President Donald Trump, pursuing his plan to carry out the largest deportation in the country’s history, has filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles, its mayor Karen Bass, and the Los Angeles City Council for “illegal” sanctuary city policies that he says “deliberately impede federal immigration officers’ ability to carry out their responsibilities.”
This move comes weeks after the city erupted in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
These protests quickly turned violent following Trump’s decision to deploy thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles without notifying California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Bass.
What the Trump administration fails to understand is that it’s not the “sanctuary” city, nor the mayor, nor the council members who are making ICE’s work difficult. Those hindering ICE’s illegal operations are the neighborhoods, their residents, who are taking to the streets to denounce these “kidnappings” by the supposedly masked agents.
Los Angeles is not just any city. It’s a city with a long tradition of defending civil rights and the immigrant community. It is home to the historical heritage of the first Mexicans who inhabited these lands; its streets breathe Latin culture in every sphere of the different communities.
It’s difficult to find a family without an immigrant, relative, or acquaintance. That’s why when ICE agents arrive, they don’t confront one, two, or three… they confront a community that will denounce and sabotage the federal agency’s operations.
To dominate, they would have to disappear this city, and that’s not going to happen. Trump knows it. The community knows it.
The lawsuit claimed that Los Angeles’ refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities resulted in “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism,” causing the situation to become so dire that the California National Guard and U.S. Marines had to be deployed to the city.
Trump wants carte blanche in carrying out deportations; he wants county police and sheriff’s deputies to interfere, and that’s very unlikely to happen.
