Latinos

On Tuesday, I voted for the first time. Not for a president, not in a midterm, but in the California special election to counter Texas Republicans’ gerrymandering efforts. What makes this dynamic particularly fascinating is that both parties are betting on the same demographic — Latino voters.

For years, pundits assumed Latinos were a lock for Democrats. President Obama’s 44-point lead with these voters in 2012 cemented the narrative: “Shifting demographics” (shorthand for more nonwhite voters) would doom Republicans.

But 2016, and especially the 2024 elections, shattered that idea. A year ago, Trump lost the Latino vote by just 3 points, down from 25 in 2020, according to Pew. Trump carried 14 of the 18 Texas counties within 20 miles of the border, a majority-Latino region. The shift was so significant that Texas Republicans, under Trump’s direction, are redrawing congressional districts to suppress Democratic representation, betting big that Republican gains made with Latinos can clinch the midterms in November 2026.

To counter Republican gerrymanders in Texas, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Democrats pushed their own redistricting plans, hoping to send more Democrats to the House. They too are banking on Latino support — but that’s not a sure bet.

Imperial County offers a cautionary tale. This border district is 86% Latino, among the poorest in California, and has long been politically overlooked. It was considered reliably blue for decades; since 1994, it had backed every Democratic presidential candidate until 2024, when Trump narrowly won the district.

Determined to understand the recent shift, during summer break I traveled in Imperial County, interviewing local officials in El Centro, Calexico and other towns. Their insights revealed that the 2024 results weren’t just about immigration or ideology; they were about leadership, values and, above all, economics.

“It was crazy. It was a surprise,” Imperial County Registrar of Voters Linsey Dale told me. She pointed out that the assembly seat that represents much of Imperial County and part of Riverside County flipped to Republican.

Several interviewees cited voters’ frustration with President Biden’s age and Kamala Harris’ lack of visibility. In a climate of nostalgia politics, many Latino voters apparently longed for what they saw as the relative stability of the pre-pandemic Trump years.

Older Latinos, in particular, were attracted to the GOP’s rhetoric around family and tradition. But when asked about the top driver of votes, the deputy county executive officer, Rebecca Terrazas-Baxter, told me: “It wasn’t immigration. It was the economic hardship and inflation.”

Republicans winning over voters on issues such as cost of living, particularly coming out of pandemic-era recession, makes sense, but I am skeptical of the notion that Latino voters are fully realigning themselves into a slate of conservative positions.

Imperial voters consistently back progressive economic policies at the ballot box and hold a favorable view of local government programs that deliver tangible help such as homebuyer assistance, housing rehabilitation and expanded healthcare access. In the past, even when they have supported Democratic presidential candidates, they have voted for conservative ballot measures and Republican candidates down the ticket. Imperial voters backed Obama by a wide margin but also supported California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage. This mix of progressive economics and conservative values is why Republican political consultant Mike Madrid describes Latino partisanship as a “weak anchor.”

The same fluidity explains why many Latinos who rallied behind Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020 later voted for Trump in 2024. Both men ran as populists, promising to challenge the establishment and deliver economic revival. For Latinos, it wasn’t about left or right; it was about surviving.

The lesson for both parties in California, Texas and everywhere is that no matter how lines are drawn, no district should be considered “safe” without serious engagement.

It should go without saying, Latino voters are not a monolith. They split tickets and vote pragmatically based on lived economic realities. Latinos are the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in the U.S., with a median age of 30. Twenty-five percent of Gen Z Americans are Latino, myself among them. We are the most consequential swing voters of the next generation.

As I assume many other young Latino voters do, I approached my first time at the ballot box with ambivalence. I’ve long awaited my turn to participate in the American democratic process, but I could never have expected that my first time would be to stop a plot to undermine it. And yet, I feel hope.

The 2024 election made it clear to both parties that Latinos are not to be taken for granted. Latino voters are American democracy’s wild card — young, dynamic and fiercely pragmatic. They embody what democracy should be: fluid, responsive and rooted in lived experience. They don’t swear loyalty to red or blue; they back whoever they think will deliver. The fastest-growing voting bloc in America is up for grabs.

Francesca Moreno is a high school senior at Marlborough School in Los Angeles, researching Latino voting behavior under the guidance of political strategist Mike Madrid.

Authors, readers and publishing industry experts lament the underrepresentation of Hispanic stories in the mainstream world of books, but have found new ways to elevate the literature and resolve misunderstandings.

“The stories now are more diverse than they were ten years ago,” said Carmen Alvarez, a book influencer on Instagram and TikTok.

Some publishers, independent bookstores and book influencers are pushing past the perception of monolithic experience by making Hispanic stories more visible and discoverable for book lovers.

The rise of online book retailers and limited marketing budgets for stories about people of color have been major hurdles for increasing that representation, despite annual celebrations of Hispanic Heritage Month from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 in the U.S. There’s been a push for ethnically authentic stories about Latinos, beyond the immigrant experience.

“I feel like we are getting away from the immigration story, the struggle story,” said Alvarez, who is best known as “tomesandtextiles” on bookstagram and booktok, the Instagram and TikTok social media communities. “I feel like my content is to push back against the lack of representation.”

Latinos in the publishing industry

Latinos currently make up roughly 20% of the U.S. population, according to Census data.

However, the National Hispanic Media Coalition estimates Latinos only represent 8% of employees in publishing, according to its Latino Representation in Publishing Coalition created in 2023.

Brenda Castillo, NHMC president and CEO, said the coalition works directly with publishing houses to highlight Latino voices and promote their existing Latino employees.

The publishing houses “are the ones that have the power to make the changes,” Castillo said.

Some Hispanic authors are creating spaces for their work to find interested readers. Award-winning children authors Mayra Cuevas and Alex Villasante co-founded a book festival and storytellers conference in 2024 to showcase writers and illustrators from their communities.

“We were very intentional in creating programming around upleveling craft and professional development,” Cuevas said. “And giving attendees access to the publishing industry, and most importantly, creating a space for community connection and belonging.”

Villasante said the festival and conference allowed them to sustain themselves within the publishing industry, while giving others a road map for success in an industry that isn’t always looking to mass produce their work.

“We are not getting the representation of ourselves,” Villasante said. “I believe that is changing, but it is a slow change so we have to continue to push for that change.”

Breaking into the mainstream

New York Times bestselling author Silvia Moreno-Garcia, a Mexican-Canadian novelist known for the novels “Mexican Gothic” and “The Daughter of Doctor Moreau,” is one of few Hispanic authors that has been able to break to mainstream. But she said it wasn’t easy.

Moreno-Garcia recalled one of her first publisher rejections: The editor complimented the quality of the story but said it would not sell because it was set in Mexico.

“There are systems built within publishing that make it very difficult to achieve the regular distributions that other books naturally have built into them,” Moreno-Garcia said. “There is sometimes resistance to sharing some of these books.”

Cynthia Pelayo, an award-winning author and poet, said the marketing campaign is often the difference maker in terms of a book’s success. Authors of color are often left wanting more promotional support from their publishers, she said.

“I’ve seen exceptional Latino novels that have not received nearly the amount of marketing, publicity that some of their white colleagues have received,” Pelayo said. “What happens in that situation (is) their books get put somewhere else in the bookstore when these white colleagues, their books will get put in the front.”

Hispanic Heritage Month, however, helps bring some attention to Hispanic authors, she added.

Independent bookstores

Independent bookstores remain persistent in elevating Hispanic stories. A 2024 report by the American Booksellers Association found that 60 of the 323 new independent bookstores were owned by people of color. According to Latinx in Publishing, a network of publishing industry professionals, there are 46 Hispanic-owned bookstores in the U.S.

Online book retailer Bookshop.org has highlighted Hispanic books and provided discounts for readers during Hispanic Heritage Month. A representative for the site, Ellington McKenzie, said the site has been able to provide financial support for about 70 Latino bookstores.

“People are always looking to support those minority owned bookstores which we are happy to be the liaison between them,” McKenzie said.

Chawa Magaña, the owner of Palabras Bilingual Bookstore in Phoenix, said she was inspired to open the store because of what she felt was a lack of diversity and representation in the books that are taught in Arizona schools.

“Growing up, I didn’t experience a lot of diversity in literature in schools.” Magaña said. “I wasn’t seeing myself in the stories that I was reading.”

Of the books for sale at Palabras Bilingual, between 30% to 40% of the books are Latino stories, she said.

Magaña said having heard people say they have never seen that much representation in a bookstore has made her cry.

“What has been the most fulfilling to me is able to see how it impacts other people’s lives,” she said. “What motivates me is seeing other people get inspired to do things, seeing people moved when they see the store itself having diverse books.”

Figueroa writes for the Associated Press.

What makes someone suspicious enough to be grabbed by masked federal authorities?

Is it a Mexican family eating dinner at a table near a taco truck?

Afghan women in hijabs working at a Middle Eastern market?

South Asian girls in colorful lehengas, speaking Hindi at an Indian wedding?

According to Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing a concurrence in the Supreme Court’s emergency ruling allowing roving immigration raids in Los Angeles, any of these could be fair game, using law and “common sense.”

Brown people, speaking brown languages, hanging out with other brown people, and doing brown people things like working low-wage jobs now meets the legal standard of “reasonable suspicion” required for immigration stops.

Living while brown has become the new driving while Black.

Of course, this particular high court ruling — and our general angst — has centered on Latino immigrants. That’s fair, and understandable. In California, about half of our immigrants are from Mexico, and thousands more from other Latin and South American countries.

But increasingly, especially for newer immigrants, more folks are coming from Africa and Asian countries such as China and India — some of which, you may recall, Donald Trump called “shithole countries” way back in 2018, while questioning why America doesn’t take more immigrants from white places such as Norway.

It’s a dangerous mistake to think Trump’s immigration purge is just about Latinos. He’s made that clear himself. We have reached the point in our burgeoning white nationalism when our high court has deemed brown synonymous with illegal, regardless of what country that pigment originated in. False distinctions about who is being targeted create divisions at a time when solidarity is our greatest power.

“It’s really about racial subordination, and this is really about promoting white supremacy in this nation,” George Galvis, executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, told me. He’s part Native American and part Latino, and 100% against policies like this one that target people by skin color.

Mexico, India, China, Iran. People from these places may not always see what they have in common, but let me help you out.

Racists see two colors: white and not white. Although this particular case was filed on behalf of Latino defendants, there is nothing in it that limits its scope to Latinos.

“It’s not targeting, you know, Eastern Europeans. It’s not targeting people who are Caucasian,” said Amr Shabaik, legal director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in L.A., a nonprofit civil rights organization advocating for American Muslims. “This is going to be on Black and brown communities, and that’s who’s going to feel the brunt.”

For Black Americans, this argument is as old as dirt. Our criminal justice system, our society, has a long and documented history of viewing Black Americans with suspicion — considering it “common sense” to think they’re up to something nefarious for actions like getting behind the wheel of a car. But, for the most part, our courts have frowned upon such obvious racism — though not always.

That anti-Black discrimination can be seen today in Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into urban centers in what Trump has described as a “war” on crime, a callback to the war on drugs of the 1990s that targeted Black Americans with devastating consequences.

This ruling on immigration enforcement goes hand-in-hand with that military deployment, two prongs in a strategy to wear away our outrage and shock at the dismantling of civil rights.

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in her dissent, the 4th Amendment is supposed to protect us all from “arbitrary interference” by law enforcement.

“After today,” she wrote, “that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”

That makes this ruling “unconscionably irreconcilable” with the Constitution, she wrote.

ICE has detained about 67,000 people across the country since last October, according to government data. Of those, almost 18,000 are from Mexico. Detentions of people from Guatemala and Honduras add almost 14,000 Latinos to that number. Places including Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela add thousands more. Certainly, by any measure, Latinos are bearing the brunt of immigration enforcement.

Other parts of the brown world are not immune, however. More than 2,800 people from India have been detained, as have more than 1,400 Chinese people. Thousands of people from across Africa, including more than 800 Egyptians, have been locked up, too.

So we are not just talking about Latino people at car washes or Home Depots. We are talking about Artesia’s Little India; Mid-City’s Little Ethiopia; the Sri Lankan community in West Covina.

We are talking about Sacramento’s Stockton Boulevard, where Vietnamese men congregate in the cafes every afternoon.

We are talking about the farms, schools and towns of the Central Valley and the Central Coast, where Latino and Asian immigrants grow our food.

We are talking about cities such as Fremont in the Bay Area, where 50% of the population is Asian, from places including India, China and the Philippines.

We are talking about California, where immigrants make up 27% of the state’s population, more than double the national average. And yes, many of them lack documents, or live in families of mixed status.

A recent UC Merced study found that there are about 2.2 million undocumented immigrants in California. Of those, about two-thirds have been here more than a decade, and half have been here for more than 20 years.

“This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws — it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including U.S. citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on social media. “Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family — and every person is now a target.”

Remember a few short months ago when our dear leader swore they were only going after criminals? How quickly did that morph into criminals being anyone who had crossed the border illegally?

And now, it has openly become anyone who is brown — and we are not even shocked. We are happily debating what the rules of these broad sweeps will be, having given up entirely on the fact that broad sweeps are horrific.

Do you think it will stop with immigration, or even crime? What about LGBTQ+ people? Or protesters? Who becomes the next threat?

Immigration sweeps are not a Latino problem, a Latino fear. We have opened the door to target people who “common sense” tells us are un-American.

The only way to close that door is with our collective strength, undivided by the kind of “common sense” discrimination that men like Kavanaugh embrace.

My dad’s passport is among his most valuable possessions, a document that not only establishes that he’s a U.S. citizen but holds the story of his life.

It states that he was born in Mexico in 1951 and is decorated with stamps from the regular trips he takes to his home state of Zacatecas. Its cover is worn but still strong, like its owner, a 74-year-old retired truck driver. It gives Lorenzo Arellano the ability to move across borders, a privilege he didn’t have when he entered the United States for the first time in the trunk of a Chevy as an 18-year-old.

The photo is classic Papi. Stern like old school Mexicans always look in portraits but with joyful eyes that reveal his happy-go-lucky attitude to life. He used to keep the passport in his underwear drawer to make sure he never misplaced it in the clutter of our home.

At the beginning of Trump’s second term, I told Papi to keep the passport on him at all times. Just because you’re a citizen doesn’t mean you’re safe, I told my dad, who favors places — car washes, hardware stores, street vendors, parks, parties — where immigrants congregate and no one cares who has legal status and who doesn’t.

“Exagera,” my dad replied — Trump exaggerates. As a citizen, my dad reasoned he now had rights. He didn’t have to worry like in the old days, when one shout of “¡La migra!” would send him running for the nearest exit of the carpet factory in Santa Ana where he worked back in the 1970s.

Then came Trump’s summer of deportation.

Masked migra swept across Southern California under the pretense of rounding up criminals. In reality, they grabbed anyone they thought looked suspicious, which in Southern California meant brown-skinned Latinos like my father. The feds even nabbed U.S. citizens or detained them for hours before releasing them with no apology. People who had the right to remain in this country were sent to out-of-state detention camps, where government officials made it as difficult as possible for frantic loved ones to find out where they were, let alone retrieve them.

This campaign of terror is why the ACLU and others filed a lawsuit in July arguing that la migra was practicing racial profiling in violation of the 4th Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary restraining order. The Trump administration appealed, arguing to the Supreme Court that it needed to racially profile to find people to kick out of the country, otherwise “the prospect of contempt” would hang “over every investigative stop.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed.

In a 6-3 vote, the justices lifted the temporary restraining order as the ACLU lawsuit proceeds. L.A.’s long, hot deportation summer will spill over to the fall and probably last as long as Trump wants it to. The decision effectively states that those of us with undocumented family and friends — a huge swath of Southern California and beyond — should watch over our shoulders, even if we’re in this country legally.

And even if you don’t know anyone without papers, watch out if you’re dark-skinned, speak English with an accent or wear guayaberas or huaraches. Might as well walk around in a T-shirt that says, “DEPORT ME, POR FAVOR.”

The ruling didn’t surprise me — the Supreme Court nowadays is a Trump-crafted rubber stamp for his authoritarian project. But what was especially galling was how out of touch Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion was with reality.

Kavanaugh describes what la migra has wrought on Southern California as “brief investigative stops,” which is like describing a totaled car as a “scratched-up vehicle.” A citizen or permanent resident stopped on suspicion of being in this country illegally “will be free to go after the brief encounter,” he wrote.

The justice uses the words “brief” or “briefly” eight times to describe what la migra does. Not once does he mention plaintiff Brian Gavidia, the U.S. citizen who on June 9 was at a Montebello tow yard when masked immigration agents shoved him against the fence and twisted his arm.

Gavidia’s offense? He stated he was an American three times but couldn’t remember the name of the East L.A. hospital where he was born. A friend recorded the encounter and posted it to social media. It quickly went viral and showed the world that citizenship won’t save you from Trump’s migra hammer.

Would Kavanaugh describe this as a “brief encounter” if it happened to him? To a non-Latino? After more cases like this inevitably happen, and more people are gobbled up by Trump’s anti-immigrant Leviathan?

Brian Gavidia stands in a parking lot next to East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park. A video of him having his arm twisted and held by an immigration officer against a wall despite being a U.S. citizen went viral. He’s currently a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging the Trump administration is violating the 4th Amendment with indiscriminate immigration raids.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Anyone who applauds this decision is sanctioning state-sponsored racism out of apartheid-era South Africa. They’re all right with Latinos who “look” a certain way or live in communities with large undocumented populations becoming second-class citizens, whether they just migrated here or can trace their heritage to before the Pilgrims.

I worry for U.S.-born family members who work construction and will undoubtedly face citizenship check-ins. For friends in the restaurant industry who might also become targets. For children in barrios who can now expect ICE and Border Patrol trucks to cruise past their schools searching for adults and even teens to detain — it’s already happened.

Life will irrevocably change for millions of Latinos in Southern California and beyond because of what the Supreme Court just ruled. Shame on Kavanaugh and the five other justices who sided with him for uncorking a deportation demon that will be hard to stop.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor recounts Gavidia’s travails in her dissent, adding that the Real ID he was able to show the agents after they roughed him that established his citizenship “was never returned” and mocking Kavanaugh’s repeated use of “brief.”

“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

I will also dissent, but now I’m going to be more careful than ever. I’m going to carry my passport at all times, just in case I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even that is no guarantee la migra will leave me alone. It’s not a matter of if but when: I live in a majority Latino city, near a Latino supermarket on a street where the lingua franca is Spanish.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. I will be able to remain, no matter what may happen, because I’m a citizen. Imagine having to live in fear like this for the foreseeable future for those who aren’t?

There’s nothing “brief” about that.

Latinos unleashed a political earthquake after voting for Donald Trump, who has long painted the country’s largest minority as an existential threat, in unexpectedly large numbers in the fall.

This swing to MAGA helped Trump win, kicked Democrats into the political wilderness, launched a thousand thought pieces and showed politicians that they ignore Latinos at their own risk.

Now, Latinos once again hold the power to make or break American politics, thanks to redistricting fights shaping up in Texas and California. And once again, both Democratic and Republican leaders think they know what Latinos want.

In the Lone Star State, the GOP-dominated Legislature last week approved the redrawing of congressional districts at the behest of Trump, upending the traditional process, to help Republicans gain up to five seats in the 2026 midterms. Their California counterparts landed on the opposite side of the gerrymandering coin — their maps, which will go before voters in November, target Republican congressional members.

Texas Republicans and California Democrats are both banking on Latinos to be the swing votes that make their gambits successful. That’s understandable but dangerous. If ever a voting bloc fulfills the cliche that to assume something makes an ass out of you and me, it’s Latinos.

Despite President Reagan’s famous statement that Latinos were Republicans who didn’t know it yet, they rejected the GOP in California and beyond for a generation after the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994. When Hillary Clinton supporters whispered during the 2008 presidential race that Latinos would never vote for a Black candidate, they gladly joined the coalition that put Barack Obama in the White House. Trump increased his Latino support each time he ran — to the point that in 2024, a bigger proportion of Latinos voted for him than for any previous Republican presidential candidate — even though Democrats insisted that Latinos couldn’t possibly stomach a man that racist.

Many Latinos hate being taken for granted and don’t like the establishment telling them how to think. It’s classic rancho libertarianism, the term I created in the era of Trump to describe the political leanings of the people with whom I grew up: Mexican Americans from rural stock who simultaneously believed in community and individualism and hated the racist rhetoric of Republicans but didn’t care much for the woke words of Democrats, either.

Such political independence exasperates political leaders, yet it’s long been a thing with Latino voters across the U.S. but especially in Texas and California, where Mexican American voters make up an overwhelming majority of each state’s Latino electorate. As Republicans in the former and Democrats in the latter launch their initial redistricting volleys, they seem to be forgetting that, yet again.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), poses for a portrait in the Rayburn House Office Building in 2021.

(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

The GOP is hoping voters in South Texas, one of the most Latino areas of the U.S., will carry their Trump love to the 2026 congressional races. There, two of the three congressional seats are held by Democrats Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, despite a swing from most of the region’s 41 counties supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to just five going for Kamala Harris eight years later.

In their new maps, Texas legislators poured more Republican voters into those South Texas districts. They also configured new districts in the Houston area and central Texas so that Latinos are now the majority, but voters favored Trump last year.

But a lawsuit filed hours after the Texas Senate moved the maps to Gov. Greg Abbott for his approval alleged that all the finagling had created “Potemkin majority-Latino districts.” The intent, according to the lawsuit, was to dilute Latino power by packing some voters into already Democratic-leaning districts while splitting up others among red-leaning districts.

The legislators especially threw San Antonio, a longtime Democratic stronghold that’s a cradle of Latino electoral power, into a political Cuisinart. Three Latino Democrats currently represent the Alamo City and its metro area: Cuellar, Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar. Under the new maps, only Castro is truly safe, while Casar is now in a district represented by Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who has announced he will retire.

“We have three Hispanic-predominated districts in South Texas that we believe we can carve out for Republican leadership,” state GOP Rep. Mitch Little bragged on CNN this month. “It’s good for our party. It’s good for our state. And we need to ensure that Donald Trump’s agenda continues to be enacted.”

The thing is, fewer and fewer Latinos are supporting Trump’s agenda. In Reuters/Ipsos polls, his Latino support dropped from 36% in February to 31% this month. Only 27% of Latinos approved of his performance in a Pew Research Center poll released this month.

If this slide continues through next year and Latinos continue to reject MAGA, Texas Republicans would have done Trump’s gross gerrymandering and sparked a nationwide legislative civil war for nothing.

In California, Latino voters are also crucial to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting push — but Democrats are hoping they’ll be GOP spoilers, despite their recent tack to the right.

Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley’s district would swing into Sacramento, picking up many more Latino voters than he now has in the majority white Eastern Sierra.

Proposed districts for Democrats Josh Harder and Adam Gray in Central California and Derek Tran in Orange County, all of whom the party is trying to buttress after they squeaked through in close elections in the fall, also include areas with more Latinos. A new congressional district in southeast L.A. County would probably be filled by a Latino Democrat.

Powerful Latinos in the state have already come out in favor of Newsom’s so-called Election Rigging Response Act, and the governor is counting on them to convince Latino voters to approve the maps in November.

But all this shuffling is happening a year after those very voters jolted state Democrats. Although the party still holds a super-majority in Sacramento, Democratic legislators serve alongside the largest number of Latino GOP colleagues ever. The biggest swings to Trump happened in areas with larger Latino populations, according to a Public Policy Institute of California report published last month.

The president’s popularity is especially souring in California due to his deportation deluge — but whether Latinos will support redistricting is another matter.

Although 51% of Latinos support Newsom’s performance, only 43% said they would vote yes on his redistricting push — the lowest percentage of any ethnic group, according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. The poll also found that 29% of Latinos are undecided on redistricting — the highest percentage of any group.

Such skepticism is the bitter fruit of a generation of Democratic rule in Sacramento, at a time when blue-collar Latinos are finding it harder to achieve the good life. Politicians blaming it all on Trump eventually created a Chicken Little situation that pushed those Latinos into MAGAlandia — and Newsom, by constantly casting redistricting as a necessary uppercut against Trump, is in danger of making the same mistake.

California Latinos have helped to torpedo liberal shibboleths at the ballot box more often than Democrats will ever admit. A Times exit poll found 45% of them voted to recall Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 while 53% voted yes on the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in 2008 even as a bigger majority voted for Obama. So egghead arguments about how redistricting will save the future of democracy won’t really land with the rancho libertarians I know. They want cheaper prices, and Trump isn’t delivering them — but neither is Newsom.

Latinos, as another cliche goes, aren’t a monolith. They could very well help Republicans win those extra congressional seats in Texas and do the same for Democrats in California.

But any politician betting that Latinos will automatically do what they’re expected to … remind me what happens when you assume something?

WASHINGTON — This year’s most far-reaching immigration case is likely to decide if immigration agents in Los Angeles are free to stop, question and arrest Latinos they suspect are here illegally.

President Trump promised the “largest mass deportation operation” in American history, and he chose to begin aggressive street sweeps in Los Angeles in early June.

The Greater Los Angeles area is “ground zero for the effects of the border crisis,” his lawyers told the Supreme Court this month. “Nearly 2 million illegal aliens — out of an area population of 20 million — are there unlawfully, encouraged by sanctuary-city policies and local officials’ avowed aim to thwart federal enforcement efforts.”

The “vast majority of illegal aliens in the [Central] District [of California] come from Mexico or Central America and many only speak Spanish,” they added.

Their fast-track appeal urged the justices to confirm that immigration agents have “reasonable suspicion” to stop and question Latinos who work in businesses or occupations that draw many undocumented workers.

No one questions that U.S. immigration agents may arrest migrants with criminal records or a final order of removal. But Trump administration lawyers say agents also have the authority to stop and question — and sometimes handcuff and arrest — otherwise law-abiding Latinos who have lived and worked here for years.

They could do so based not on evidence that the particular person lacks legal status but on the assumption that they look and work like others who are here illegally.

“Reasonable suspicion is a low bar — well below probable cause,” administration lawyers said. “Apparent ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion,” they added, noting that this standard assumes “lawful stops of innocent people may occur.”

If the court rules for Trump, it “could be enormously consequential” in Los Angeles and nationwide, said UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law & Policy. “The government would read this as giving immigration enforcement agents a license to interrogate and detain people without individualized suspicion. It would likely set a pattern that could be used in other parts of the country.”

In their response to the appeal, immigrant rights advocates said the court should not “bless a regime that could ensnare in an immigration dragnet the millions of people … who are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally entitled to be in this country and are Latino, speak Spanish” and work in construction, food services or agriculture and can be seen at bus stops, car washes or retail parking lots.

The case now before the high court began June 18 when Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and two other Pasadena residents were arrested at a bus stop where they were waiting to be picked up for a job. They said heavily armed men wearing masks grabbed them, handcuffed them and put them in a car and drove to a detention center.

If “felt like a kidnapping,” Vasquez Perdomo said.

The plaintiffs include people who were handcuffed, arrested and taken to holding facilities even though they were U.S. citizens.

They joined a lawsuit with unions and immigrants rights groups as well as others who said they were confronted with masked agents who shouted commands and, in some instances, pushed them to the ground.

However, the suit quickly focused not on the aggressive and sometimes violent manner of the detentions, but on the legality of the stops.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong said the detentions appeared to violate the 4th Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

It is “illegal to conduct roving patrols which identify people based on race alone, aggressively question them, and then detain them without a warrant, without their consent, and without reasonable suspicion that they are without status,” she said on July 11.

The crucial phrase is “reasonable suspicion.”

For decades, the Supreme Court has said police officers and federal agents may stop and briefly question persons if they see something that gives them reason to suspect a violation of the law. This is why, for example, an officer may pull over a motorist whose car has swerved on the highway.

But it was not clear that U.S. immigration agents can claim they have reasonable suspicion to stop and question persons based on their appearance if they are sitting at a bus stop in Pasadena, working at a car wash or standing with others outside a Home Depot.

Frimpong did not forbid agents from stopping and questioning persons who may be here illegally, but she put limits on their authority.

She said agents may not stop persons based “solely” on four factors: their race or apparent ethnicity, the fact they speak Spanish, the type of work they do, or their location such as a day labor pickup site or a car wash.

On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift the judge’s temporary restraining order. The four factors “describe only a broad profile that does not supply the reasonable suspicion to justify a detentive stop,” the judges said by a 3-0 vote.

The district judge’s order applies in the Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and Orange counties as well as Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo.

The 9th Circuit said those seven counties have an estimated population of 19,233,598, of whom 47% or 9,096,334 identify as “Hispanic or Latino.”

Like Frimpong, the three appellate judges were Democratic appointees.

A week later, Trump administration lawyers sent an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court in Noem vs. Perdomo. They said the judge’s order was impeding the president’s effort to enforce the immigration laws.

They urged the court to set aside the judge’s order and to clear the way for agents to make stops if they suspect the person may be in the country illegally.

Agents do not need evidence of a legal violation, they said. Moreover, the demographics of Los Angeles alone supplies them with reasonable suspicion.

“All of this reflects common sense: the reasonable-suspicion threshold is low, and the number of people who are illegally present and subject to detention and removal under the immigration laws in the (the seven-county area of Southern California) is extraordinarily high,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer. “The high prevalence of illegal aliens should enable agents to stop a relatively broad range of individuals.”

He said the government is not “extolling racial profiling,” but “apparent ethnicity can be relevant to reasonable suspicion, especially in immigration enforcement.”

In the past, the court has said police can make stops based on the “totality of the circumstances” or the full picture. That should help the administration because agents can point to the large number of undocumented workers at certain businesses.

But past decisions have also said officers need some reason to suspect a specific individual may be violating the law.

The Supreme Court could act at any time, but it may also be several weeks before an order is issued. The decision may come with little or no explanation.

In recent weeks, the court’s conservatives have regularly sided with Trump and against federal district judges who have stood in his way. The terse decisions have been often followed by an angry and lengthy dissent from the three liberals.

Immigration rights advocates said the court should not uphold “an extraordinarily expansive dragnet, placing millions of law-abiding people at imminent risk of detention by federal agents.”

They said the daily patrols “have cast a pall over the district, where millions meet the government’s broad demographic profile and therefore reasonably fear that they may be caught up in the government’s dragnet, and perhaps spirited away from their families on a long-term basis, any time they venture outside their own homes.”

Most California voters strongly disapprove of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and believe that raids in the state have unfairly targeted Latinos, according to a new poll.

The findings, released Sunday, reflected striking emotional reactions to immigration enforcement. When voters were asked to describe their feelings about news reports or videos of immigration raids, 64% chose rage or sadness “because what is happening is unfair.”

Among Democrats, 91% felt enraged or sad. Conversely, 65% of Republicans felt hopeful, “like justice is finally being served.”

Such divisions were consistent across 11 questions about the administration’s overall immigration strategy and specific aspects of the way enforcement is playing out in the state, with divisions along partisan lines. The UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll was conducted for the Los Angeles Times.

Democrats almost unanimously oppose President Trump’s tactics on immigration, the poll showed. Most Republicans support the president, though they are not as united as Democrats in their approval.

“It was essential to show the strength of feelings because Democrats are strongly on the negative side of each of these policies,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS Poll. “That struck me. I don’t usually see that kind of extreme fervor on a poll response.”

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The poll found that 69% of respondents disapprove of the way immigration enforcement is being carried out in the state.

Among Democrats, 95% disapprove, as well as 72% of voters with no party preference or others not affiliated with the two major parties, whereas 79% of Republicans approve.

The poll was completed online in English and Spanish from Aug. 11-17 by 4,950 registered voters in California.

A question that showed the least unified support among Republican voters asked respondents whether they agree or disagree that federal agents should be required to show clear identification when carrying out their work. The question comes as immigration agents have carried out raids using face coverings, unmarked cars and while wearing casual clothing.

Some 50% of Republicans agreed that agents should have to identify themselves, while 92% of Democrats agreed.

G. Cristina Mora, IGS co-director and a sociology professor at UC Berkeley who studies race and immigration, helped develop the poll questions. She said the poll shows that Republican voters are much more nuanced than Democrats. They also split on questions about due process, birthright citizenship and immigration enforcement in sensitive locations.

“Republicans are much more fractured in their thinking about immigration across the state,” Mora said.

Mora said she developed the question about agent identification in response to the recent bill led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) that would require immigration officers to display their agency and name or badge number during public-facing enforcement actions, similar to police and other local law enforcement.

Padilla also spearheaded a letter last month to Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons seeking information about the agency’s policies regarding the identification of agents while on duty. ICE has justified the tactics by stating that agents are at risk of doxxing and have faced increased assault on the job.

“The public has a right to know which officials are exercising police power, and anonymous enforcement undermines both constitutional norms and democratic oversight,” Padilla and 13 other Democrats wrote in the letter.

Another poll question that garnered mixed support of Republicans asked respondents to agree or disagree with the statement, “ICE agents should expand immigration enforcement into schools, hospitals, parks and other public locations.”

Among Republicans, 53% agreed with that statement, though fewer than 1 in 3 agree strongly. Meanwhile, 94% of Democrats disagreed.

Shortly after Trump took office, his administration rescinded a 2011 memo that restricted immigration agents from making arrests in sensitive locations, such as churches, schools and hospitals. Since then, agents have been filmed entering locations that were previously considered off limits, putting immigrant communities on edge.

Schools in Los Angeles reopened this month with “safe zones” in heavily Latino neighborhoods and changed bus routes with less exposure to immigration agents. An 18-year-old high school senior, Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, was walking his family’s dog in Van Nuys when he was taken into federal immigration custody.

Mora said the varied responses illustrate how California Republicans view the Trump administration’s immigration tactics with “degrees of acceptability.” They might feel strongly that immigrants with violent criminal histories should be deported, she said, but the takeover of MacArthur Park, when a convoy of immigration agents in armored vehicles descended there in a show of force, or the enforcement actions outside of public schools “might have been a step too far.”

Mike Madrid, a GOP political consultant who wrote a book about how Latinos have transformed democracy, said the split among Republicans is consistent with national polling. The trend is problematic for Trump, he said, because it means he is losing big swaths of his base.

“This is becoming viewed as overreach more than it is immigration control,” he said. “The idea sets a frame for it, but the actual implementation is widely unpopular.”

Republicans were largely united in response to other questions. Asked about the Trump administration’s proposal to do away with birthright citizenship — which confers citizenship to all children born in the U.S. regardless of their parent’s legal status — 67% of GOP respondents approved, and most of them strongly approved. By contrast, 92% of Democrats disapproved, and as did seven in 10 respondents overall.

Mora said she was surprised by the fact that Latinos didn’t stand out as substantially more opposed to Trump’s actions than voters of other racial and ethnic groups. For example, 69% of Latino voters said ICE raids have unfairly targeted Latinos, just five percentage points higher than the 64% of white non-Latino voters who agreed.

“You would imagine Latinos would be through the roof here, but they’re not,” Mora said. She said this reminded her of research around the tendency for Latinos to individualize their experiences instead of seeing them as racially unjust.

Broadly, 72% of Latinos disagree with the way the Trump administration is enforcing immigration laws in California, while 25% approve and 3% have no strong opinion.

Among Latino voter subgroups, older men and third-generation (or beyond) women are the more likely to support the way immigration enforcement is being handled in California, with 38% of Latino men over age 40 in agreement compared to 11% of Latinas ages 18-39, although among both groups majorities disapprove.

Madrid said that’s consistent with national polling showing a decrease in support for Republicans among Latinos after record gains in the last presidential election. The question, he said, is whether Trump’s approval ratings among Latinos could regress substantially enough to flip control of Congress in the midterms.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.

A quarter of Latinos who supported President Donald Trump in the November election are not guaranteed to vote for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, according to a new national poll by Equis, a leading research and polling group.

Last week Equis, alongside progressive think tank Data for Progress, released a July memo that summarized key findings from a national poll of 1,614 registered voters, conducted between July 7 and July 17.

This time frame coincides with some notable turning points in politics: namely, when Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law, as well as his execution of mass deportations and controversial handling of the Epstein files.

Respondents were asked, “If the 2026 election for United States Congress were held today, for whom would you vote?” Only 27% replied that they would vote for a Republican candidate, marking a significant political party drop from the 45% who said they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

A quarter of those polled said they were not sure whom they would vote for (16%), would vote for someone else (5%), or would not vote at all (4%).

This shaky political alignment comes at a critical time for Republicans, who are banking on continual Latino support in 2026 — especially as Texas Republicans plan to flip five blue seats under a newly proposed congressional map.

The Equis study also found that 63% of Latinos disapproved of Trump’s job as president in July, a slight uptick from polling numbers in May, when 60% disapproved. This rating seems to reflect broader sentiments regarding the state of the U.S. economy: 64% of Latinos rated the economy as “somewhat or very poor,” while only 34% viewed it as “somewhat or very good.”

However, a disapproval of Trump does not mean Latinos have rushed to back the Democratic Party. Half the Latinos polled said Democrats care more about people like them, versus the 25% who said Republicans care more. Meanwhile, 17% said they believe that neither party cares.

Swing voters — including those who Equis calls “Biden defectors,” or voters who elected Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 — are twice as likely to say that neither party cares about people like them (38%).

“Growing dissatisfaction with Trump offers Democrats an opportunity, but only if they are willing to capitalize on it,” the July memo states.

Overall, Trump’s national approval ratings are taking a nosedive, according to aggregate polling by the New York Times, which notes that Trump’s approach to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation has angered his base.

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for the files; lawmakers believe they could implicate Trump and other former top officials in the sex-trafficking investigation.

Trump’s anti-immigration policies have also likely shifted his popularity. Early July Gallup polling revealed that Americans have grown more positive toward immigration — 79% of Americans say immigration is a “good thing” for the country, which marks a 64% increase from last year and a 25-year record high.

Punk rock is not the first thing one might associate with a children’s puppet show. But on Sunday morning at the Ford Theater, L.A. punk pioneers Juanita y Juan and puppeteers from the Bob Baker Marionette Theater put local kids to the test.

After a morning spent crafting their own paper marionettes in the foyer, children marched towards the stage to revel in the weirdness of Juanita y Juan’s electro-cumbia guitar jams — a musical fusion they call “loud lounge.”

The duo was accompanied by vintage marionettes and their handlers, who played backup dancers in the shapes of jellyfish, cats and aliens. Families bounced and gently moshed along to the drum machine beats as “Juan,” also known as Kid Congo Powers, regaled them with a story about his hair catching on fire while playing a candlelit punk show with the Cramps.

And when a couple of rowdy kids started to climb onstage, bouncers swiftly intervened. “Oh, that’s very punk!” said “Juanita,” better known as Alice Bag.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez / For De Los)

It was a familiar scenario for Bag and Powers. When the two first crossed paths in the 1970s — one being the front woman of the Bags, the other a guitarist in such bands as the Gun Club, the Cramps and later Pink Monkey Birds — they could hardly surmise how influential their scrappy community would become in its nascent years.

“We were all trying to create some kind of new subculture or protest against the bland music of the day,” said Kid in a Zoom call before the show. “We bonded under the flag of punk rock,” added Bag.

In the storied history of the Los Angeles punk scene, Chicanos were, and remain, permanent fixtures. But after predominantly white bands like Germs, X and the Go-Go’s were commemorated in countless books and documentaries as architects of the genre, Bag and Powers decided to start sharing their own perspectives as Mexican Americans who broke the mold.

First, they committed the stories of their lives to the page. In 2011, Alice Bag published a memoir titled “Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, a Chicana Punk Story,” and in 2022, Kid Congo Powers followed with “Some New Kind of Kick.”

But it was after collaborating on a song for the 2022 Peacock mystery series “The Resort” that their duo, Juanita y Juan, was born. They spoke to De Los about their salad days, their new album, “Jungle Cruise” and how young Latinos can navigate this time of upheaval in the U.S.

The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez / For De Los)

Tell me about your supergroup, Juanita y Juan. What sparked this idea for you?

Kid Congo Powers: Juanita and Juan are the alter egos of Alice and I. Our reference was Marty & Elayne, who were a cabaret covers act at the Dresden Room [in Los Feliz]. They got a huge following; they were in the movie “Swingers.” And the songs are fun.

We first reconnected as friends after Alice [released] her book, “Violence Girl.” Then we got asked to write a song for a [2022] TV show on Peacock called “The Resort.” Me and Alice are on the same label, In the Red Records, out of L.A. They asked for a song by “a beach lounge act,” and they wanted it to be in Spanish. We are both Mexican Americans, Chicanos, but I thought, “Alice is much more fluent in Spanish.” She was like, “Why don’t we try to do it as a duet?” And they liked that idea.

Alice Bag: With “The Resort,” we had a springboard of this “loud lounge” idea. But it morphed into several different things that were very much our personality, and very much not something we would normally do — exploring different rhythms, like Latin rhythms and tropical rhythms. I spent a month in Tucson, and we actually wrote and recorded songs [that became the album] “Jungle Cruise.”

So how did this puppet show come into play?

K.C.G.: The [Bob Baker] Marionette Theater heard our music and thought it would be appropriate for a kids’ punk thing.

A.B.: I have actually worked with Bob Baker’s Marionette Theater before. We did a video together for a song on my “Sister Dynamite” album, which was released in 2020. Also, I’m a former teacher. I used to take my classes to the old theater, so I have a very warm association with childhood and how enchanted kids are when they see a puppet show.

(Evelina Gabrielle Perez/For De Los)

You both are really inspiring to me as Latinos who helped shape punk in its very early days. Learning about you and other Latin punks like Jeffrey Lee Pierce (The Gun Club) was affirming to me as a young Latina and punk. How did you two connect over your Mexican American experience?

A.B.: There were a lot of Latinos in the early punk scene. Not just Kid and I, but like, Trudie Arguelles, who was the face of L.A. punk.

K.C.P.: Yeah, she was the it girl.

A.B.: And Margot Olavarria, who was the original bassist for the Go-Go’s, was a big shot in the scene. Tito Larriva, who formed the Plugs. Robert Lopez, Hector Penalosa, all the Zeros! There were a lot of Latinos around. But I think one of the things that happened is — I’m Alice Bag, although Bag is not my last name. Our last names got lost, and people just thought of the band names as our family names, like the Ramones! We banded under the flag of punk rock.

Our ethnicity was present, but it wasn’t always the first thing that you noticed about us because of how we dressed. People did not know what punk was. They would make comments like, “Is the circus in town? Are these people in a gang? Are they they gonna beat us up?” So we bonded, and we had to hang out together as self-defense. We were the weirdos.

Alice, in your memoir (“Violence Girl”) you spoke about the tension between the Mexican cultural mores that you grew up with and what you were creating anew with punk.

A.B.: I think people got the wrong idea about me very early on because they knew I was from East L.A. I grew up around gang culture and learned to stick up for myself, so people thought I was scary. Even Kid Congo Powers said I was scary.

Did you think she was scary?

K.C.P.: I thought she was intense. Anything could happen when Alice Bag got on stage. And that was what drew me to her and the band. There was a menace to them, something volatile. This could be a riot, or it could be an orgy.

And Kid knows chaos very well. You held your own in bands like the Cramps. Could you think of a Latin entertainer who helped influence your own performance?

K.C.P.: Iris Chacón.

Wow, I didn’t know you got down like that!

K.C.P.: My mom watched her on TV. That was exciting.

A.B.: That’s where he got his maraca work from.

K.C.P.: And my outfits. But there was Ritchie Valens, of course. I like old rock ‘n’ roll. And then when I met Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club in 1978 or ‘79, we bonded on being Chicano. We both grew up in San Gabriel Valley — me in La Puente, Jeffrey in El Monte. We’d reference riffs coming out of a garage in La Puente, some Chicano garage band playing Santana or War. We shared the outsider-ness of being born in America, but we were in Chicano world. And throw in the fact that I knew I was queer from a young age … I didn’t know if I was in or out.

A.B.: My influences were from Spanish-language music. Raphael was a Spanish singer who’s very intense and very dramatic. And I also am a big fan of José Alfredo Jiménez, who wrote all these ranchera songs that were very emotional. I think there’s a connection between ranchera music and punk — it’s for everybody. It’s better when everybody joins in and sings along. Punk and ranchera are the people’s music.

That calls to mind the resurgence of corridos among young people. Some of the songs generate controversy, but it’s interesting to see a similarly rebellious spirit as punk. What do you think?

K.C.P.: People are always saying to me, “Don’t you feel sorry for young people today? They don’t have what you had, this and that.” But I would never in my life underestimate younger people. There’s something going on, and I don’t know about it. You don’t know about it, because it’s not for us to know about.

You both have shown many Latinos how to live authentically to your identity, to your values. What’s a quick bite of encouragement or advice for young, weird Latino kids? Especially now, when it’s hard not to feel demoralized about what’s happening across the country?

K.C.P.: Well, to live authentically is a path that can be lonely. But it’s also very empowering. And I get to be in my 60s and say I’ve done music exactly as I’ve pleased. That is possible. I had no idea how to play guitar until Jeffrey Lee Pierce said, “Here’s a guitar. I think you can do this. And you’re gonna do it.” I thought, “If this one person believes in me, then I’m gonna try it.” You just have to say yes to yourself.

A.B.: I would also say you’re not alone. Every day, there’s a bombardment of things in the world and in the U.S. that you want to resist. It’s very easy to become despondent and overwhelmed. But you don’t have to feel like you’re lifting this whole weight by yourself. It’s important to know that you do have a community that stands with you. We’re all working in different ways. We’re all a band. We’re going to make it through this together.

He inveighs against illegal immigration in terms more appropriate for a vermin infestation. He wants all people without papers deported immediately, damn the cost. He thinks Los Angeles is a cesspool and that flying the Mexican flag in the United States is an act of insurrection. He uses the internet mostly to share crude videos and photos depicting Latinos as subhuman.

Stephen Miller? Absolutely.

But every time I hear the chief architect of Donald Trump’s scorched earth immigration policies rail in uglier and uglier terms, I recall another xenophobe I hadn’t thought of in awhile.

For nearly 30 years, Glenn Spencer fought illegal immigration in Los Angeles and beyond with a singular obsession. The former Sherman Oaks resident kicked off his campaign, he told The Times in a 2001 profile, after seeing Latinos looting during the 1992 L.A. riots and thinking, “Oh, my God, there are so many of them and they are so out of control.”

Spencer was a key volunteer who pushed for the passage of Prop. 187, the 1994 California ballot initiative that sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was so punitive that a federal judge later ruled it unconstitutional. A multiplatform influencer before that became commonplace, Spencer hosted a local radio show, produced videos that he mailed to all members of Congress warning about an “invasion” and turned his vitriolic newsletter into a website, American Patrol, that helped connect nativist groups across the country.

American Patrol’s home page was a collection of links to newspaper articles about suspected undocumented immigrants alleged to have committed crimes. While Spencer regularly trashed Muslims and other immigrants, he directed most of his bile at Mexicans.

A “Family Values” button on the website, in the colors of the Mexican flag, highlighted sex crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants. Editorial cartoons featured a Mexican flag piercing a hole in California with the caption “Sink-hole de Mayo.”

Long before conservative activists recorded themselves infiltrating the conferences of political enemies, Spencer was doing it. He provoked physical fights at protests and published reams of digital nonsense against Latino politicians, once superimposing a giant sombrero on an image of Antonio Villaraigosa with the epithet, “Viva Mexico!”

On the morning Villaraigosa, the future L.A. mayor, was to be sworn in as speaker of the assembly in 1998, every seat in the legislative chamber was topped by a flier labeling him a communist and leader of the supposed Mexican takeover of California.

“I don’t remember if his name was on it, but it was all his terminology,” said Villaraigosa, who recalled how Spencer helped make his college membership in the Chicano student group MEChA an issue in his 2001 mayoral loss to Jim Hahn. “But he never had the balls to talk to me in person.”

Spencer became the Johnny Appleseed of the modern-day Know Nothing movement, lecturing to groups of middle-aged gringos about his work — first across the San Fernando Valley, then in small towns where Latinos were migrating in large numbers for the first time.

“California [it] has often been said is America’s future. Let me tell you about your future,” he told the Council of Conservative Citizens in Virginia in 1999.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks with the media outside the White House in Washington, DC, on May 9, 2025.

(Saul Loeb/ AFP via Getty Images)

Spencer is the person most responsible for mainstreaming the lie of Reconquista, the wacko idea that Mexicans came to the U.S. not for economic reasons but because of a plot concocted by the Mexican government to take back the lands lost in the 1848 Mexican-American War. He wrote screeds like “Is Jew-Controlled Hollywood Brainwashing Americans?” and threatened libel lawsuits against anyone — myself included — who dared point out that he was a racist.

He was a favorite punching bag of the mainstream media, a slovenly suburban Ahab doomed to fail. The Times wrote in 2001 that Spencer “foresaw millions of converts” to his anti-immigrant campaign, “only to see his temple founder.”

Moving to southern Arizona in 2002, the better to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border, Spencer spent the rest of his life trying to sell state and federal authorities on border-monitoring technology he developed that involved planes, drones and motion-detection sensors. His move inspired other conservatives to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border on their own.

By the Obama era, he was isolated even from other anti-immigrant activists for extremist views like banning foreign-language media and insisting that every person who came to this country illegally was a drug smuggler. Even the rise of Trump didn’t bring Spencer and his work back into the limelight.

He was so forgotten that I didn’t even realize he was dead until Googling his name recently, after enduring another Miller rant. Spencer’s hometown Sierra Vista’s Herald Review was the only publication I found that made any note of his death from cancer in 2022 at age 85, describing his life’s work as bringing “the crisis of illegal immigration to the forefront of the American public’s consciousness.”

That’s a whitewash worthy of Tom Sawyer’s picket fence.

We live in Glenn Spencer’s world, a place where the nastier the rhetoric against illegal immigration and the crueler the government’s efforts against all migrants, the better. Every time a xenophobe makes Latinos out to be an invading force, every time someone posts a racist message on social media or Miller throws another tantrum on Fox News, Glenn Spencer gets his evil wings.

Spencer “stood out among a vile swamp of racists and crackpots like a tornado supercell on radar,” said Brian Levin, chair of the California Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate and founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino, who monitored American Patrol for years. “What’s frightening now is that hate like his used to be well-segregated from the mainstream. Now, the guardrails are off, and what Spencer advocated for is federal policy.”

I first found out about Spencer in 1999 as a student activist at Chapman University. Spencer applauded the Anaheim Union High School District’s decision to sue Mexico for the cost of educating undocumented immigrants’ children, describing those of us who opposed it as communists — when he was being nice. His American Patrol described MEChA, which I, like Villaraigosa, belonged to, as a “scourge” and a “sickness.”

His website was disgusting, but it became a must-read of mine. I knew even then that ignoring hate allows it to fester, and I wanted to figure out why people like Spencer despised people like me, my family and my friends. So I regularly covered him and his allies in my early years as a reporter with an obsession that was a reverse mirror of his. Colleagues and even activists said my work was a waste of time — that people like Spencer were wheezing artifacts who would eventually disappear as the U.S. embraced Latinos and immigrants.

And here we are.

Spencer usually sent me legal threats whenever I wrote about his ugly ways — threats that went nowhere. That’s why I was surprised at how relatively polite he was the last time we communicated, in 2019.

I reached out via email asking for an interview for a Times podcast I hosted about the 25th anniversary of Prop. 187. By then, Spencer was openly criticizing Trump’s planned border wall, which he found a waste of money and not nearly as efficient as his own system. Spencer initially said he would consider my request, while sending me an article he wrote that blamed Prop. 187’s demise on then-California Gov. Gray Davis and Mexico’s president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo.

When I followed up a few months later, Spencer bragged about the legacy of his website, which he hadn’t regularly updated since 2013 due to declining health. The American Patrol archives “would convince the casual observer that The Times did what it could do [to] defeat my efforts and advance the cause of illegal immigration,” Spencer wrote. “Do I think The Times has changed its spots? No. Will I agree to an interview? No.”

Levin hadn’t heard about Spencer’s death until we talked.

“I thought he went into irrelevance,” he admitted with a chuckle that he quickly cut off, realizing he had forgotten about Spencer’s legacy in the era of Trump.

“We ignored that cough, that speck in the X-ray,” Levin concluded, now somber. “And now, we have cancer.”

Floating in the vastness of unknowable space, our miniscule planet contains all of our stories — victories and tragedies orbiting around a dying star. But what if we could leave it all behind and start anew elsewhere? To migrate if you will.

Elio Solís (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) dreams of leaving Earth — he feels he doesn’t belong. As day turns to night, the eponymous orphaned boy in Pixar’s new intergalactic adventure looks up at the sky and wonders if perhaps somewhere out there, on another levitating rock or among a still undiscovered alien race, he might feel more at home.

The animated voyage, with its themes of alienation and aliens, arrives at a time when immigrants in this country, and Latinos at large, have become the target of brutal ICE raids that ignore due process and racially profile citizens and undocumented people alike.

In turn, the production of “Elio” also illuminates the regressive political climate in this country. Last week, a piece published by The Hollywood Reporter claimed that leadership at Pixar erased the protagonist’s queer identity, prompting the original writer-director Adrian Molina to exit the project, with Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian stepping in to co-direct “Elio.” Had his take come to fruition, Molina, who is Mexican American, would have become the first Latino and the first openly LGBTQ+ person to solo direct a movie for Pixar.

Still, the version that did make it to the screen, where Elio feels ostracized because of his obsession with extraterrestrial life and all its possibilities, remains relevant. Though not overt about his ethnicity, the movie features visual nods to Elio’s Latino upbringing: a Day of the Death altar (pertinent since Molina co-directed “Coco”), a Spanish language song on the radio and colorful conchas as part of a feast.

It’s not a stretch to think that the premise of a Latino kid alienated for who he is and who believes that he won’t ever feel fully accepted in the place he calls home could speak to millions of Latino children across this country; especially here in California, witnessing the disturbing, life-threatening consequences of the administration’s policies.

Elio (voice of Yonas Kibreab), left, and Glordon (voice of Remy Edgerly) in Disney and Pixar’s “Elio.”

(Disney/Pixar)

Kids who must be wondering why there are masked men violently abducting people that look like their family members solely based on their appearance, or why their parents don’t want to leave the house, or why the vendor near their school hasn’t shown up in weeks.

They might be devastated to learn via online chatter that the people in charge of this country don’t want them to feel like they belong, even if they were born here. Now think about the children whose parents were among those taken. Words fail to estimate the trauma they must be experiencing without any certainty of when or if they’ll be reunited.

How do you explain to a child that the president of the United States is gleefully targeting anyone he deems looks “illegal,” regardless of their immigration status? That millions of people in this country harbor such hatred against immigrants that they cheer on an ill child being deported, children crying for their mothers and people dying in detention centers?

“I voted for this,” they write on social media endorsing the inhumane atrocities their government is committing against people they consider “criminals.” But their rigid version of legality only applies to immigrants from underprivileged backgrounds, those who have no choice but to cross borders without documents in order to survive, to aspire to a dignified life. The “right way” is not available to the poor, and those in power know it.

Down here in our chaotic reality, the villains currently have the upper hand. But up in space, nobody asked Elio for a passport or questioned the validity of his existence. On the contrary, the leaders of other planets, who gathered in a striking locale known as “Communiverse,” take his claim that he is the leader of Earth at face value and the singular boy rises to the occasion. Elio helps deescalate a conflict with a space warlord and reconnects with his aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña) by befriending and then saving the life of the warlord’s young son.

Unfortunately, “Elio” has become Pixar’s biggest box office failure, despite being one of the studio’s best reviewed releases in recent years. Grosses were low globally, perhaps as a result of poor marketing or because audiences have been conditioned to wait for Disney’s animated films to hit streaming rather than seeing them in theaters.

But while that outcome can’t entirely be attributed to Latinos not going to the movies, when millions who are part of the audience that most devoutly purchase tickets in this country — we see movies even though the movies don’t often show us — are frightened to step outside their door, one can’t help but wonder if the numbers for “Elio” would be at least slightly different if the ICE raids were not terrorizing the community. If people are afraid to even go to the grocery store, movie theaters are certainly not a priority.

This country takes Latinos for granted, including how our money impacts Hollywood.

I hope that “Elio” lands in front of Latino children soon, and that they see that the hero who saves not only himself but the entire planet is a Latino boy who ultimately redefines the meaning of home on his own terms. Amid the horrors, I also wish for them to not feel alone, and that they know thousands of people have taken to the streets to speak up for them.

People who believe they do belong here, that they are not “aliens” or “invaders,” but integral part of this country. And that their parents and others in their lives, documented or not, deserve dignity and compassion, no matter what the overlords do to deny them.

The Pew Research Center is one of the most trusted polling firms in the country, especially when it comes to Latinos. Last week, it published findings that should have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America’s largest minority.

According to Pew, Trump won 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential election — the highest percentage ever recorded by a Republican presidential nominee and a 12 percentage point improvement from his 2020 showing.

Latinos made up 10% of Trump’s coalition, up from 7% four years ago. Latino men went with a Republican for the first time. Trump even improved his share of support among Latinas — long seen by Democratic leaders as a bulwark against their macho Trumpster relatives — by a 13-point margin, a swing even greater than that of Latino men.

These stats prove what I’ve been warning about for years: that Latinos were souring on illegal immigration — even in blue California — and tiring of a Democratic Party too focused on policies that weren’t improving their lives. This gave Trump a chance to win over Latino voters, despite his years-long bloviations against Mexico and Central American nations, because Latinos — who assimilate like any other immigrants, if not more so — were done with the Democratic status quo. They were willing to take a risk on an erratic strongman resembling those from their ancestral lands.

Pew’s findings confirm one of Trump’s most remarkable accomplishments — one so unlikely that professional Latinos long dismissed his election gains as exaggerations. Those voters could have been the winds blowing the xenophobic sails of his deportation fleet right now.

All Trump had to do was stick to his campaign promises and target the millions of immigrants who came in illegally during the Biden years. Pick off newcomers in areas of the country where Latinos remain a sizable minority and don’t have a tradition of organizing. Dare Democrats and immigrant rights activists to defend the child molesters, drug dealers and murderers Trump vowed to prioritize in his roundups. Conduct raids like a slow boil through 2026, to build on the record-breaking number of Latino GOP legislators in California and beyond.

Trump has done none of that. He instead decided to smash his immigration hammer on Los Angeles, the Latino capital of the U.S.

Instead of going after the worst of the worst, la migra has nabbed citizens and noncitizens alike. 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.

Instead of harassing newcomers with few ties to the U.S., agents are sweeping up migrants who have been here for decades. Instead of doing operations that drew little attention, as happened under Presidents Obama and Biden — and even during Trump’s first term — masked men have thrown around their power like secret police in a third-rate dictatorship while their bosses crow about it on social media. Instead of treating people with some dignity and allowing them a chance to contest their deportations, the Trump administration has stuffed them into detention facilities like tinned fish and treated the Constitution like a suggestion instead of the law of the land.

The cruelty has always been the point for Trump. But he risks making the same mistake that California Republicans made in the 1980s and 1990s: taking a political win they earned with Latinos and turning it into trash.

Fullerton College student David Rojas calls on Fullerton High students across street to join a protest against Proposition 187 on Nov. 3, 1994. The ballot initiative sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants but instead changed California politics.

(Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of the last amnesty for immigrants in the country illegally. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan, who famously said that Latinos were Republicans who didn’t know it yet. The Great Communicator knew that the best way to bring them into the GOP was to push meat-and-potato issues while not demonizing them.

The 1986 amnesty could have been a moment for Republicans to win over Latinos during the so-called Decade of the Hispanic. Instead, California politicians began to push for xenophobic bans, including on store signs in other languages and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, arguing that these supposed invaders were destroying the Golden State. This movement culminated in the passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants and was eventually declared unconstitutional.

We all know how that worked out.

My generation of Mexican Americans — well on our way to assimilation, feeling little in common with the undocumented immigrants from southern Mexico and Central America who arrived after our parents — instead became radicalized. We waved the Mexican flag with pride, finding no need to brandish the Stars and Stripes that we kept in our hearts. We helped Democrats establish a supermajority in California and tossed Republicans into the political equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits.

When I covered anti-ICE protests in June outside a federal building in Santa Ana, it felt like the Proposition 187 years all over again. The Mexican tricolor flew again, this time joined by the flags of El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. The majority of protesters were teens and young adults with no ties to the immigrant rights groups I know — they will be the next generation of activists.

I also met folks such as Giovanni Lopez. For a good hour, the 38-year-old Santa Ana resident, wearing a white poncho depicting the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, blew a loud plastic horn as if he were Joshua trying to knock down the walls of Jericho. It was his first protest.

“I’m all for them deporting the criminals,” Lopez said during a short break. “But that’s not what they’re doing…. They’re getting regular people, and that’s not right. You gotta stand up for regular raza.”

Since then, I’ve seen my social media feeds transform into a barrio CNN, as people share videos of la migra grabbing people and onlookers unafraid to tell them off. Other reels feature customers buying out street vendors for the day so they can remain safely at home. The transformation has even hit home: My dad and brother went to a “No Kings” rally in Anaheim a few weeks ago — without telling each other, or me, beforehand.

When rancho libertarians like them are angry enough to publicly fight back, you know the president is blowing it with Latinos.

People gather on Sunset Boulevard and Vin Scully Avenue to protest against immigration raids in Los Angeles as well as the Dodgers on June 21, 2025.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Back to Pew. Another report released last month found that nearly half of Latinos are worried that someone they know might get deported. The fear is real, even among Latino Republicans, with just 31% approving of Trump’s plan to deport all undocumented immigrants, compared with 61% of white Republicans.

California Assemblymember Suzette Martinez Valladares and state Sen. Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh are among those GOP skeptics. They signed a letter to Trump from California Republican legislators asking that his migra squads focus on actual bad hombres and “when possible, avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.”

When proud conservatives like Ochoa Bogh and Valladares, who is co-chair of the California Hispanic Legislative Caucus, are disturbed by Trump’s deportation deluge, you know the president’s blowing it with Latinos.

Yet Trump is still at it. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was suing the L.A. City Council and Mayor Karen Bass, arguing that their “sanctuary” city policy was thwarting “the will of the American people regarding deportations.”

By picking on the City of Angels, Trump is letting us set an example for everyone else — because no one gets down for immigrant rights like L.A., or creates Latino political power like we do. When mass raids pop up elsewhere, communities will be ready.

Many Latinos voted for Trump because they felt that Democrats forgot them. Now that Trump is paying attention to us, more and more of us are realizing that his intentions were never good — and carrying our passports because you just never know.

You blew it, Donald — but what else is new?

As federal immigration raids continue to upend life in Los Angeles, Asian American leaders are rallying their communities to raise their voices in support of Latinos, who have been the primary targets of the enforcement sweeps, warning that neighborhoods frequented by Asian immigrants could be next.

Organizers say many Asian immigrants have already been affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants working in the country without documentation. Dozens of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders had been on indefinite hold have been detained after showing up for routine check-ins at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigration attorneys and advocacy groups.

In recent months, a number of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants whose deportation orders had been stayed — in some cases for decades — have been told that those orders will now be enforced.

The Asian immigrants being targeted are generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the U.S., making them subject to deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through because the immigrants had lived in the U.S. long enough that their home countries no longer recognized them as citizens.

“Our community is much more silent, but we are being detained in really high numbers,” said Connie Chung Joe, chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. “There’s such a stigma and fear that, unlike the Latinx community that wants to fight and speak out about the injustices, our community’s first reaction is to go down and get more and more hidden.”

On Thursday, more than a half-dozen leaders representing Thai, Japanese and South Asian communities held a news conference in Little Tokyo urging community members to stand together and denounce the federal action as an overreach.

President Trump came into office in January vowing to target violent criminals for deportation. But amid pressure to raise deportation numbers, administration officials in recent months have shifted their focus to farmworkers, landscapers, street vendors and other day laborers, many of whom have been working in the country for decades.

While an estimated 79% of undocumented residents in L.A. County are natives of Mexico and Central America, Asian immigrants make up the second-largest group, constituting 16% of people in the county without legal authorization, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Across the U.S., Indians make up the third-largest group of undocumented residents, behind Mexicans and Salvadorans.

According to the Pew Research Center, the L.A. metropolitan area is home to the largest populations of Cambodian, Korean, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese people in the U.S.

So far, the highest-profile raids in Southern California have centered on Latino neighborhoods, targeting car washes, restaurants, home improvement stores, churches and other locales where undocumented residents gather and work.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado and Peter Gee of the Little Tokyo Service Center were among the speakers who denounced ICE raids during a news conference Thursday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

But Asian businesses have not been immune. A raid outside a Home Depot in Hollywood happened near Thai Town, where organizers have seen ICE agents patrolling the streets. In late May, Department of Homeland Security agents raided a Los Angeles-area nightclub, arresting 36 people they said were Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants in the country without authorization.

In Little Bangladesh, immigration agents recently detained 16 people outside a grocery store, said Manjusha P. Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 community-based organizations.

“They will come for us even more in the coming days and weeks,” Kulkarni said. “So we are only protected when we’re in solidarity with our fellow Angelenos.”

From June 1 to 10, at the start of the federal sweeps, ICE data show that 722 people were arrested in the Los Angeles region. The figures were obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of enforcement data at UC Berkeley Law.

A Times analysis found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal convictions. Nearly 48% were Mexican, 16% were from Guatemala and 8% from El Salvador.

Forty-seven of the 722 individuals detained — or about 6% — were from Asian countries.

“We know the fear is widespread and it is deep,” said Assemblymember Mike Fong, a Democrat whose district takes in Monterey Park and west San Gabriel Valley, areas with large Asian immigrant populations.

Los Angeles City Councilmembers Nithya Raman and Ysabel Jurado spoke of the repercussions the raids were having on immigrant communities. Raman is Indian American, and Jurado is Filipino American.

Jurado said undocumented Filipinos make up a sizable portion of the region’s caregivers, tending to elderly people and young children.

“Their work reflects the deepest values of our communities: compassion, service and interdependence,” Jurado said. “Their labor is essential, and their humanity must be honored.”

Jurado and Raman called on the federal government to end the raids.

“This is such an important moment to speak out and to ensure that the Latino community does not feel alone,” Raman said. “I also want to make it clear to every single person who is Asian American, these aren’t just raids on others. They’re raids on us.”

Staff writer Rachel Uranga contributed to this report.

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

The U.S. population includes an estimated 65.2 million Latinos, nearly a quarter of whom call California home. For over a century, Latinos were absent from the state’s two U.S. Senate seats. In 2022, Sen. Alex Padilla reversed the willful neglect of Latino senatorial candidates by both major political parties, winning 61.1% of the vote, more than any other statewide candidate, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.

On Thursday, in the midst of the Trump administration’s largest immigration raids to date, Padilla was forcibly removed at a Department of Homeland Security press conference in his hometown, Los Angeles. Manhandled, for daring to exercise his congressional responsibilities. Pushed out of a job-related meeting for asking a question. For many Latinos, the abhorrent treatment of Padilla by the Trump administration is emblematic of a shared grievance: being pushed out of conversations about our lives, our families and our futures.

The Trump administration’s immigration raids are squarely a Latino issue. Not because immigration is a Latino issue — all issues are Latino issues — but because Trump’s immigration enforcement is and has always been racially motivated. From Trump’s campaign announcement in 2015, calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, to his fixation with building a wall across our southern border and having Mexico pay for it, to his 2024 campaign focused on falsehoods about immigrants and criminality, the central narrative has been “us” versus “them.”

Immigration is a concern in every city and state, yet Trump’s immigration enforcement seems to be exclusively focused on Latino communities. In Los Angeles, Trump’s raids are explicitly targeting Latino-majority neighborhoods and cities including Westlake, Paramount and Compton, going beyond data-informed enforcement actions to the racial profiling of Latinos near schools, tending to errands like getting a car washed or sitting in a church parking lot.

Over the last week, Los Angeles has been ground zero for Trump’s federal overreach. Padilla’s silencing and removal follow refusals to admit four U.S. House representatives at the Los Angeles federal detention center on Saturday and three representatives to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Adelanto on Sunday.

While immigration raids raise serious policy and human rights concerns, the unequal treatment of Latino congressional leaders by the Trump administration represents a different kind of hazard: a test for control of our democratic republic.

America has three co-equal branches: legislative, executive, judiciary. This system of separation of powers and checks and balances is designed to prevent tyranny and ensure a balanced government. For the last five months, the Trump administration has upended our system of governance.

The Trump administration bypassed Congress’ budgetary actions by eliminating foreign aid. Trump officials willfully ignored judicial orders. They’ve blocked sitting members of the House and Senate from entering federal buildings, obstructed them from conducting oversight and undermined their inquiries.

Like Trump’s immigration enforcement actions, the administration’s overreach is racially motivated. Latinos have long expressed that no one is listening to their needs — that they are left out of the conversation and never at the table where decisions are being made. Research has made clear that Latinos bear the brunt of underrepresentation across important societal institutions such as academia, private enterprise, philanthropy and news media. The list goes on.

Unfortunately, when Latinos achieve positions that ought to wield power — such as Padilla’s ascent to the Senate — the positions themselves tend to be diminished, so that — again, like Padilla being silenced at a press conference — the Latinos who gain prominence are denied the power that non-Latinos enjoy in parallel positions. This week’s events provide a new chapter in the diminishment of Latino agency and dignity; members of Congress were denied entry to do their jobs, and in the case of Padilla, forcibly removed and detained.

One thing is consistent: the repeated dehumanization of Latinos and their needs. Latinos are not a monolith, but the Trump administration is surely treating us as such. His administration has rolled out a carte blanche attack on Latinos. From Latino community members being stalked and apprehended in Home Depot parking lots, at places of worship or their children’s school graduations, to targeted attacks on the sustainability and operations of Latino-led nonprofit organizations, to the physical assault of a U.S. senator. The subjugation of Latinos is currently on full display in Los Angeles, a region that fuels the world’s fourth-largest economy (California) and is the global epicenter of media and entertainment. The absence of meaningful Latino participation in shaping narratives, trends and the public imagination is cause for concern.

Any conversation on the fragility of American democracy, the resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism and the future of the Constitution is, inherently, a discourse about Latinos — and about all Americans. So long as Latinos remain silenced, ostracized and relegated to the periphery in conversations about the future of this nation, that future remains bleak. The test of how America responds in real time to the wholesale attack on its second-largest demographic group is now a shared assignment. And the group’s leader is Padilla.

Sonja Diaz is a civil rights attorney and co-founder of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab and UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute.

Often overshadowed by its neighbors with glitzier landmarks — namely Burbank and Pasadena — Glendale gets an unfair rap as being suburban and drab. Many Angelenos (especially those on the Westside) know it primarily for its massive malls: the Glendale Galleria and oft-meme’d Americana at Brand.

Get to know Los Angeles through the places that bring it to life. From restaurants to shops to outdoor spaces, here’s what to discover now.

While its retail landscape is certainly impressive, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of this 30-square-mile city that traverses two mountain ranges and boasts dozens of historic buildings and more than 50 parks. Visit one small corner of this century-old city and your main takeaway might be the preponderance of Armenian bakeries, kebab joints and hookah bars. For a more bohemian, historic take on Glendale, visit Adams Square, where storybook Tudor houses proliferate and a queer community flourishes. At Adams Square Mini-Park, once a gas station, find a public art gallery inside an old service building and nearby crosswalks that have been painted vibrant colors as a way to increase pedestrian visibility and celebrate the local community.

Vintage period revival mansions on enviously large plots of land can be found in Glendale’s higher elevation communities, like Chevy Chase Canyon or El Miradero, situated below the 31-acre Brand Park. Plenty of historic Queen Anne-Eastlake Victorian homes dating to the 1870s to 1890s are also still standing. Some of these older buildings — like a turn-of-the-century Moorish mansion and an old winery barn — now serve as museums, public libraries and nature centers.

While there is plenty of new development — think high-rise condominiums, strip malls, big-box stores and expanded transportation routes — Glendale actively balances preserving its historic sites while promoting change. Take, for instance, Brand Boulevard, the heart of downtown Glendale. It’s a dynamic mix of new retailers, multicultural restaurants and landmark businesses like the 100-year-old Alex Theatre and a corset shop that has been in the same location since 1922.

And the transformation of the city goes even further.

While Glendale once bore the unfortunate reputation of being a mid-20th-century “sundown town,” it has since evolved into a vibrant melting pot. Today, it is home to large communities of Armenians, Latinos, Koreans, Filipinos and Persians. In a significant step toward reconciliation, Glendale became the first city in California — and the third in the nation — to formally apologize for its racist past.

Whichever analogy you choose — a Rubik’s cube, an onion — Glendale is one of the more fickle SoCal destinations that takes time to get to know. There are pockets of funk, beauty and culture — a neon museum, a retro roller rink, a progressive art museum at the top of a cemetery. Glendale also produced numerous Hollywood greats, like John Wayne, Eva Mendes and Paul Walker, and serves as the final resting spot of even larger luminaries, such as Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

Here’s where to go to get the best representation of this oft-misunderstood place that is actually, to name-drop its century-old moniker, a “jewel” of a city.

Guess who suddenly has a “TACO” allergy? President Yuge Taco Salad himself.

In the annals of four-letter words and acronyms Donald Trump has long hitched his political fortunes on, the word “taco” may be easy to overlook.

There’s MAGA, most famously. DOGE, courtesy of Elon Musk. Huge (pronounced yuge, of course). Wall, as in the one he continues to build on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Love” for himself, “hate” against all who stand in his way.

There’s a four-letter term, however, that best sums up Trump’s shambolic presidency, one no one would’ve ever associated with him when he announced his first successful presidential campaign a decade ago.

Taco.

His first use of the most quintessential of Mexican meals happened on Cinco de Mayo 2016, when Trump posted a portrait of himself grinning in front of a giant taco salad while proclaiming “I Love Hispanics!” Latino leaders immediately ridiculed his Hispandering, with UnidosUS president Janet Murguia telling the New York Times that it was “clueless, offensive and self-promoting” while also complaining, “I don’t know that any self-respecting Latino would even acknowledge that a taco bowl is part of our culture.”

I might’ve been the only Trump critic in the country to defend his decision to promote taco salads. After all, it’s a dish invented by a Mexican American family at the old Casa de Fritos stand in Disneyland. But also because the meal can be a beautiful, crunchy thing in the right hands. Besides, I realized what Trump was doing: getting his name in the news, trolling opponents, and having a hell of a good time doing it while welcoming Latinos into his basket of deplorables as he strove for the presidency. Hey, you couldn’t blame the guy for trying.

Guess what happened?

Despite consistently trashing Latinos, Trump increased his share of that electorate in each of his presidential runs and leaned on them last year to capture swing states like Arizona and Nevada. Latino Republican politicians made historic gains across the country in his wake — especially in California, where the number of Latino GOP legislators jumped from four in 2022 to a record nine.

The Trump taco salad tweet allowed his campaign to present their billionaire boss to Latinos as just any other Jose Schmo ready to chow down on Mexican food. It used the ridicule thrown at him as proof to other supporters that elites hated people like them. Trump must have at least felt confident the taco salad gambit from yesteryear worked because he reposted the image on social media this Cinco de Mayo, adding the line “This was so wonderful, 9 years ago today!”

It’s not exactly live by the taco, die by the taco. (Come on, why would such a tasty force of good want to hurt anyone)? But Trump is suddenly perturbed by the mere mention of TACO.

Doritos Locos Tacos at the Taco Bell Laguna Beach location.

(Don Leach/Daily Pilot)

That’s an acronym mentioned in a Financial Times newsletter earlier this month that means Trump Always Chickens Out. The insult is in reference to the growing belief in Wall Street that people who invest in stocks should keep in mind that the president talks tough on tariffs but never follows through because he folds under pressure like the Clippers. Or a taco, come to think of it.

Trump raged when CNBC reporter Megan Cassella asked him about TACO at a White House press conference this week.

“Don’t ever say what you said,” the commander in chief snarled before boasting about how he wasn’t a chicken and was actually a tough guy. “That’s a nasty question.”

No other reporter followed up with TACO questions, because the rest of the internet did. Images of Trump in everything from taco suits to taco crowns to carnivorous tacos swallowing Trump whole have bloomed ever since. News outlets are spreading Trump’s out-of-proportion response to something he could’ve just laughed off, while “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” just aired a parody song to the tune of “Macho Man” titled — what else? — “Taco Man.”

The TACO coinage is perfect: snappy, easily understandable, truthful and seems Trump-proof. The master of appropriating insults just can’t do anything to make TACO his — Trump Always Cares Outstandingly just doesn’t have the same ring. It’s also a reminder that Trump’s anti-Latino agenda so far in his administration makes a predictable mockery of his taco salad boast and related Hispandering.

In just over four months, Trump and his lackeys have tried to deport as many Latino immigrants — legal and illegal — as possible and has threatened Mexico — one of this country’s vital trading partners — with a 25% tariff. He has signed executive orders declaring English the official language of the United States and seeking to bring back penalties against truck drivers who supposedly don’t speak English well enough at a time when immigrants make up about 18% of the troquero force and Latinos are a big chunk of it.

Meanwhile, the economy — the main reason why so many Latinos went for Trump in 2024 in the first place — hasn’t improved since the Biden administration and always seems one Trump speech away from getting even wobblier.

As for Latinos, there are some signs Trump’s early presidency has done him no great favors with them. An April survey by the Pew Research Center — considered the proverbial gold standard when it comes to objectively gauging how Latinos feel about issues — found 27% of them approve of how he’s doing as president, down from 36% back in February.

President Trump gives a thumbs up to the cheering crowd after a Latinos for Trump Coalition roundtable in Phoenix in 2020.

(Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)

Trump was always an imperfect champion of the taco’s winning potential, and not because the fish tacos at his Trump Grill come with French fries (labeled “Idaho” on the menu) and the taco salad currently costs a ghastly $25. He never really understood that a successful taco must appeal to everyone, never shatter or rip apart under pressure and can never take itself seriously like a burrito or a snooty mole.

The president needs to move on from his taco dalliance and pay attention to another four-letter word, one more and more Americans utter after every pendejo move Trump and his flunkies commit:

Help.