Heather Cox Richardson, June 10, 2025, Letters from an American, June 11, 1015.
Today President Donald J. Trump made it clear that the provocations he and his administration are escalating in Los Angeles and now elsewhere are using the issue of immigration to suppress dissent entirely.
In the Oval Office today, Trump said of the military parade scheduled for this Saturday: “If there’s any protester wants to come out, they will be met with very big force…. For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.”
His statement comes after the administration instituted aggressive immigration sweeps in Los Angeles during which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) met the few hundred protesters with violence.
Then, over the protests of both Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom, Trump federalized 4,000 members of California’s National Guard and ordered 700 Marines to Los Angeles. He and his advisors have repeatedly threatened to arrest anyone who does not cooperate with ICE, including Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom.
Trump has said he based his decision to federalize the National Guard on his insistence that Los Angeles is staggering under violent riots, but in fact the protests are largely peaceful and local officials maintain they can handle the situation.
Still, Trump described Los Angeles as “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” and said “violent insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem called Los Angeles a “city of criminals,” and other MAGA lawmakers have gotten into the act. Will Sommer of The Bulwark pointed out today that MAGA influencers are also pushing for more crackdowns and more cruelty in a feedback loop as they and White House officials push each other toward more and more cruelty toward immigrants.
But the narrative that L.A. is under siege is hard to make stick. Protesters have been filming the bands playing and people dancing at the protests, which remain small. They have also filmed the ICE agents shooting less-lethal bullets at individuals, including an Australian journalist who was speaking to a camera when she was shot from behind. The complaint against SEIU leader David Huerta, who has been charged with conspiring to impede an officer, says that he walked and sat on a public sidewalk in such a way that he blocked an ICE van before an officer pushed him to the ground and arrested him.
Counterpoint:
Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles noted that Trump is “turning the world’s powerful military away from its focus on Russia and China toward a new enemy—the American people themselves.” He mused: “I’ve been saying that I felt Trump’s dramatic escalation in recent days was driven in part by Musk’s emasculation of him last week. I also wonder whether it’s being driven by Zelensky’s profound humiliation of Putin, and Putin lashing out at Trump for not delivering Ukraine to him.”
Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times reported today that right-wing bots, trolls, conspiracy theorists, and MAGA influencers are flooding social media with messages designed to attack immigrants and Democrats and defend Trump. Many of those accounts are linked to Russia and Russian disinformation.
It certainly feels as if administration officials are going for broke in ways that benefit Russia. [...]
A YouGov poll out today shows that only 34% of American adults approve of Trump’s deployment of Marines to the Los Angeles area to respond to protests over the enforcement of immigration laws while 47% do not approve. Only 38% of American adults approve of Trump’s deployment of National Guard soldiers to L.A., while 45% disapprove. A strong majority—56%—of Americans think state and local officials should take the lead in responding to the L.A. protests, while only 25% think the federal government should.
Strikingly, 50% of adults disapprove of the administration's handling of deportations, while only 39% approve.
Democracy under assault:
Tonight Governor Newsom delivered a prime-time address about the events of the past few days. He outlined the story of the ICE raids and Trump’s escalation of conflict. He urged protesters to exercise their First Amendment rights peacefully and warned that anyone participating in violence would be held accountable.
Then the governor launched into a wholesale condemnation of the Trump regime. He warned that “[i]f some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.”
Newsom called Trump out for firing the government watchdogs that could hold him accountable for fraud, and for declaring war “on culture, on history, on science, on knowledge itself. [...]
“[T]his isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles,” Newsom said. “When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation. This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.”
“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes,” Newsom said. “This moment we have feared has arrived. He’s taking a wrecking ball…to our founding fathers’ historic project: three coequal branches of independent government.”
No comments:
Post a Comment