An L.A. Reid: there is no crisis in Los Angeles that ICE didn't cause

Four days in Los Angeles and all I saw was SOCAL normality ... until ICE showed up.

People keep texting and calling me and my team from The Joy Reid Show, who have been in Los Angeles since last Thursday to participate in the State of the People Power Tour and BET 45th anniversary weekend. The texts go something like: “be safe out there,” or “what’s happening out there?” The presumption? Los Angeles is fully engulfed in violent chaos. The belief is so strong, and so strongly perpetuated by the mainstream media narrative, many Americans may be looking the other way or continuing to practice the fan dance while the Trump regime essentially begins a military occupation of this country’s largest state — complete with the National Guard and United States Marines.

“Professional agitators” … “insurrectionists” … interesting choice of words for the Insurrectionist in Chief.

There’s this thing that Jan 6 apologists love to do … they pretend that the actual insurrection that took place when hoards of Trump superfans showed up to the capitol to rage against his election loss was a mere peaceful protest, that only turned violent when the capitol police showed up (or the FBI somehow tricked maga dolts into shitting on the ground, smashing windows and threatening to hang Mike Pence.)

The problems with that narrative are threefold:

1. The “protest” began only after Donald Trump told his zombies to march to the capitol. So HE initiated said “protest.”

2. The “protesters” weren’t met with armed police force. Not only did they vastly outnumber the unprepared police, it is now a known fact that the Capitol Police were stood down by their own leadership because they viewed Trump fans as “friendlies,” only to be unpleasantly surprised when they showed up with stun guns, zip ties, brass knuckles and bear spray. And again even maga themselves admit — or even boast — that police literally let them into the Capitol, in a small number of cases, taking selfies with them, before the mayhem began. And who caused the mayhem? Well … look for yourself:

3. Once the police did begin to resist the invasion of the Capitol, the use of force went entirely in one direction: by protesters against police. I wouldn’t call that a protest. I’d call that an insurrection.

Contrast that with Los Angeles, where I’ve been since Thursday, and which has been entirely quiet and calm, everywhere we’ve driven around, from Hollywood to downtown, except … and this is important … where ICE has shown up. When that has happened, it has played out exactly the way you would expect. And here is how the national news is covering it all:

Note the intensity of the coverage. Note the still that was chosen. And this is ABC News, which is actually one of the more responsible networks.

And as David Muir did note in his package, this was the first time the National Guard was activated without a request from the state governor whose troops were being put into action since 1965 — and the occasion for that activation was the Selma to Montgomery march, in which John Lewis and other protesters were getting the hell beaten out of them on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, because they were daring to fight for the right of Black citizens to vote. So given that stark contrast with the historical use of the Guard on U.S. soil, more context would seem appropriate.

And when you think about what’s happening in California, and in cities across the country that are being targeted by the regime, it’s important to ask the usual questions that both journalists and informed citizens ought to have top of mind: namely, who, what, when, where, how, and why.

So let’s start with the who: namely:

Who is causing the conflagrations that you’re seeing on your screens?

That answer is simple: it’s ICE. There was literally nothing remarkable going on in this city the day before ICE started kidnapping people at Home Depots in and near Los Angeles, and at two L.A. warehouses, where they abducted some 50 unnamed people. And no one knows who and where those people are. All we know is that 50 people who used to live in Los Angeles are gone, and that ICE took them. Here’s one of the more widely circulated videos:

What is ICE doing?

What we know from both reporting, and from what I’m being told on the ground, is that ICE is target-raiding places where they are likely to found Latino migrants: Home Depots and warehouses, where migrant workers often line up, waiting for assignments in the building trade; restaurants, where migrants work in kitchens as cooks or in dining rooms as busboys, construction sites, including in places like Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles or Altadena and Pasadena, which are outside of the city, and where homeowners are frantically trying to rebuild after the catastrophic fires earlier this year.

Where are ICE kidnapping people from?

Well, many of the incidents are not even in Los Angeles. In fact, the video above, showing the aftermath of the Home Depot raid in the city of Paramount has nothing to do with Los Angeles, since Paramount is 16 miles away.

But the story had the desired impact, sparking terror inside of immigrant-rich Los Angeles, and creating a national image of L.A. as completely overtaken by immigration raids.

As to the when: that one’s easy.

ICE began targeting Los Angeles on Friday, just as BET Weekend was getting under way and on the same day Kamala Harris made her appearance at the State of the People Power Tour.

The raids were literally taking place while we were inside the Feed School; the venue where the tour stop was staged. Here is the statement the former VP put out about the mess:

And now to the why

Lest you think the choice of Home Depots and warehouses were coincidental, note the following reporting from The New Republic:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was enraged to hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been focusing on arresting only criminals, The Washington Examiner reported Monday.

Last week, 25 field directors from ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations, as well as 25 special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, were called to Washington for a meeting. Officials told the Examiner that the president’s ghoulish immigration czar wasn’t happy.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone,” said one official. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down.”

The official told the conservative outlet that Miller didn’t want ICE to narrow its field to just undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recalled.

When one ICE official pushed back against Miller’s call to widen the deportation dragnet, citing border czar Tom Homan’s claims that ICE’s deportation efforts would target criminals, the deputy chief of staff seemed confused.

“What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” the official recounted Miller as saying. “Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest.”

Last week, Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration had set a new quota of a minimum 3,000 ICE arrests per day. On Monday, ICE announced that it had completed its largest operation ever in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Area—but as the number of arrests rose, so did the number of people detained with no criminal record or deportation order. Hundreds of so-called “collaterals” were arrested as part of the massive operation.

“Why aren’t you at Home Depot…? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” … I mean, there are brown people there…

Bottom line: ICE is causing the chaos, so that Trump can claim there is chaos and send in the military to occupy Democrat-run cities

It is classic fascism to foment a crisis and then claim there is a crisis that can only be solved by deploying military force into the heart of the community you’re hoping to terrify and suppress. And so Stephen Miller demands ICE meet their 3,000 brown migrant-a-week quota by raiding Home Depots — where I hate to break it to him, is where you’ll typically find “honey-do” husbands and reno kings and queens, not gang members. And then, when the inevitable protests occur, the cops show up. And things play out the way they usually do when brown people, and lots of national and international media are involved. And that includes the small protest at which local labor leader David Huerta was arrested and injured, after being shoved to the ground by masked federal agents. Here’s some local reporting on that:

And here is a closer look at what sure looks like an assault on Mr. Huerta, with video courtesy of social media:

It’s giving LaMonica McIver …

In the calculated logic of fascism, Herta is now the one being charged with a crime, of course — because it is necessary to criminalize any resistance to the kidnapping of the disfavored in an autocracy. And so:

David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union California (SEIU), is facing one charge of felony conspiracy to impede an officer after he was arrested by federal officers on Friday, according to court records obtained by USA TODAY.

Huerta remained in federal custody until Monday, June 9, when he was released on $50,000 bond, according to multiple reports.

But let me go back for a moment to the where, because while the mainstream media is making it look like all of Los Angeles is in conflagration, that’s not even close to true. And that’s because Los Angeles is huge.

The self-storage website SpareFoot.com used a tool that leveraged Google Maps to draw a city-limit outline of L.A. and then projected that outline on other city / state / landmark maps, recalculating the outline’s dimensions using Mercator projection distortions. In short, they took an overlay of Los Angeles and pasted it on a bunch of different world cities to illustrate exactly how big the city of angels really is.

It’s important to note, however, that Sparefoot chose to use L.A.’s city limits rather than draw out the entire metropolitan area (mostly for sake of simplicity). As many of readers will understand, when angelenos think of Los Angeles, many of our interpretations extend to a much larger scope.

In fact L.A. county, with its roughly 10 million total inhabitants, is the largest county by-population in the entire country. And if you look at the land area of the entire county, now we’re talking about something along the lines of 4,700 square miles of land, ranging from Lancaster at the northern tip to the edges of Long Beach in the southern portion.

Which is why for the entire time we’ve been here, Los Angeles has looked the way it does in this montage of our Monday in the city:

The anti-ICE protests that even the LAPD have confirmed were almost entirely peaceful, took place over about two or three blocks near City Hall ( if you were to walk just a few blocks away, you wouldn’t even know anything had happened…) and in the few blocks surrounding the federal detention center where Mr. Huerta was being held. That center has been thoroughly tagged with anti-Trump and anti-ICE messages (which you’ve got to believe Miller and Homan used to convince oh-so sensitive Donald that the Marines are needed to stifle the Trump hate…)

But it wouldn’t even be pragmatic for people to protest there again, since that is where the National Guard are stationed.

Bottom line: do not buy the mainstream media and regime narrative that Los Angeles is in the midst of a conflagration that could in any way necessitate federal military intervention. What is happening in the vast majority of this city, as my The Joy Reid Show team and I have personally observed, is absolute normality — well, normality in the L.A. sense. Here’s where I was supposed to be tonight — as the Marines supposedly deploy to the city to save it from being overrun by brown scaries:

How alarming…

Bottom line: there was nothing going on besides ordinary life in Los Angeles until ICE showed up. And when ICE shows up, protesters follow. And when protesters follow, police show up, too. And when you throw in FBI and other feds, it’s bound to get dicey. All completely by design. Currently, this city is deploying extra swaths of police, and police choppers that we can hear day and night, in anticipation of more inevitable protests that will be caused by ICE raiding more Home Depots, restaurants and 7-Elevens in search of brown construction workers, cooks, janitors, store clerks and dish washers to serve up to Miller, Trump and Homan’s obsessive-compulsive hatred. (By the way, I stand with Terry Moran.)

Fascist Accelerationism 101

This is how it works: the regime produces the conflict. Then they impose an extreme “solution” that is itself a farce. The goal appears to be to make Los Angeles a test case for what amounts to a military occupation of the nation’s second largest city and among its cultural capitals — the city slated to host both 2026 World Cup matches and the 2028 Olympics. (Won’t it be clever when the Ghouly and Goblin send ICE to detain and disappear brown, foreign soccer stars and gymnasts…) Maga would kill to have control of America’s west coast city-state — and they can’t take hold of it the old fashioned way, through persuasion, because no one in this modern city wants to live in the Handmaid’s Tale; and Trump’s “Hollywood ambassadors committee” of ‘80s-famous has-beens is a literal joke. So instead, Homan, Miller and Trump are living out their fever dream of rendering the leaders of this city and state incapable of resisting maga ethnic cleansing, including threatening to seize the tax dollars they pay to support red welfare states and give back nothing in return. It really is fascism 101. And this week we also spoke with Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, who told us she knows that her diverse, immigrant-rich city is also on the menu in what amounts to a coup against the sitting Democratic governor, Gavin Newsome, who is rightly suing, in the nation’s first official nonwhite majority state. It’s not coincidental that the regime’s actions look a lot like those of the apartheid government in the bad old version of South Africa.

Check out this must read from Stacey Abrams: When Protest Becomes a Pretext for Militarism

A clip:

What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is a dangerous and deliberate escalation—one we’ve seen in authoritarian regimes, not in democracies. When dissent is met with armed force, when peaceful protest is pushed into chaos, and when the military is used to silence communities rather than serve them, we’re no longer debating policy. We’re facing tyranny at our doorstep. The steps are clear: identify a target that you can demonize, strip away protections and then use their understandable panic to justify over-reaction and the erosion of rights.

Well said.

Next up: The Joy Reid Show interview with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

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