The Lessons of Trump’s Fight With Los Angeles Over Immigration

Magazine|Trump Got the Fight He Wanted. Did It Turn Out the Way He Expected?

On June 7, Cruz was walking to buy tamales with her sister in San Bernardino, Calif., when she saw a truck full of landscapers being detained by what appeared to be law-enforcement officers in unmarked uniforms. Cruz, a 28-year-old nurse’s assistant, is a first-generation Mexican American who was born in California, but her husband is an undocumented immigrant who worked on a similar landscaping crew. (She asked to be identified by only her last name for her family’s safety.) When the Trump administration’s raids targeting undocumented immigrants reached the city, word of the arrests spread quickly, but Cruz had not taken the news too seriously until she saw one for herself.

The next week, on the morning of June 13, her husband called to say he’d been working on Waterman Avenue when a truck full of federal agents pulled up. They appeared to be from Homeland Security Investigations, one of the many federal agencies now scouring Southern California for undocumented immigrants. When an officer asked him if he had a visa, he told the truth. Minutes later, he was in the back of a government vehicle, bound for the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal facility, in Los Angeles.

For nearly a week, such raids had spurred small protests in several cities in the region. Federal agents fired less-lethal munitions at protesters; shortly after, President Trump, casting images of the clashes as evidence of citywide anarchy wrought by undocumented immigrants and their defenders, announced that he was federalizing control of the California National Guard and deploying it to address “lawlessness.” After protests gave way to rioting on the blocks around the detention center on the night of Sunday, June 8, he announced he was deploying U.S. Marines.

Since the George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, Trump had vocally supported deploying the military to quell violent protests on American streets — a move he had flinched at doing at the time but now was at last making. It was a natural conclusion of the story Trump told on the campaign trail last year about what had happened to America — what his enemies had done to America — and what he would do, if elected again, to restore it. “Order will be restored,” Trump wrote, “the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.”