood. “Every day it’s a different story. That’s why we need to stand up.”

Enriquez told everyone to gather around.

Time to learn how to defuse a pepper ball.