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Newsweek - Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California was forcibly removed from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's Los Angeles press conference on Thursday about recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.
"I'm Senator Alex Padilla, and I have questions for the secretary," Padilla could be heard saying as he was escorted out of the room.
Noem continued her remarks uninterrupted, addressing an audience of reporters and law enforcement officials.
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New Republic - More militant ICE raids are coming to a city near you. The Trump administration is readying tactical ICE units known as
“special response teams” to conduct large raids in five Democratic
cities, according to MSNBC. They will be in New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and northern Virginia. While it’s unclear when exactly the raids will start, all ICE agents in those areas have been told to stand by.
This is going to be a mess. Trump’s crackdown in Los Angeles—with thousands of National Guardsmen and hundreds of Marines patrolling the streets—is the model for his larger deportation campaign: Have ICE pour into a community and make indiscriminate arrests, then when civilians predictably resist, use that to justify sending even more militant forces in to quell the chaos that ICE induced. New York City is already on edge, as 80 protestors were arrested in Lower Manhattan Tuesday night at an anti-ICE protest.
“’Look, this isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles, 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,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes, this moment we have feared has arrived.’” He’s right. ICE is planning to expand its campaign of terror to blue cities across the country. If Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—which includes billions in funding for a mass deportation campaign—passes, it will get even worse.
Washington Post - President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to California, saying the troops need to “liberate” Los Angeles from a “migrant invasion.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a key architect of the president’s immigration crackdown, said on social media that the city is proof of how migration “unravels” a society.
But federal and state data tell a far different story about the Golden State than the political fury unfolding in Washington and on the streets of Los Angeles, where the administration has sent 700 Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops as protests continue over recent immigration raids.
In California, violent crime is down, and the unemployment rate is close to the national average. The state recently overtook Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy. It has the highest number of immigrants — both legal, most of them citizens, and undocumented. But in recent years, the state has lost hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to their homelands or to more-affordable states. Unauthorized immigrants in California remain well below the peak of nearly 3 million more than a decade ago for reasons that often have little to do with enforcement — or Trump.
“Even the surge that we’ve seen more recently in undocumented immigration, a lot of that has not come to California,” said Eric McGhee, policy director and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. “If I were to hazard a guess, it’s because California’s expensive.”
The Guardian - California national guards troops and marines deployed to Los Angeles to help restore order after days of protest against the Trump administration have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.
Three different advocacy organisations representing military families said they had heard from dozens of affected service members who expressed discomfort about being drawn into a domestic policing operation outside their normal field of operations. The groups said they have heard no countervailing opinions.
“The sentiment across the board right now is that deploying military force against our own communities isn’t the kind of national security we signed up for,” said Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents the interests of military spouses, children and veterans.
The Guardian - Long before it was part of the US, LA was Indigenous Tongva and Chumash land. It later came under Spanish and then Mexican rule. The name “California” itself comes from a Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), and appeared on maps as early as 1541. But it wasn’t until 2 August 1769, that Spaniard Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest accompanying the first European land expedition through California, described in his journal a “beautiful river from the northwest”. He named the river, which would later become the LA River, Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciúncula (Our Lady of the Angels of the Porciuncula). Twelve years later, in 1781, the settlement would emerge with the shortened and anglicized name of Los Angeles.
After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Los Angeles – indeed the whole region– remained Mexican territory until it was ceded to the US in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. California became the 31st state in 1850, entering the Union as a free state.
Today, one in three people of LA county’s more than 10 million residents are immigrants, and 1.6 million children in the region have at least one immigrant parent. They come from countries around the world. It’s common for Angelenos to have been born in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, China and Hong Kong – but also Russia, France, the UK and elsewhere.
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