The Canary in the Coal Mine

Across Los Angeles, concerned Angelenos like me have joined community defense hubs to deter ICE in their neighborhoods. We deliver groceries, attend training sessions, update one another on confirmed ICE sightings, and “stay trucha,” meaning we remain watchful. At any given Home Depot parking lot, you will find a group of individuals passing out red Know Your Rights cards to day laborers. Volunteers have tasked themselves with patrolling the entire perimeter and diverting raids from occurring via walkie-talkie. Canopy tents with homemade banners sharing messages of resistance stand next to those of food vendors preparing meals for workers and passersby. Not unlike the community response to LA’s fires in January, Angelenos have come out in droves to protect their neighbors.

The Trump administration kicked off its first of many planned ICE raids across Los Angeles County on June 6. Trump was strategic about these raids, starting first in Los Angeles’ Fashion District, where undocumented labor is the driving force of the garment industry. While Angelenos are not new to deportations or encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these recent raids mark a turning point in how ICE agents enforce policies to detain undocumented people with a judicial warrant. ICE has no legal jurisdiction over U.S. citizens, but there have been multiple reports of citizens being detained by ICE agents when protesting, documenting agents, or likely due to their racial background.

On June 6, SEIU-USWW union president David Huerta was responding to alerts of an ICE raid in the garment district when masked ICE agents slammed him to the ground and forcibly arrested him. The scene was not unlike the infamously violent clash between striking janitors and the police on June 15, 1990, where Huerta was present as a young organizer on the Justice for Janitors campaign. In both instances, law enforcement chose excessive violence against visibly Latino protesters exercising their First Amendment rights.

After his release David Huerta stated the following:

“I don’t know what they have in store for me. . . . I imagine that at this point in time I am their project . . . their example of what happens, but I am prepared to take on that journey and I’m prepared to face them.

National news coverage has tended to focus on the extreme tactics of ICE and of the National Guard being sent to Los Angeles like an occupying army, but what has received less attention is the role that local law enforcement has played in the past few months under federal occupation.

To better understand LA’s brawny police state, it should be noted that Los Angeles has two separate law enforcement agencies, each with their own jurisdiction over Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the agency responsible for policing Los Angeles City, while the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) has jurisdiction over the entire county, while smaller cities in the county may also have their own police departments. The differentiation between these two entities is important for understanding where these agencies get their money from and who they answer to.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) serves under Mayor Karen Bass, the Los Angeles City Council, and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Their budget is also managed by the Los Angeles City mayor and city council, and makes up nearly 47 percent of the city’s annual budget.

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD), on the other hand, has jurisdiction over the entirety of Los Angeles County and receives funding from the Los Angeles County’s budget, which is overseen by the County Board of Supervisors and the County CEO, Feshia Davenport.

Los Angeles is supposed to be a “sanctuary city,” meaning that local law enforcement is not supposed to assist federal agents in their detainment processes, unless federal agents have a judicial warrant for a suspect. This “sanctuary city” policy has no real teeth and relies on local law enforcement to honor this policy. Since community trust in law enforcement is strained at best, there is no real policy in place to prevent the detainment of those suspected of criminal activity by ICE. To no one’s surprise, both LAPD and LASD forces were present at the protests that followed the raids and assisted ICE by blockading and brutalizing protesters.

When thousands of Angelenos took to the streets immediately after the ICE raids began, Mayor Bass administered a seven-day curfew in an attempt to discourage protesters from being within a one-mile radius of downtown LA. This was the first curfew imposed since the 2020 George Floyd mobilizations. These actions have not dimmed, and daily protests are being held at the Los Angeles Federal Building and elsewhere across LA County. Local government officials are speculating a cost of over $32 million in wages and overtime for LAPD officers since the protests began.

For a fair amount of LA’s history, local law enforcement agencies have been a force of injustice, known for police brutality, corruption, and a history of deputy gangs.

While many readers will be familiar with the 1992 uprisings in response to the LAPD’s brutalization of Rodney King, the attack on King was far from being a one-off occurrence in LA’s history. Only two years before, in 1990, the LAPD had beaten janitors on strike for higher wages with the Justice for Janitors campaign. In 1967, two years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, the LGBT+ community in LA had its own violent encounter with the LAPD at the Black Cat in Silver Lake, a gay bar that was raided by police and resulted in patrons being violently abused. Throughout the twentieth century, periodic eruptions of major police violence—such as during the 1965 Watts riots and the 1951 Bloody Christmas scandal—provided punctuation in an ongoing story of a police force dedicated to enforcing the political hegemony of white wealthy home- and landowners over and against the rights of Black people, Mexican Americans, and people considered to be social outsiders.

Police-violence-as-the-norm continues to be the order of the day. In the last year alone, the LAPD paid out $50 million of taxpayer dollars solely on excessive force lawsuits and $100 million total in liability payments. The LASD, similarly, paid out over $80 million in a number of legal judgments and settlements. All while the department has continuously denied well-documented claims that the LASD has gangs, complete with matching tattoos and violent initiation rituals.

In the wake of Floyd’s murder by police and the wave of calls for police divestment that followed, there have been attempts in Los Angeles to change course. For example, in 2020, Los Angeles County voters passed Measure J, which allocates no less than 10 percent of the county’s yearly surplus dollars toward community care initiatives and alternatives to incarceration. The headwinds are strong, though. Despite this mandate being passed, the LASD budget has grown from $3.5 billion in 2020 to a budget of over $4 billion last year.

LA’s police forces incarcerate thousands of people at any given time, and now boast their biggest budgets in the city’s history. So why do our people still feel so unsafe?

Because Trump is so unpopular in California and has an ongoing Internet beef with Governor Newsom, state and local authorities have swiftly distanced themselves from the National Guard’s deployment in the city. However, their responses have amounted to nothing more than unfulfilled pledges.

Still, there is no question that imposing the National Guard upon the city—as opposed to the city inviting them in—represents a major escalation and dredges up memories of the Watts Riots and Kent State, where civilians were murdered by their own military. In recent weeks, ICE agents have detained and charged U.S. citizens in Los Angeles with obstruction of justice, and local law enforcement continues to seemingly collude with the federal government’s disappearance of people.

In a press conference given by city councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez on July 7 in response to ICE and National Guard presence in Macarthur Park, a historically Latino neighborhood with a large undocumented population, Hernandez warned the rest of the country about what is to come:

And now a call to all electeds and all people across the country. . . . Please understand that what is happening here in the city of Los Angeles: we are the canary in the coal mine. What you see happening in Macarthur Park is coming to you; $140 billion new budget for ICE—what do you think that’s going to do? That’s gonna transport what’s happening here in our neighborhoods to your front doorsteps, so wake up.

Less than a month later, on August 6, the Trump administration would stage another political posturing at a Home Depot not far from Macarthur Park, naming it Operation Trojan Horse. Agents in full tactical gear swarmed out the back of a Penske moving truck and detained day laborers that had been lured by a false promise of work.

The constant witch-hunt campaign from the Trump administration is almost impossible to keep up with. Once again, LA became victim to Trump’s persecution on August 14 when over a hundred ICE agents were deployed outside Little Tokyo’s Japanese American Museum, where Governor Newsom was inside hosting a conference announcing his formal plans to redraw congressional maps in California.

It is imperative to note that people are being disappeared by the Trump administration, not for the sake of mass detainment, but to instill fear in local communities and scare people into hiding. While the Trump administration claims to be protecting U.S. citizens from the threat of immigrants, his policies do not protect any citizens from cuts to Medicaid funding and natural disasters that rampage the likes of Kerr County, Texas, with no aid in sight. The normalization of the police state by Democrats, public servants, and anyone who still supports massive funding to the police has helped pave the way for a fascist dictatorship, and there’s no going back now. Use your voice while you still have one.

Now, President Trump has deployed the National Guard throughout the nation’s capital and put local law enforcement under the control of the federal government, a move the president says will curb crime. History really has been a bountiful teacher of the tricks and tactics of fascist government takeovers, so here are a handful of practical tips for protecting yourself and your loved ones:

• Learn your rights: with the help of the ACLU
• Don’t open the door: agents must show a warrant for the individual signed by a judge
• Document what you see: record any activity you see, cars, license plates, etc.
• Share what is local to you: highlight ICE sightings in as timely a manner as possible
• Share facts, not rumors: avoid spreading misinformation by only sharing confirmed ICE sightings (ICE moves fast and we don’t want to waste other people’s time)
• Use your privilege: physically show up for your neighbors (put your body on the line!), distract ICE, waste their time, do your best civil disobedience!

_{Image: Kaikara Dharma / Unsplash}

Contributors

Leah Perez Leah Perez is the La Defensa Campaigns Coordinator. She holds a BA in Contemporary Latino and Latin American Studies from the University of Southern California and graduated with a Master's degree in Curatorial Studies from the Roski School of Art and Design.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• community organizing
• criminalizing dissent
• ice detention
• immigrants rights
• los angeles
• police violence