Image by Ted Griswold.

Donald Trump’s agenda will never win Los Angeles—at least not in the traditional sense, and certainly not through votes or on the ideological terrain. But the campaign of terror being unleashed upon the city is not about a conventional victory. Instead, Trump intends to terrorize Los Angeles into submission, creating a spectacle and inflicting chaos in an attempt to break the political and moral backbone of a city that refuses to submit to authoritarian ethnonationalism. Faced with extreme federal overreach, which has taken the form of ICE abductions and the deployment of militarized forces, Los Angeles now finds itself at a crossroads. We are witnessing in Los Angeles an authoritarian attempt to undermine the mandate of the people to retain the city as a longtime sanctuary for immigrants. To be more precise, what is taking place now is a retaliatory campaign—a punishment for Los Angeles’ defiance and a message to every city that dares to resist Trump’s ethnonationalist agenda.

But Los Angeles is not just any city. It has always been a locus of struggle and resistance.

My aim in this essay is twofold. First, I outline the dominant narrative about what is happening in Los Angeles, offering some context that shows that framing the issue as a question of “national security” is misguided. Second, I propose an alternative framework: rather than a battle between “law and order” and so-called lawlessness (framed through the twin tropes of “illegal” immigration or anarchic unrest), I argue that we are seeing the righteous resistance to defend the sovereignty—and the soul—of Los Angeles.

Not Law and Order versus Lawlessness

In a recent speech at Fort Bragg, Trump declared that “generations of Army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third-world lawlessness,” adding that “what you’re witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order, and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags.”1 In subsequent speeches, he explained that his deployment of national troops represents a mission to “liberate Los Angeles.” But what, exactly, does he mean to “liberate Los Angeles” from? The answer lies in a disinformation campaign: a bizarre, gaslighting alternate reality that severs Los Angeles from its own history and from the broader nation. It attempts to recast California (and Los Angeles in particular) as a white MAGA ethnostate, which it never was and never will be.

The narrative of “law and order versus lawlessness” is an attempt to harness narrative power in a distorted reality and to rewrite LA’s reality and history. The narrative being spun by the Trump administration is one we’ve heard before: immigrants are criminals, protestors are anarchists, and real Americans are under siege. The federal response has been couched in terms like “law and order,” “public safety,” and “national security,” but such a framing collapses under scrutiny.

The reality is that Los Angeles has never been—and will never be—a white-majority city, much to the dismay of figures like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the current regime. From its founding in 1781 by the original Pobladores—a group of Black, Indigenous, mestizo, and Spanish settlers—Los Angeles has always been a multicultural city. By 1850, roughly 75 percent of its population was of Mexican descent. Even after the so-called Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, when close to one million people (including thousands of US birthright citizens) were forcibly removed and deported, Los Angeles has continued to be a majority minority city.

In a place like this, immigrants are essential to the economic and social fabric, even as they continue to be politically disenfranchised. Of the approximately ten million residents in the county, around 33 percent are foreign-born. Immigrants make up more than half the workforce in sectors like manufacturing, food services, and healthcare. The impact of federal immigration raids is already being felt in the form of labor shortages in these industries, and the agricultural sector has yet to see the full fallout. That these raids coincide with graduation season in the Los Angeles Unified School District and other area districts should also not be lost on anyone.

Thus, to borrow the words of the prolific borderlands thinker Gloria Anzaldúa:“This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again.”2 To say this is not some sort of radical threat against the United States. It’s........

© CounterPunch