What started in Los Angeles is no longer just about Los Angeles. Unchecked federal power now threatens every American.
Karen Bass
| Opinion contributor
Anti-ICE raid demonstrators protest into fourth night
Anti-immigration raid protests are continuing into the fourth night as the Pentagon deployed active-duty U.S. Marines.
The commander in chief of the mightiest military in the world did something a United States president should rarely do: Unleash the machinery of the federal government against America’s cities, including its second most populous city, Los Angeles.
Against the will of our elected leaders and our people, Los Angeles became the first city President Donald Trump occupied with the military since returning to office. Federal agents poured into our neighborhoods ‒ masked men, shoulder to shoulder, in plain clothes, armed and unidentified.
They weren’t pursuing criminals. They were targeting Angelenos based on how they looked, where they worked or the language they spoke. Worse, some of those targeted, according to recent reporting, were U.S. citizens in this country legally.
Trump’s federal incursions into LA were the first step
While Los Angeles was the first test case, it has been far from the last. From our streets, the National Guard has already spread to Washington, DC, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and Memphis, Tennessee ‒ in each case with eerily similar tactics. Masked men flooding neighborhoods, patrolling without accountability, seizing citizens and noncitizens alike without due process.
Simply put, what started in Los Angeles is no longer just about Los Angeles. Unchecked federal power now threatens every American. If Washington can descend on a community of nearly 4 million, abuse and seize residents without charges, and dismantle local economies in days, no one is safe.
We all have to recognize the real consequences of these federal actions on our cities and the entire nation. More important, we must respond.
I have never witnessed as much fear as when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids began in our city. I heard directly from families torn apart overnight.
Mothers were too stricken by grief to get out of bed. Grandparents and parents who told me they are too terrified to send their children to school for fear they won’t come home. Angelenos of every background are wondering if they will be next.
The staggering human toll is accompanied by the economic devastation of small businesses and our local economy. On Father’s Day, I walked through Boyle Heights, where small businesses stood empty because families were too afraid to step outside. Owners told me the raids hit them as hard as COVID-19 once did.
Days later, I visited the Fashion District, normally one of the busiest, most entrepreneurial corridors in the city. I saw shuttered stores and abandoned streets. Construction sites, car washes, laundromats, corner stores ‒ the daily pulse of our city’s working-class economy ‒ fell silent across the city.
Now, with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court, using a secretive shadow docket to green-light racial profiling, the federal government turned Los Angeles into the testing ground for authoritarian rule.
American cities can and must respond to Trump’s aggression
But Los Angeles and other American cities are not powerless.
When the raids began, the city of Los Angeles acted immediately. State law has long prohibited city resources from being used in federal immigration enforcement, and we made sure all our city departments knew what to do when Angelenos came to them for help.
The city’s private sector delivered direct cash assistance to families, and immigrant rights organizations conducted countless know-your-rights resources. We took to the courts to demand accountability, transparency and compliance with long-standing law.
Most recently, I called on U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, who sits on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, to launch a formal investigation into ICE misconduct and to provide a forum for our community to be heard.
At the same time that Trump’s administration repeatedly smears Los Angeles as “lawless,” we are meeting their lawlessness with its antidote: the truth. At every opportunity possible, we are making the truth clear. Homicides in Los Angeles are on pace to reach a 60-year low, and street homelessness has declined for two consecutive years ‒ the first time in our history.
Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don’t have the app? Download it for free from your app store.
To be sure, there is still work to be done to ensure the safety of every resident, but the real, tangible progress in Los Angeles did not come from military takeovers. It came from local, sustained, community-driven solutions ‒ the kind of work that Washington dismisses but actually makes cities safer.
We keep our cities running, even when Washington tries to shut them down. And now, under the shadow of federal overreach, mayors and city leaders are the last line of defense for American democracy. We will not meet chaos with chaos. We will meet it with truth, discipline, unity and with the most powerful defense history has always given us: peaceful, lawful protest.
History will remember this moment
From Selma to Standing Rock, from the grape strikes in Delano, California, to the immigrant rights marches on LA’s Wilshire Boulevard, from the #MeToo movement to the recent thousands of “No Kings” rallies across America, history shows that people united cannot be silenced.
Peaceful protest is not disorder. It is democracy’s immune system. We have never needed it more.
What we are living through is one of the great civil rights and human rights struggles of our time. Decades from now, Americans will ask: Did we stay silent, or did we stand up? Did we retreat in fear, or did we defend our neighbors? Did we accept the erosion of democracy, or did we fight to protect it?
Because when we defend our neighbors, we defend democracy itself. When we protect democracy, we honor the generations who came before us and safeguard those still to come.
There is no other option.
Karen Bass is the 43rd mayor of Los Angeles. She is also a former congresswoman and former speaker of the California State Assembly.