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    US citizen arrested during Ice raid in what family describes as ‘kidnapping’

    A US citizen was arrested during an immigration raid in downtown Los Angeles this week in what her family described as a “kidnapping” by federal immigration agents.Andrea Velez, 32, had just been dropped off at work by her mother and sister, the pair said, when they saw agents grab her.“My mom looked at the rear mirror and she saw how my sister was attacked from the back,” Estrella Rosas told ABC7. “She was like: ‘They’re kidnapping your sister.’”Velez, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona, was taken into custody during an immigration raid on Tuesday. In video captured from the scene, agents can be seen surrounding her as a crowd gathers in the street and police officers stand by. Meanwhile, Rosas and her mother, who has residency but is not a citizen, screamed from a nearby vehicle for help.“She’s a US citizen,” Rosas said through tears. “They’re taking her. Help her, someone.”In other video, an agent can be seen lifting Velez off the ground and carrying her away. Witnesses told media, including CBS Los Angeles, that the agents never asked Velez for identification, and that she did nothing wrong.“The only thing wrong with her … was the color of her skin,” Velez’s mother, Margarita Flores, told CBS Los Angeles.The incident comes as numerous US citizens have been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants. People have reported they are being targeted for their skin color and for attempting to aid immigrants being detained by immigration agents.While it’s not yet clear how many citizens have been affected by the administration’s attack on immigrant communities, a government report found that between 2015 and 2020, Ice erroneously deported at least 70 US citizens, arrested 674 and detained 121.Velez’s family was unaware of her whereabouts for more than a day until attorneys for the family tracked her down. “It took us four hours to find her and we’re attorneys. That’s crazy,” attorney Dominique Boubion told ABC7.“Just to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and you have the full weight of the federal government against you and your family can’t find you – it is very scary.”Authorities have not told lawyers what charges Velez faces, but an official with the Department of Homeland Security told media that she was arrested for assaulting an Ice officer. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More

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    Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments

    Shortly before last November’s presidential election, before anyone could envision him defying his “America first” political base and launching a bombing raid on Iran, Donald Trump offered a preview of how and why he would want to deploy the military on US soil.It was, the president said, to deal with “the enemy within”.“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” he said in a Fox News interview that prompted widespread condemnation at the time. “I think it should be very easily handled by … national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Trump did not specify what it was he didn’t want to let happen – only that while he promised to put an end to America’s “forever wars” overseas, he regarded domestic political adversaries, perhaps like the ones who have been protesting in massive numbers in Los Angeles and across the US this month, as a national security threat worthy of a military response.When thousands of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles earlier this month to protest against his administration’s heavy-handed immigration sweeps targeting workers in factories and car washes, he wasted little time making good on what he had promised.The reality of Trump sending thousands of national guard troops and US marines into LA earlier this month has not matched his rhetoric – yet the shock of it may have been dulled by the headlines coming out of the Middle East. The troops have largely kept a low profile, their duties restricted to guarding federal buildings and, at least according to the administration, accompanying immigration enforcement agents and other federal officials as they go about their business.Still, as the dust settles on two weeks of impassioned street protests and occasional vandalism and violence in downtown Los Angeles, the deployment continues to unnerve California’s political leaders, national Democratic party figures worried about who might be next, as well as many ordinary citizens and influential figures within the military itself.“The US military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats, not to police American streets or intervene in political disputes at home,” a group of retired four-star generals and admirals and high-profile former Pentagon officials said in a statement, signalling just how far Trump has strayed from precedent.The group, including a former secretary of the army, a former secretary of the navy, and Michael Hayden, a retired air force general who led the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency under presidents of both parties, are part of a lawsuit seeking to reverse the deployment, which they say “puts both service members and civilians at risk of harm and violates longstanding constitutional limits on government power”.Some observers have gone further, seeing a direct link between Trump’s willingness to send troops into American city streets and his decision to involve the United States in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran. “That kind of authoritarian aggression [rarely] stays inside the country’s borders,” Julia Ioffe, a national security expert and founding editor of Puck News, said of the California deployment on 11 June. “Didn’t think I’d be right so soon,” she wrote on Friday, as Trump’s war plans for Iran were ramping up.The Trump administration has vowed to keep the troops in place for at least 60 days, to ensure – as Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, told a House defense appropriations subcommittee – “that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we’re not going anywhere”.The threat of a more muscular military confrontation with “the enemy within” has not gone away, either, though one of the questions remaining is whether the military or the many agencies under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – immigration enforcement, border patrol, FBI – are more likely to take the lead.Two days before the No Kings rallies, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, was in Los Angeles and said the federal government’s goal was not just to maintain order on the streets but “to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”. Seconds after delivering these lines at a news conference, FBI agents under Noem’s authority manhandled and handcuffed Alex Padilla, a California senator who interrupted her to ask a question.Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, has threatened to arrest the governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, if they stand in the way of the immigration sweeps. At least two elected officials, the New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver and New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, have indeed been arrested for alleged interference in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.The military has so far stayed out of these headline-grabbing events, their role largely eclipsed by continuing immigration raids conducted by masked federal agents refusing to disclose their names or badge numbers, but experts and constitutional scholars say their very presence risks destabilizing what is already a volatile and politically charged situation. “The risk of escalation, or of someone making a mistake, is always present and in these situations actually quite high,” said Chris Mirasola, a national security expert at the University of Houston Law Center. “Just the deployment itself is escalatory.”View image in fullscreenIn deciding to take charge of the California national guard, over Newsom’s objections, Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act used by past presidents to help quell civil unrest, most recently during the 1992 LA riots when marines rode alongside southern California police patrols in burning neighborhoods.Rather, he invoked a rarely used power to mobilize the military to “temporarily protect” federal property and personnel. Lyndon Johnson used the same protection power to guarantee the safety of civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in 1965, in defiance of the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon used it in an ill-fated attempt to get the national guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike in 1970. But scholars said they were not aware of it being used any time since.Mirasola said he was a little perplexed, given the vehemence of Trump’s rhetoric about “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, that the president opted for this softer approach. “Maybe he just wanted the theatrics of getting the military on the streets,” Mirasola said. “This is a way of doing that while still preserving some space to continue to escalate.”It was also possible, he suggested, that Trump could not talk his military commanders into taking a more aggressive approach. “The military establishment is extremely allergic to the Insurrection Act,” he said. “It’s one of the few things bred into every single officer.”According to veterans and advocacy groups for service members being deployed to Los Angeles, the military also prides itself on being entirely apolitical and has no appetite to be drawn into a political conflict involving Trump or anyone else. Perhaps for this reason, the national guard and the marines have been barely visible in Los Angeles.At the first big downtown protest, on 8 June, the Los Angeles police moved protesters away from the national guard’s staging area at a federal courthouse complex and parked their patrol cruisers in such a way that the guardsmen could not come out and intervene.Six days later, in the final stages of the No Kings protest, a hard core of protesters briefly faced off against a line of marines stationed on the front steps of the downtown federal building. “Leave LA!” the crowd chanted, prompting the marines to deploy riot shields and push the protesters away from the building. The Los Angeles police quickly issued a dispersal order, sent in officers on horseback, and fired volleys of teargas to send most of the crowd scattering.Otherwise, the only reported incident has involved a military veteran who inadvertently crossed a line of police tape outside a federal building in west Los Angeles. One of the marines on guard wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him, but he was released shortly after and told reporters he was treated “very fairly”.California has sued the Trump administration over the military deployment and seemed to score an early win in court last week when a district judge said the president had exceeded his authority and needed to return control of the state national guard immediately. An appeals panel has since reversed that ruling, however.Part of California’s problem in arguing its case is that the national guard has been pressed into non-traditional activities with increasing frequency in recent years, undermining the notion of a strict separation between military and civilian activities.Several states, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have drafted the guard into border patrol duties despite severe morale issues among the troops and opposition from the military brass. New Mexico has asked its national guard to work as substitute teachers in understaffed schools. Florida has had them filling in as prison guards, and New York has seconded its guard to police the New York City subway.Supporters of California’s lawsuit argue that none of these scenarios are appropriate. And deploying the national guard for non-military purposes is even more inappropriate, they say, when it happens for an overtly partisan purpose over the objections of the state governor. “The military shouldn’t be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit.“If Americans weren’t aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We’re all on notice.” More

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    Los Angeles is not a hellscape – no matter how much Trump wishes for it | Dave Schilling

    The Los Angeles Dodgers lost on Thursday, 5-3, to the San Diego Padres. A mostly unremarkable game livened up by a hit batsman that led to a near-brawl between the two teams. But the real action took place well before the first pitch. Federal agents were seen attempting to enter Dodger Stadium’s parking lot earlier in the day, according to several reports. When asked, the agents declared they were with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). After the Dodgers said they had turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents away, Ice denied being at the stadium at all, while DHS said Customs and Border Protection vehicles “were in the stadium parking lot very briefly, unrelated to any operation or enforcement”. Yes, but what about, you know, the videos? The eyewitness accounts? All that evidence? Never mind that, I suppose.We’ve become quite immune to the confused realities of this administration. They could say the sky is purple, horses can carry on cocktail party conversation à la Mr Ed, and Justin Bieber is a recent Nobel laureate in physics and we’d respond: “Well, of course, carry on. Congrats to Justin, I suppose.” They’ve been doing it since Donald Trump’s first term, but really ratcheted up the bullshit during the immigration protests in Los Angeles. The administration’s party line is that Los Angeles was tipping into full-on, RoboCop-style anarchy and the only solution to that problem was a deployment of the national guard and the marines, against the wishes of the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. This, despite the protests occurring within about 1 sq mile of a city that is, by my last count, absolutely enormous. Or, for those who don’t live here, 500 sq miles (1,300 sq km). To be exact.The protests have largely wrapped up, even as Ice has become more brazen in its activities – snatching people outside a Home Depot in Hollywood and dropping by our baseball stadium for unknown reasons. Despite the lack of conflagration, a federal appeals court recently affirmed Trump’s right to deploy the guard for this particular purpose, though going to the trouble of reminding the administration that such actions are not above judicial review. Of course, for the immigrant denizens of LA, this city does feel like a war zone, with the constant fear, anxiety and stress that comes with all of that. Public transit ridership is down significantly, businesses have to close to prevent their employees from being captured and stories of Ice raids trickle through communities like drips of poison. That’s our shared reality, but it’s not the one outsiders seem to care about. They’re more interested in the Waymos, I suppose.Despite the ongoing mischaracterization of the situation on the ground, Trump seems unable to manage to get the widespread clashes and chaos he so clearly desires. The military deployment in LA wasn’t much more remarkable than his birthday-party-cum-bring-your-army-to-work-day that nearly put Marco Rubio to sleep. Trump might have been asleep too, but his eyes have narrowed into such baggy slits that one can no longer make an accurate judgment. His eyelids now resemble two fluffy hamburger buns, with nothing but a layer of mayonnaise in between.Perhaps the president’s burger eyes are partially to blame for his lack of awareness of what is actually happening in Los Angeles. Our schools are in summer break, leaving the roads slightly less congested. A recent heatwave has me canoodling with my air conditioner, like two drunk celebrities in the back of the Met Gala dining room. Juneteenth celebrations in my area carried on as usual. Downtown, the site of the protest actions, is back to being a great place to urinate in an alley without being pelted by rubber bullets. I still can’t get my agent to call me back about that script. All is well here. And yet, the pretense of simmering violence is continuing to be used to justify a wholly unnecessary deployment of the armed forces.Speaking of armed forces, the Los Angeles police department totals nearly 9,000 officers, with tanks, riot gear and heavy weaponry. The LAPD is, in many ways, a little mini-army to patrol those aforementioned 500 sq miles of enormousness. When Bass said the LAPD could handle it, she meant it. This is another way in which perception taints the reality on the ground. LA has taken the place of countless other conservative boogeymen – San Francisco, Portland, New York City – as the pre-eminent scourge of so-called liberal lawlessness. Of course, LA, like those other cities, spends money on its police force like I do on The RealReal after one too many martinis. The most recent LAPD budget topped $2bn, which, while less than the purchase price of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, is still quite a lot. It’s a billion dollars more than is spent on homelessness programs by the entire state. A city politician can hardly get elected without at least some support from the police unions, like our new district attorney, Nathan Hochman, who trounced the incumbent by running on a law-and-order platform.But the American conservative media apparatus can and routinely does tell a different story of Los Angeles. That it’s a liberal hellscape where God has been given his two-weeks’ notice and everyone gives each other anal beads for Christmas. If only that were true. Maybe this would be a more exciting place to live. In reality, AKA that thing that happens when you go outside, this can be a terribly boring place to live, especially when your agent doesn’t call you back. To be honest, I quite like how boring it is. It’s a lot easier to complain about mundane things, like every good restaurant closing on Mondays. Can we spread that out? Maybe some of you close on Sundays, so I don’t have to subject myself to Sweetgreen when I’m too lazy to cook. Just try it out. I could complain about how the DMV kiosk that’s supposed to make it faster to renew your car registration is actually becoming just as long of a line as the normal window because the payment system is constantly going down. Or that the San Diego Padres are the dirtiest team in baseball and their entire franchise should be sold to the Saudi royal family for scrap and moved to Riyadh. You know, normal things to complain about. The only time it’s not boring to live in Los Angeles is when someone (you know who) decides to send the marines in to walk around in a circle for two months. If the federal government could promise to let Los Angeles be boring again, I’ll promise to stop handing out anal beads during the holidays. A deal’s a deal.

    Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist More

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    From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it’s fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat | Andy Beckett

    From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places.Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: “In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”This month, Donald Trump’s administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. “Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,” he said. It was “a city of criminals” and “socialists”, said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. “Mob violence” was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an “insurrection” was under way. Trump promised: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”That this “liberation” involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles.The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage’s complaint in 2014 that he could not “hear English” on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past.While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between “the people” and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race.More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as “once great”. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left.A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan’s centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment.Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city’s immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: “Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge” – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney.For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995.Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs “pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time”. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives don’t seem well suited to such tasks.Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s to become the world’s fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring.Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn’t be written off as just playing into the enemy’s hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today’s intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten.

    Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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    From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it’s fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat | Andy Beckett

    From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places.Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: “In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.”This month, Donald Trump’s administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. “Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,” he said. It was “a city of criminals” and “socialists”, said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. “Mob violence” was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an “insurrection” was under way. Trump promised: “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.”That this “liberation” involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles.The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage’s complaint in 2014 that he could not “hear English” on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past.While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between “the people” and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race.More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as “once great”. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left.A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan’s centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment.Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city’s immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: “Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge” – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney.For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995.Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs “pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time”. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives don’t seem well suited to such tasks.Perhaps that doesn’t matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state’s economy recently overtook Japan’s to become the world’s fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring.Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn’t be written off as just playing into the enemy’s hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today’s intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten.

    Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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    Pete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LA

    The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.The comments before the Senate armed services committee come as Donald Trump faces dozen of lawsuits over his policies, which his administration has responded to by avoiding compliance with orders it dislikes. In response, Democrats have claimed that Trump is sending the country into a constitutional crisis.California has sued over Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles, and, last week, a federal judge ruled that control of soldiers should return to California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. An appeals court stayed that ruling and, in arguments on Tuesday, sounded ready to keep the soldiers under Donald Trump’s authority.“I don’t believe district courts should be determining national security policy. When it goes to the supreme court, we’ll see,” Hegseth told the Democratic senator Mazie Hirono. Facing similar questions from another Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, he said: “If the supreme court rules on a topic, we will abide by that.”Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon after three Republican senators and all Democrats voted against his appointment, creating a tie vote on a cabinet nomination for only the second time in history. The tie was broken by the vice-president, JD Vance.There were few hints of dissatisfaction among GOP senators at the hearing, which was intended to focus on the Pentagon’s budgetary needs for the forthcoming fiscal year, but Democrats used it to press for more details on the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, as well as the turmoil that has plagued Hegseth’s top aides and the potential for the United States to join Israel’s attack on Iran.The Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin asked whether troops deployed to southern California were allowed to arrest protesters or shoot them in the legs, as Trump is said to have attempted to order during his first term.“If necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. But there’s no arresting going on,” Hegseth said. On Friday, marines temporarily took into custody a US citizen at a federal building in Los Angeles.The secretary laughed when asked whether troops could shoot protesters, before telling Slotkin: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing in, except for the Bible.”An exasperated Slotkin replied: “Oh my God.”Trump has publicly mulled the possibility that the United States might strike Iran. Slotkin asked if the Pentagon had plans for what the US military would do after toppling its government.“We have plans for everything,” Hegseth said, prompting the committee’s Republican chair, Roger Wicker, to note that the secretary was scheduled to answer further questions in a behind-closed-doors session later that afternoon.In addition to an aggressive purge of diversity and equity policies from the military, Hegseth has also ordered that military bases that were renamed under Joe Biden because they honored figures in the Confederacy to revert to their previous names – but officially honoring various US soldiers with the same name.The Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that in his state, several bases had been renamed under Biden in honor of accomplished veterans, and their families were never officially told that the names would be changed back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You didn’t call any of the families, and I’ve spoken with the families, and the families were called by the press. That’s how they learned about this. They learned about it from the press,” Kaine said,He asked Hegseth to pause the renaming of these bases, which the secretary declined to do, instead saying: “We’ll find ways to recognize them.”Democrats also criticized Hegseth for turmoil in the ranks of his top aides, as well as his decision to name as the Pentagon’s press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared on social media an antisemitic conspiracy theory.The Pentagon head had a sharp exchange with the Democratic senator Jacky Rosen, who asked whether he would fire Wilson. “I’ve worked directly with her. She does a fantastic job, and … any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization.”“You are not a serious person,” the Nevada lawmaker replied. “You are not serious about rooting out, fighting antisemitism within the ranks of our DOD. It’s despicable. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”Rosen then asked if the far-right activist Laura Loomer was involved in the firing of a top national security staffer. Hegseth demurred, saying the decision was his to make, but the senator continued to press, even as the committee chair brought down his gavel to signal that she had run out of time for questions.“I believe your time is up, senator,” Hegseth said. A furious Rosen responded: “It is not up to you to tell me when my time is up. And I am going to say, Mr Secretary, you’re either feckless or complicit. You’re not in control of your department.” More

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    ‘Abducted by Ice’: the haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA

    “Missing son.” “Missing father.” “Missing grandmother.”The words are written in bright red letters at the top of posters hanging on lampposts and storefronts around Los Angeles. At first glance, they appear to be from worried relatives seeking help from neighbors.But a closer look reveals that the missing people are immigrants to the US who have been disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Some of the faces are familiar to anyone who has been following the news – that missing father, for instance, is Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in March without a hearing, in what the Trump administration admitted was an error. “Abducted by Ice,” the poster reads, under a picture of Ábrego García with his small son. “Did not receive constitutional protections. Currently being held in detention.”The missing grandmother is Gladis Yolanda Chávez Pineda, a Chicago woman who was taken by Ice when she showed up for a check-in with immigration officials this month. She had arrived in the US seeking a better life for her daughter and was in the midst of applying for asylum. “Lived in the US for 10 years,” the poster states. “No criminal history.”View image in fullscreenThe missing son is Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled persecution in Venezuela. On arrival in the US, he was detained, with US authorities claiming his tattoos indicated gang membership. His family and friends say that’s ridiculous. He was among hundreds of people deported to the El Salvador mega-prison known as Cecot in March. “Currently being held in a concentration camp,” the poster says.The posters are just a few examples of a campaign of quiet resistance on the streets of Los Angeles. On Monday, a walk down Sunset Boulevard in the historic Silver Lake neighborhood meant encountering an array of flyers, artwork and spray-painted messages of support for disappeared immigrants and fury at the administration.The “missing” posters, which have also appeared in other neighborhoods, were particularly effective. Duct-taped to telephone polls amid ads for comedy shows, guitar lessons and yard sales, they reminded passersby of the individual lives derailed by Trump’s immigration crackdown – instead of names in the news, these were families and friends who might have lived just down the road.View image in fullscreenHumanizing people’s stories was precisely the goal, said the creators behind the posters.“I just wanted to reframe this idea of immigrants as criminals, and put into perspective that these are people – this is someone’s grandmother, this is someone’s father, this is someone’s son,” said Ben*, the posters’ 28-year-old designer. He worked with his friend Sebastian*, 31, to distribute them around town.What began as a friends-and-family effort expanded after Ben shared the PDF: “I shared it with a few friends, then they shared it, and so it kind of just blew up.”For Sebastian, the issue was personal. “I moved here from Colombia 14 years ago, and ever since the first Trump administration, I’ve seen my community being attacked,” he said. “So as soon as I saw these posters that my friend was doing, that I felt something in me that needed to go out and help.”While they worked, “people started taking photos, and I had a moment with this one elderly woman where she was looking at it, and she really just started tearing up,” Ben said. “At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is actually connecting to people.’”The images have appeared in recent days as the city has become a focal point for protests against Trump’s immigration policies, which began on 6 June amid raids targeting immigrants at several locations in the city.As the protests emerged in parts of LA, Donald Trump called in the national guard without the governor’s consent – an action no president has taken since 1965. Shortly afterward, he summoned hundreds of marines. Much news coverage painted the city as a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, with protesters facing off against troops and cars on fire, fueling Trump’s narrative of a lawless city hopelessly embroiled in chaos.In fact, much of the unrest was confined to a small area of downtown LA. Across most of the vast city and county, life continued as normal, the sun shining over familiar traffic jams, studio lots and suburban sprawl. Still, the protests – and the federal government’s wildly disproportionate clampdown – served as a spark that has helped to fuel a national outcry, as well as this subtler demonstration of local solidarity.Alongside the “Missing” posters were a series of alternative descriptions of Ice – rather than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stenciled messages on the pavement and shop windows condemned “Illegal Country-wide Embarrassment”, “Institution of Child Endangerment” and the perhaps less clear “Insecure Confused Ejaculation”.View image in fullscreenOther flyers advertised Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, while still others noted that “Undocumented hands feed you”, with an illustration of a person working in a field. Those latter posters were created by Sydney*, 29, who works in the music industry in Los Angeles. Her 9-to-5 job makes it impossible to attend protests, she said, so creating this image was an alternative way to participate in resistance. “You read something tragic every morning lately about the Ice raids,” she said.She was particularly moved by the plight of agricultural workers, toiling for low wages under the threat of immigration crackdowns. “I just felt very compelled to speak up for them in places that people probably don’t think about them, like Silver Lake and the city,” she said. “I am Latina. I have many family members that came here and are immigrants, and so it just touches home for me.”Inspired by a slogan she saw in protest photos and Mexican decor flags, Sydney created the stylized image as a social media post. “I just wanted to tie something beautiful with something very political and loud,” she said. A friend saw the post, asked if she could print it out, and plastered it around town.That DIY approach adds to the posters’ power: there is a sense of neighbors helping neighbors. As the administration conjures a tale of a city in crisis, the images – unpretentious and haunting – serve as a reminder of what the protests are actually about.* The Guardian is withholding full names for privacy reasons More

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    Appeals court likely to keep Trump in control of national guard deployed in LA

    A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, opened the hearing by asking whether the courts have a role in reviewing the president’s decision to call up the national guard. Brett Shumate, an attorney for the federal government, said they did not.“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the Guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.Shumate made several references to “mob violence” in describing ongoing protests in Los Angeles. But mayor Karen Bass lifted a curfew for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, saying acts of vandalism and violence that prompted her curfew a week ago had subsided.“It is essential that this injunction be stayed, otherwise, lives and property will be at risk,” Shumate said.Harbourt argued that the federal government didn’t inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard. He said the Trump administration hasn’t shown that they considered “more modest measures to the extreme response of calling in the national guard and militarizing the situation”.Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest”.Breyer’s order applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were also deployed to LA but were not yet on the streets when he ruled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.Newsom said in advance of the hearing that he was confident in the rule of law.“I’m confident that common sense will prevail here: the US military belongs on the battlefield, not on American streets,” Newsom said in a statement.Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.Breyer, an appointee of former president Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”The national guard hasn’t been activated without a governor’s permission since 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. 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