It was a sun-kissed summer morning in Los Angeles when the radio blared that another ICE raid was happening. Hopping on X, I scrolled through videos of federal officers charging through MacArthur Park on horseback, flanked by gun-toting armed troops and military Humvees. It’s a scene that has become disturbingly familiar in a city under siege by federal forces since early June.
I started texting friends who live near the park, asking for eyewitness reports. “Choppers still hovering… It sounds like war from here,” reported a friend who runs an art gallery a few blocks away. Another messaged: “A few min ago I saw a lady who looked Central American with her young daughter sprinting.” For a few moments, I deliberated whether it was safe for me to go. “Ooh sis, I’d be v careful,” warned a friend who has been opposing ICE raids in his neighbourhood. He told me that ICE has been targeting Asians, and even legal immigrants were staying home. It might sound extreme to get deported for covering a protest, but this has happened to foreign reporters unluckier than me.
It’s hard to overstate the emotional toll that compounding crises — first the fires, now ICE — are having on LA. For weeks, the streets and public plazas have been ghostly quiet, with all kinds of immigrants taking cover from the masked men snatching up people in broad daylight. There’s a real boogeyman quality to these attacks. A reporter friend told me stories of taco trucks getting raided, meat still sizzling on the grill but no one left to flip it. Over the Independence Day weekend, at a rave called “Fuck the Fourth”, it felt like America was cancelled, and barely anyone was dancing. “I’ve been stuck in a psychic swamp,” said a friend who skipped it entirely.
Resisting the urge to stay inside, I decided to go to the park. As I laced up my shoes, the radio reported that Mayor Karen Bass had shown up at the chaotic scene. She’d been on her way to a press conference with Governor Newsom about the city’s fire recovery when she diverted to tell ICE to get out. She was overheard saying on the phone: “You’re getting ready to leave? Can you leave ASAP?” When asked who she was speaking to, Bass replied, “the head of customs”. Later, she called the raid “outrageous and unAmerican” in a tweet.
I biked down to the park, helicopters thrumming ahead. By the time I arrived, the border patrol agents were gone. According to LA Taco, protestors had gathered and confronted the officers, prompting them to retreat into armoured vehicles and a black SUV. The streets were unnaturally deserted. The only people I could spot at first were a scattering of homeless people hanging out on public benches, some of them slumped over in the sunshine.
MacArthur Park in Westlake is one of LA’s most contested public spaces; it is a place where the city’s broader housing and public health failures are writ large. While surrounding neighbourhoods like Echo Park and Silver Lake have hyper-gentrified into nauseating hipster playgrounds, Westlake remains home to the low-income and working-class populations who have lived there for generations. Like Skid Row, it has been a “containment zone” for the city’s homeless, drug addicted, and mentally ill since the Seventies, as part of a policy to concentrate poverty in certain areas of Los Angeles. Open-air drug use and homeless encampments are right alongside street vendors, fruit sellers, and family barbecues.
The densely populated neighbourhood has historically been a landing stop for many Central American migrants, including Salvadorans fleeing the civil war in the Eighties and Nineties. The transnational gang MS-13, which has become a focal point in Trump’s immigration crackdown, was born in the MacArthur Park area during that era. Newly arrived immigrants from El Salvador were recruited into the Central American gang as a form of protection: both from rival gangs like the majority-Mexican 18th Street, and from the LAPD’s indiscriminate crackdowns on Latino residents.
Decades of underinvestment and neglect have turned the park into what prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls a site of “organized abandonment”, where police surveillance and sweeps fill the cracks of broken social infrastructure. Horrific stories of unchecked violence still shape the park’s reputation. A 61-year-old transgender woman who owns a nearby store was assaulted six times over the past three months, and a $10,000 reward was recently posted for her at-large attackers.
The conservative commentariat has reduced MacArthur Park to a caricature, describing it as a “dangerous, filthy, depressing shithole” and “open-air drug den” while applauding the use of ICE and military personnel to “scare everybody off”. The notion that men in tactical gear would have arrested scores of gang members and drug dealers to clean up the park is laughable: the vast majority of folks who’ve been scooped up in ICE raids this year have been workers, parents, and other long-term residents with no gang affiliations. According to a CNN investigation, public ICE data reveals that 75% of people booked into ICE custody have had no criminal records, other than immigration or traffic-related offences. Indeed, the agents who swooped into MacArthur Park made zero arrests — it was all just an expensive political show.
“The conservative commentariat has reduced MacArthur Park to a caricature.”
Trump has been repeatedly accused of using Los Angeles as a backdrop for his political cosplay, deploying 5,000 members of the National Guard in June — many of whom spent their time guarding federal buildings from graffiti out of boredom. These actions, clearly engineered to scare immigrant workers while providing fodder for his base, were nothing more than a “show of farce”. Law professor Evan Sorg described it as “spectacle policing”. “Political power is increasingly enacted through image and performance, where state authority is less about substantive governance and more about its carefully curated visibility,” wrote Song in an analysis.
The Democrats aren’t exempt from political theatre either. Mayor Bass’ insistence that MacArthur Park was merely the site of a children’s summer camp that morning where innocent kids were prevented from playing is disingenuous, and fails to acknowledge the reality of the park. But the Right’s celebration of these raids makes clear the broader agenda: criminalise homelessness, drug addiction, and migration to prop up a vistion of a nativist America.
After circling the park a couple times, I spotted a group of about 40 protesters standing by Wilshire Boulevard, which cuts through the centre of the park. Some waved Mexican flags, while others shouted “Deport Donald Trump!” and “It wouldn’t be LA without Mexicans!”
Many of the park’s regulars sat back and watched. “Oh look, they blocking the street now… maybe the police come,” said one of the older men sitting on a concrete retaining wall. He was part of a group of Central American elders who gather here most days to play dice and chess during. That day, they took a break from their games to show each other TikTok videos of the raid. I asked them if they were afraid of being outside, and getting scooped up by ICE. They shook their heads. A man with a grandfatherly smile said he was a citizen, while his younger friend said he believed the police were only looking for people with criminal records. The men smiled, asking where I was from — and whether I had a boyfriend. The younger man looked me up and down and said that if ICE came for me, he’d come save me himself. “Do you know chinga la migra?” they said, teaching me the chant that the protestors were now shouting. “La migra es ICE,” they said, “And chinga es…” They fumbled for the words in English, and put up their middle fingers at a passing cop car instead.
Passing cars honked their horns in solidarity, but the tension from the morning’s raid was quickly dissipating. A handful of independent journalists hanging out at the back of the group looked bored, some of them trading tips on how you can get paid for filming ICE content. I eventually got hungry, and wandered to a corner of the park where the street vendors typically sold food. The area was covered in a chain-link fence that was installed by the city a few months ago to prevent illegal vending. A poster on a traffic pole warned about the raid — apparently, community organisers had known it was coming. Down Alvarado Street, next to the iconic Langer’s Deli, many of the brick-and-mortar shops were also shuttered, their gates pulled down tight.
At the stores that were still open, some shopkeepers averted their eyes, saying “No, no…” and gesturing for me to move on. One young woman who was willing to talk to me told me her mother, who is undocumented, wanted to work that day, but she’d insisted that her mother hide upstairs. Another older woman tending to a plant store said she’s still open for business because — she pointed to her mouth — “necessito comer”, she needed to eat.
In such anxious environments, it’s difficult to discern the line between caution and paranoia. One of my foreign-born friends told me he’d been sheltering at home for weeks, only leaving for occasional grocery runs. Both of us shared a feeling of dismay that America was starting to resemble the authoritarian country we’d both fled from. On the other hand, the Central American elders’ belief that it’s only criminals getting deported also showed the power of hearsay. There’s no consensus on how to behave during the ICE raids.
Coming face-to-face with these Latino immigrants, however, suddenly snapped the situation into focus. So much is lost in the internet’s outrage-driven discourse, which trickles down into a fearful population consuming a mediated reality on their screens. The truth is found in these quieter moments — the conversations between the men playing chess in the park next to the protestors, the gentle resilience of the women watering the plants outside their businesses. In an era where dissociation and apathy are seductive coping mechanisms, and posting on social media passes as activism, sometimes the best thing you can do to cut through the bullshit is simply show up and bear witness.
As I was processing all of this, the woman at the plant store placed her hand on my arm. “Thank you,” she said, gently. Her gratitude surprised me, and I laughed it off, not knowing what to say. If I spoke better Spanish, I would have told her that I was afraid, too.
