Trump blundered in L.A. riots. So did protesters who waved Mexican flags

Andres Oppenheimer

It is hard to take the Trump administration seriously when it claims that it sent the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles because there was a “migrant invasion,” and that “this is a fight to save civilization.”

Really? Despite the Los Angeles protesters’ own blunders, which I’ll get to in a minute, both assertions — the first one by Trump, the second one by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — are ridiculous. Here’s why:

First, by several measures, there was no more destruction of public property during the weekend L.A. riots than at the Dodgers’ 2024 World Series celebrations and other sports events.

And there were certainly far fewer casualties at the latest Los Angeles demonstrations than at the Jan. 6, 2021, takeover of the Capitol by a violent pro-Trump mob.

The attack on the Capitol resulted in seven deaths, including suicides, and 150 police officers injured, in addition to widespread damage at the U.S. Congress. By comparison, there were no deaths and only a few injuries at the Los Angeles protests. A handful of Waymo self-driving cars were set on fire.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s deployment of the National Guard was “purposely inflammatory,” and warned that it would only help escalate tensions. Trump was the first president in more than half a century to send in National Guard troops against the wishes of local authorities.

But Trump wanted to score a political point. With the economy shrinking and his tariff wars risking a recession, he wants the national conversation to center on immigration, where he still enjoys higher ratings than Democrats, rather than on the economy.

Second, Trump’s entire narrative that an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants is allegedly driving up crime rates is based on a series of fallacies.

In fact, the flow of undocumented migrants fell by more than 70% in 2024, and has continued to fall since, according to Border Patrol figures. There’s no foreign “invasion.”

And contrary to Trump’s cherry-picked stories of immigrant crimes, undocumented immigrants are, on average, half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as U.S.-born citizens, according to a study by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Third, from an economic point of view, America should welcome immigrants. Because of declining birth rates and the massive retirement of baby boomers, the United States “faces high risks of shortages in critical industries,” according to a new report by the Washington D.C.-based Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.

Already, there are labor shortages in the healthcare, social assistance and construction industries. These industries rely heavily on immigrants, who fill jobs that most Americans don’t want to do.

Of course, Trump claims that he supports legal immigration. But that argument sounds increasingly hollow given his crusade against immigrants who are legally in the country.

Among them are more than 500,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders from places like Venezuela and Haiti, and more than 530,000 DACA beneficiaries, or children of undocumented parents who were brought to the country as infants.

Just as misleadingly, administration officials claim that they are mainly trying to deport criminals. But ICE roundups don’t seem to focus on criminals. The Los Angeles protests were sparked by ICE arrests of immigrants who were waiting for work at a Home Depot parking lot and workplaces around the city.

Having said all of this, the Los Angeles protesters played right into Trump’s anti-immigrant narrative by waving Mexican flags.

While demonstrators have the constitutional right to march with whatever flags they want, and most did it to express their pride in their ancestors, their waving of Mexican flags was a public relations disaster. It gave the Trump administration and xenophobes and racists within its base ammunition to paint them as ungrateful — and even hostile — to the United States.

Summing up, it’s laughable to call the Los Angeles demonstrators a “threat to civilization,” and send in the Marines. Much more of a threat to civilization are the violent rioters who broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6 trying to overturn an election, causing several deaths and wounding more than a hundred police officers, and were later pardoned and praised as “patriots” by Trump.