Why isn’t this a bigger deal? Have you heard about what happened in Los Angeles? Your city could be next. Mine, too.
This isn’t a crew on location shooting a scene of a disaster film, this is real life. We are living in a nightmare.
Federal officials said it was an immigration enforcement operation, though it was unclear if anyone had been arrested. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said as she condemned the action.
It had been a quiet morning in MacArthur Park, a hub in one of Los Angeles’s most immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Children at a summer camp were playing outside, but the park was otherwise largely empty.
Then, dozens of armed federal agents began marching over soccer fields and grass berms, based on footage of the incident. Military-style vehicles blocked the street and a federal helicopter flew overhead.
They wore fatigues, masks and helmets and marched in lines. Some were on horseback. Camera crews followed alongside them.
Los Angeles leaders have grown weary after thousands of National Guard troops and Marines arrived nearly a month ago and immigration raids have become a regular, visible occurrence. But they took particular umbrage at Monday’s extraordinary show of force in MacArthur Park and issued a swift and furious rebuke.
“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” Mayor Bass said in a news conference on Monday afternoon, adding that she had traveled regularly into conflict zones as a member of Congress.
Dozens of federal agents were observed in the park, many arriving in armored military vehicles. They were joined by 80 California National Guard troops under the command of President Trump, according to the office of Governor Gavin Newsom, who criticized the effort and has tried to stop the federalization of Guard members through a lawsuit.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to specific questions about the purpose of the operation at MacArthur Park or whether anyone had been detained.
“The operation is ongoing,” she wrote in an email. “So that should be a message in of itself.”
Asked to clarify that message, she responded that it was an immigration enforcement operation and that such efforts “are not in one single location.”
To many local leaders, the Monday march through MacArthur Park seemed designed to intimidate immigrants and residents, rather than to carry out targeted enforcement. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the president of the Los Angeles City Council, derided the display as a stunt made for TikTok.
“If you want to film in L.A., you should apply for a film permit like everybody else,” he said during an afternoon news conference. “Stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody who lives in this great city and disrupt our economy.”
Ms. Bass said that once she arrived, she had demanded to speak to the person in charge of the operation at the park. She was handed a phone, through which, she said, Mr. Bovino told her that he would be “getting them out of the park,” apparently referring to federal agents.The agents left the park a short time later, she said. From New York Times by Jill Cowan and Mimi Dwyer
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These questions need to be answered: when are good people going to rise up and put an end to this dystopian nightmare? When is enough, enough?
They ripped away health care. They denied food assistance to children. They exploded the nation’s debt, shuttered Social Security offices, rural hospitals, and decimated federal employees and the VA, along with kidnapping mothers and fathers and students. When is enough ENOUGH?
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