Commentary: A year after Trump unleashed his deportation machine on LA, we cannot let his heroes succeed

A year ago this Saturday, I was enjoying a beautiful day in Pacific Palisades when President Trump launched his flood of deportations in Los Angeles, starting a reaction that would ripple through cities across the United States.

I was at the reopening of the Thomas Mann House, closed for months for cleaning after it miraculously survived the Palisades fire. As speaker after speaker hailed the author’s warnings about the slow burning of totalitarianism in his native Germany, text messages arrived on my phone with news of immigration raids near the city on a scale and number not seen in decades.

Undercover federal agents quickly spread throughout Southern California. Protests followed.

Most of the people arrested had no criminal record, but that didn’t stop the White House from portraying the sweep as a purge of hardened criminals. Some protesters were charged with crimes because of little evidence. Masked agents asked US citizens of Latino heritage to produce ID to prove they are in the country legally.

Rangers, veterans, students. Workplaces, residential streets, courts. MacArthur Park, Home Depot, Dodger Stadium parking lot. No one was safe from the poisonous bullet soup of government agencies tasked with deporting people without papers, at great cost. The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, even sent in the National Guard and the Marines to quell opposition to a royal display better suited to a “Star Wars” Sith king.

The attack has rendered large areas of LA as quiet as the days of the coronavirus shutdown; some areas have not gone up again and may not. That’s why commemorations will take place across the Southland this weekend to remember the people and peace we’ve lost in the past 12 months to Trump’s war on immigration. Although the official brutal caravan – led by the former commander of the Border Patrol in a large area Gregory Bovino – left LA after a few weeks to other American cities, including Chicago and Minneapolis, the deportations and arrests here have not stopped completely.

In fact, border governor Tom Homan recently vowed that there is more to come.

“You haven’t been seen s—yet,” he boasted last month when opening remarks at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. “This year will be a very good year.

An orange whistle hangs from my rearview mirror to make sure I don’t forget the horror of those first few weeks of the attack. Tear gas bottles and pepper balls were thrown by activists. Businesses are closed due to fear. My social media timeline has turned into an essay of crying men and women being chased by strangers. Telephone poles placed in fundraising appeals for families whose breadwinners were rotting away in a remote detention center or repatriated.

No one in my family or friends has been arrested, thank God – the people in my life who were undocumented legalized their status before Trump poisoned our country. And yet I’ve had nightmares about ICE taking people I love – and me. My passport hasn’t left my side since last summer. It probably won’t happen again.

I picked up an orange whistle last fall while visiting Chicago. At that time Bovino – who has become an apostle for deporting 100 million people, as if that is far from the many undocumented people living in the US – was in charge of working there. Residents of the Windy City have embraced the whistles as a cheap, easily accessible warning just in case these migrations it was entering. They too were to be called to action.

That’s why I can only think sad thoughts in one year of the raid.

I’m sure the Trump administration, emboldened by the historic victory of 2024 that saw even Latinos embrace his mass deportation plans, with public indifference or tacit approval when his Leviathan arrived in L.A. That was our track record, after all.

Many Angelenos applauded or remained silent when the US government rounded up Japanese Americans during World War II and when the Eisenhower administration deported hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the 1950s during the caustically named Operation Wetback. Only Latinos and progressive allies seemed to care when ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, launched its own crackdown throughout the 1980s, or when politicians passed or proposed anti-immigrant resolutions and proposals in the 1990s. Even the 2006 immigration marches, among the largest in the United States up to that time, attracted people from certain parts of the city.

This time, it seemed like every good Angeleno stood up. That couldn’t be literally true, of course – but at least, in the end, it felt like it.

From the Westside to Boyle Heights, Wilmington to Sylmar, people who had never been involved at the street level bought street vendors to avoid possible arrest and set up charities and neighborhood watches. People escorted immigrants to court or brought them into their homes or gave them identity cards at businesses, like my wife did at her restaurant. No one bought Trump’s lie that he wanted to go after the worst because we saw our favorite neighbors, favorite street vendors and even high school students get caught.

That’s why ICE’s reputation, not very good here, is now somewhere between hantavirus and rush hour at Sepulveda Pass.

More importantly, Angelenos created a template that was followed by others across the country. Chicago activists got the idea for whistleblowing after talking to Angelenos about how to communicate when cellphone service went down near the Metropolitan Detention Center that first weekend of the attack. Local organizers have also done something that was thought impossible: Mainly they put aside the egos that tend to bend to the left and rely on collective action instead of individual heroes to lead the way – because, like the end of “Spartacus,” it is very difficult to cut a movement when everyone is a leader.

Ramon Quintanilla stands next to dozens of police officers on Main Street as thousands march downtown to protest Trump’s 2025 immigration policies.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

This weekend, people will say “Never again.” I also urge people to, “Bring it on.” We can’t think that the worst is behind us and we can’t get carried away by what happened and will happen again. Just yesterday, the US Senate approved $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol for the remainder of Trump’s term. As Thomas Mann memorably put it, “Tolerance becomes a crime, if it is extended to evil.”

LA is ready more than ever to face it, again, against the dark thugocracy of Trump and his organization of goons.