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Protesters, some of them armed and carrying flags that many consider anti-American, stormed a government building, intent on disrupting a constitutionally required process. Some savagely beat law enforcement officers and threatened to kill government officials.
These protesters, who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, were deemed patriots by President Donald Trump, who pardoned more than 1,500 of the rioters who were convicted of or pled guilty to federal crimes. These protestors were mostly white and loyal to Trump.
Last Friday, hundreds of people protested outside a federal building in Los Angeles to call for an end to immigration raids after masked immigration officials arrested dozens of people at work places and stores in several areas of the city with a large Latino population. Fueled by law enforcement officers using tear gas, flash bangs and shooting an Australian reporter with rubber bullets while she was on air and arresting a union leader, the protests escalated. They have since spread to other cities.
Trump used the protests in LA as a pretense to send National Guard troops to the city, against the wishes of the city’s mayor and the governor of California. He also had about 700 Marines deployed to the city to protect federal immigration officials, which even Sen. Susan Collins criticized. She, so far, is the only prominent Republican to do so, although she said she supports the deployment of National Guard troops to the city.
When the president uses the military against the American people, we are treading on very dangerous ground. It is made much more dangerous by false and inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants, who are integral parts of our communities and our economy.
While we condemn the violence and destruction that has occurred in Los Angeles, it is important to remember what initially started the protests. They began as a non-violent response to the heavy-handed and increasingly frequent raids that are being used to sweep up immigrants, or people who look like immigrants, under the pretense that they are dangerous criminals.
It is also important to dispel some misinformation surrounding this situation. The U.S. is not being taken over by some sort of “foreign invasion” as Trump and others in his administration have claimed.
Some of the protesters in LA did carry flags from Mexico, Guatemala and other countries. That does not mean that they are acting on behalf of these countries or that those countries endorse rioting and looting in Los Angeles. Likewise, the fact that some Jan. 6 protesters carried confederate flags and beat police officers with U.S. flags does not mean that all Americans and residents of southern states supported their actions.
Los Angeles and California are not under siege, at least not from protesters or immigrants. The city is big — more than 500 square miles — and the protests are happening in small pockets of the city. California has the largest immigrant population in the U.S. It also has one of the strongest economies — the fourth largest in the world, having recently surpassed Japan — and a lower crime rate than many other states.
Migration is not unraveling our society — the heavy-handed tactics of the Trump administration are. Deportations under former President Joe Biden were actually higher than during the Trump administration. These deportations under Biden were generally done without armed, masked men in unmarked vehicles rounding up people and spiriting them away without due process.
A customer of a restaurant in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, that was raided by ICE last month shared a growing sentiment. “It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy,” Connor Simon told a local TV station. In a statement, the restaurant’s owners said they believed the three employees that were detained had legal asylum status in the U.S.
Trump has long been looking for a pretense to take more power and to use the military to quell protests that he disapproves of. On Saturday, military members and tanks will parade through Washington, D.C., on Trump’s birthday. The parade is expected to cost at least $45 million. Trump warned that people who protest the parade will be met with “very heavy force,” despite America’s long tradition of protests and the constitutional protections around them.
As Morgan Lueck, who served as a sergeant in the Marine Corps, wrote in a recent Bangor Daily News column: “The moment we begin to use our armed forces as a political weapon is the moment we begin to lose the republic our Founders fought to establish.”
We have much more to fear from Trump’s increasing disregard for laws and long-standing norms and his increasing use of force, including military force, to quell disagreement than we do from the immigrants in our communities.
