A police officer fires a soft round in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, the third day of demonstrations against U.S. President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.Eric Thayer/The Associated Press
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids exploded in Los Angeles County on Friday after agents began targeting workplaces to find and detain those suspected of being undocumented migrants. Calling the protests “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States,” President Donald Trump deployed 2,000 members of the National Guard to Los Angeles to protect ICE agents and federal property.
The move is, in the words of California Governor Gavin Newsom, “purposefully inflammatory.” It is also a dream scenario for Mr. Trump: a perfect storm of, as the New York Times puts it, “a showdown with a top political rival in a deep blue state over an issue core to [Mr. Trump’s] political agenda.”
Mr. Trump will take advantage of this moment. He will not respond by driving immigration enforcement into the shadows or by targeting migrants with criminal records. Rather, he will continue to sensationalize his approach to immigration wherever and whenever possible. Time and time again, the cruelty is the point.
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In an effort to sow chaos and unpredictability in people’s lives, livelihoods, communities and families, the Trump administration has chosen the most outrageous path for enforcement actions, many of which are clear violations of due process, human rights law and constitutional protections. These are not isolated missteps. They are calculated strategies to draw attention, to demonstrate that Mr. Trump’s strongman tactics extend to this violent and punitive arm of the state.
This past weekend’s developments in the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador are a case in point. After months of denying responsibility for securing the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia to the United States, the Trump administration filed an indictment in Nashville’s Federal District Court accusing him of conspiracy and human smuggling. Were the curious timing of the indictment not enough, the Chief of the Department of Justice’s criminal division resigned over the case, making these allegations seem even more suspicious.
Another example is the courtroom arrests in New York, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle, where in some cases the judge had just dropped active cases against the migrant. Or when ICE detentions are but a thinly veiled excuse to punish students, researchers and professors for their political views. With each case, the Trump administration undermines the due process rights that are supposed to shield every person, regardless of their legal status in the United States, from arbitrary and retaliatory government action.
The other purpose of these actions is, of course, to send a message to migrant communities in the United States and to deter would-be migrants worldwide. When ICE agents begin ransacking schools, workplaces, churches, immigration hearings and hospitals, the primary objective is to instill fear. While all migrants without citizenship always live in various states of precarity, they used to be able to rely on the knowledge that they would, at the very least, have access to due process. Now, even legal permanent residents are afraid of being arrested, detained and deported, without cause or recourse.
Los Angeles became a flashpoint over the weekend as protesters set cars alight and police shot tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowd. The size and spread of the protests did not necessitate that the National Guard be deployed. Los Angeles has, of course, seen bigger and bolder protests.
Instead, it is clearly an escalation tactic, with a message embedded within: Mr. Trump believes you are a political opponent. He will use the full power of the state to punish you, and neither your constitutional rights of due process or freedom of assembly, nor the judiciary’s constitutional role as a check on executive power, will protect you. Be afraid.
It is a dangerous, volatile, lose-lose situation for protesters, and it is one of the President’s own making. Without a doubt, Mr. Trump wants to see protesters clash with law enforcement so that he can claim that Los Angeles is lawless, chaotic and un-American, and justify an even bigger crackdown in arrests. (White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have called for 3,000 arrests per day.)
The escalation is also a Trumpian sleight of hand that draws attention away from his difficulties in achieving his agenda through the appropriate levers of power. The stalled “Big Beautiful Bill,” which includes US$75-billion in supplemental funding for ICE to expand its enforcement operations, demonstrates that governing through the democratic channels – even with the Republican majority in Congress – is much harder than issuing executive order after executive order.
But this is precisely why protests must continue. The danger is real, but so is the power of collective defiance. As Mr. Trump seeks to instill fear and bypass democratic processes, there remains power in the people.