Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.
That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.
Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.
Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.
Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”
Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.
Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.
Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.
The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.
Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:
La migra.
It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.
Who knew?
Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.
Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.
A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.
Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”
Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.
Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.
The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.
This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?
Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.
And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.
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.
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.”
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?
Commentary: Sanctuary policies and activists aren’t endangering lives during ICE raids — ICE is
Like with cigarettes, la migra should come with a warning label: Proximity to ICE could be hazardous for your health.
From Los Angeles to Chicago, Portlandand New York, the evidence is ample enough that wherever Trump sends in the immigration agency, people get hurt. And not just protesters and immigrants.
That includes 13 police officers tear-gassed in Chicago earlier this month. And, now, a U.S. marshal.
Which brings us to what happened in South L.A. on Tuesday.
Federal agents boxed in the Toyota Camry of local TikToker Carlitos Ricardo Parias — better known to his hundreds of thousands of followers as Richard LA. As Parias allegedly tried to rev his way out of the trap, an ICE agent opened fire. One bullet hit the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant — and another ricocheted into the hand of a deputy U.S. marshal.
Neither suffered life-threatening injuries, but it’s easy to imagine that things could have easily turned out worse. Such is the chaos that Trump has caused by unleashing shock troops into U.S. cities.
Rather than take responsibility and apologize for an incident that could’ve easily been lethal, Team Trump went into their default spin mode of blaming everyone but themselves.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the shooting was “the consequences of conduct and rhetoric by sanctuary politicians and activists who urge illegal aliens to resist arrest.”
Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli chimed in on social media soon after: “I urge California public officials to moderate their rhetoric toward federal law enforcement. Encouraging resistance to federal agents can lead to deadly consequences.” Hours later, he called Times reporter James Queally “an absolute joke, not a journalist” because my colleague noted it’s standard practice by most American law enforcement agencies to not shoot at moving vehicles. One reason is that it increases the chance of so-called friendly fire.
Federal authorities accuse Parias of ramming his car into agents’ vehicles after they boxed him in. He is being charged with assault on a federal officer.
Time, and hopefully, evidence, will show what happened — and very important, what led to what happened.
The Trump administration keeps claiming that the public anger against its immigration actions is making the job more dangerous for la migra and their sister agencies. McLaughlin and her boss, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, keep saying there’s been a 1,000% increase in assaults on immigration agents this year like an incantation. Instead of offering concrete figures, they use the supposed stat as a shield against allegations ICE tactics are going too far and as a weapon to excuse the very brutality ICE claims it doesn’t practice.
Well, even if what they say is true, there’s only one side that’s making the job more dangerous for la migra and others during raids:
La migra.
It turns out that if you send in phalanxes of largely masked federal agents to bully and intimidate people in American cities, Americans tend not to take kindly to it.
Who knew?
Gregory Bovino, center, of U.S. Border Patrol, marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Aug. 14.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
We’re about to enter the sixth month of Trump’s plan to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. Sycophants are bragging that he’s doing the job, but they’re not caring to look at the mess left in its wake that’s becoming more and more perilous for everyone involved. They insist that those who are executing and planning raids are professionals, but professionals don’t make constant pendejos out of themselves.
Professionals don’t bring squadrons to chase after tamale ladies or day laborers, or stage flashy raids of apartments and parks that accomplish little else than footage for propaganda videos. They don’t go into neighborhoods with intimidation on their mind and ready to rough up anyone who gets in their way.
A ProPublica investigation showed that ICE has detained at least 170 U.S. citizens this year, many whom offered proof that they were in this country legally as la migra cuffed them and hauled them off to detention centers.
Professionals don’t lie like there’s a bonus attached to it — but that’s what Trump’s deportation Leviathan keeps doing. In September, McLaughlin put out a news release arguing that the shooting death of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago by an ICE agent was justified because he was dragged a “significant distance” and suffered serious injuries. Yet body cam footage of local police who showed up to the scene captured the two ICE agents involved in the incident describing their injuries as “nothing major.”
Closer to home, a federal jury in Los Angeles last month acquitted an activist of striking a Border Patrol agent after federal public defender Cuauhtémoc Ortega screened footage that contradicted the government’s case and poked holes in the testimony of Border Patrol staff and supervisors. Last week, ICE agents detained Oxnard activist Leonardo Martinez after a collision between their Jeep and his truck. McLaughlin initially blamed the incident on an “agitator group … engaged in recording and verbal harassment,” but footage first published by L.A. Taco showed that la migra trailed Martinez and then crashed into him twice — not the other way around.
Professionals don’t host social media accounts that regularly spew memes that paint the picture of an American homeland where white makes right and everyone else must be eliminated, like the Department of Homeland Security does. A recent post featured medieval knights wearing chain mail and helmets and wielding longswords as they encircle the slogan “The Enemies are at the Gates” above ICE’s job listing website.
The Trump administration has normalized racism and has turned cruelty into a virtue — then its mouthpieces gasp in mock horror when people resist its officially sanctioned jackbootery.
This evil buffoonery comes straight from a president who reacted to the millions of Americans who protested this weekend at No Kings rallies by posting on social media an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown and dropping feces on his critics from a jet fighter. And yet McLaughlin, Noem and other Trump bobbleheads have the gall to question why politicians decry la migra while regular people follow and film them during raids when not shouting obscenities and taunts at them?
As I’ve written before, there’s never a nice way to conduct an immigration raid but there’s always a better way. Or at least a way that’s not dripping with malevolence.
Meanwhile, ICE is currently on a hiring spree thanks to Trump’s Bloated Beastly Bill and and has cut its training program from six months to 48 days, according to The Atlantic. It’s a desperate and potentially reckless recruitment drive.
And if you think rapidly piling more people into a clown car is going to produce less clown-like behavior by ICE on the streets of American cities, boy do I have news for you.
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Commentary: I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m always going to carry my passport now. Thanks, Supreme Court
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.
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