In California, Trump tests his autocratic national plans

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

You can be for or against the Los Angeles demonstrations protesting the raids and immigration policies of Donald Trump. But let’s not fool ourselves. By federalizing the California National Guard and sending in the Marines, who were not requested by the state, Trump is generating a crisis where there was none and exploiting the images to feed his narrative that it’s the immigrants who are the “criminals” and “invaders” who have to be removed from the country.

No one condones violence or vandalism. But the demonstrations have been largely peaceful, according to press reports, except for some isolated incidents that were being handled by local authorities. Protestors reacted to a series of reckless ICE operations, particularly in the Fashion District and at Home Depot stores. The protests intensified precisely because of the presence of the National Guard.

People have the right to protest what they consider to be the excesses of the Trump administration: sending ICE agents — masked and armed to the teeth — to detain workers, fathers and mothers, and even labor leaders like David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in California, who was punched, detained, and now accused of “conspiracy to impede an officer.”

For Trump, however, the Los Angeles protestors are “instigators and paid troublemakers.” But he calls “patriots” those who assaulted the federal Capitol on January 6, 2021, under the pretense that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and perpetrated bloody attacks against the Capitol Police. What’s more, those who ended up in jail are now free because Trump commuted their sentences.

Trump and his deputy chief of staff and national security advisor, Stephen Miller, created chaos to sustain the false idea that there is a “national emergency” because we are being “invaded” at the border with Mexico. That suddenly justifies, for them, the application of draconian measures. Trump doesn’t rule out invoking the controversial Insurrection Act that permits him to deploy the armed forces to suppress riots in Los Angeles.

At the same time, he is seeking support for the $151.3 billion included in the Senate budget proposal that would make ICE the best-funded federal agency, to enforce Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.

President Trump, who smells opportunities like a shark smells blood in the water, saw an opening to federalize the National Guard and send soldiers, despite opposition from California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who affirms that there is no justification for the deployment.

What we are witnessing is another stage in the escalation of the war Trump declared against immigrants. First, he said he would focus on “criminals,” but quickly began with the detention and deportation of working immigrants without a criminal history, including established immigrants with U.S. citizen children and grandchildren.

From there he began to widen his net to include documented immigrants, leaving them unprotected upon eliminating protections extended to them through programs like TPS and humanitarian parole, among others, or students with visas, Dreamers, and asylum seekers or beneficiaries. Even citizens and permanent residents have been captured in the raids.

They also began to detain people in the immigration courts, in restaurants, businesses, and at traffic stops.

A new poll from YouGov found that 50% of people reject the way that Trump is managing the issue of deportations; 45% disapprove of the deployment of the National Guard, compared to 38% who approve of it; and 47% oppose sending the Marines, compared to 34% who approve of it.

In that way, California has once again become a laboratory of all that can happen at the national level. In this political theater with the Democrat Newsom, Trump tests how far his plans to militarize the immigration apparatus at the national level can go.

Days before a military parade that coincides with his birthday — at a cost of $45 million tax dollars — Trump takes another step toward the autocracy to which he aspires.

The original Spanish version is here.