How long can Trump bend reality to his will? [ICE arrests and Los Angeles protests]

Jean Guerrero, This Is How the Protests Could Break Trump’s Deportation Machine, NYTimes, June 13, 2025.

A recent CBS News survey found that most Americans believe the president’s crackdown is prioritizing “dangerous criminals.” But videos out of Los Angeles and across the country paint a different picture. They show ICE arresting mothers, fathers, co-workers and friends of U.S. citizens. Not hardened criminals, but valued community members. The videos show ICE snatching workers outside of a Home Depot, at a local carwash, on the street. They show parents on lockdown at a school graduation because ICE was nearby. These videos, which are going viral, have the power to destabilize Mr. Trump’s narrative that his immigration operations are about law and order.

As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the highly visible raids in Los Angeles resulted from a directive from Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who urged agents to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” including at 7-Elevens and Home Depots. It was never going to be possible for Mr. Trump to keep his campaign promise of mass deportations without rounding up innocent people, because the world he and Mr. Miller created in which millions of undocumented gang members are running wild doesn’t exist. Mr. Miller’s insatiability means that arrests that once happened mostly in the shadows are now happening in broad daylight, and that people are capturing evidence.

Each act of documentation chips away at the alternate reality that Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have constructed — one in which ICE is making communities safer. In fact, the administration is diverting resources from serious child trafficking and homeland security investigations to meet quotas that will satisfy Mr. Miller’s appetite for detained human beings.

Citizen journalism:

Many of the videos that are circulating online have been filmed by Latinos, whose communities are disproportionately impacted by the raids and who are severely underrepresented in the traditional news media, where they have long been unable to correct inaccurate and dehumanizing stereotypes about immigrants. These community videos, a form of citizen journalism, may represent a tipping point.

In the face of boldfaced authoritarianism, filming ICE arrests may seem futile and even absurd. After all, in a world of echo chambers, it’s easy to turn away from evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Can these videos actually change people’s minds?

I believe they are the only thing that can. When I was a public media reporter documenting the human cost of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies, I had a Trump-supporting aunt who sometimes commented on the links to my videos on Facebook, expressing empathy for the immigrants I interviewed. She told me she had no idea Trump was going to be targeting mothers and that it was upsetting. Later, when I became an opinion columnist, she began to write off my work as propaganda. It left me convinced that the most powerful storytelling is not commentary, but human stories. Instead of condemning and criticizing Mr. Trump, Democratic politicians should use every opportunity to lift the stories of the families he has harmed.

There's more at the link.