[Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times]
The Trump administration is directing staged made-for-TV (or for-TikTok) spectacles familiar to tinpot dictators. No American alive has witnessed anything quite like this before. The effort, designed to intimidate, has been successful thus far. It is the advent of a police state.
Yesterday in Los Angeles, California, scores of armed, masked federal agents, outfitted in military fatigues and helmets, marched across a city park, led by agents on horseback — backed by the National Guard, as armored vehicles with gun turrets blocked Wilshire Boulevard and a Black Hawk helicopter flew overhead. Minutes before the U.S. conquest of MacArthur Park, children at summer camp had been rushed from the soccer field into safety.
“What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a news conference on Monday afternoon, adding that she had traveled regularly into conflict zones as a member of Congress. “It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”
The mayor called out the operation as un-American, asking: “What happened to the criminals, the drug dealers, the violent individuals? Who were in the park today were children. It was their summer camp, their summer day camp.”
City councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, in whose district the park sits, had a message for Americans: “Please understand that what’s happening here in the city of Los Angeles, we are the canary in the coal mine. What you see happening in MacArthur Park is coming to you … So wake up.”
This malicious regime will continue in Los Angeles, as Gregory Bovino, a Customs and Border Protection chief in Southern California, confirmed. “Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon,” Mr. Bovino told a Fox News reporter. “We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
This isn’t bravado, nor may we expect it to be confined to a single Democratic-led city. Not after the Republican majority in Congress approved Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which provides $170 billion for Trump’s expansive border and immigration efforts, extending the coercive reach of the federal government.
Theda Skocpol (Harvard sociologist and political scientist) observed that while the huge tax giveaways for the hugely wealthy and the unprecedented cuts to healthcare and food assistance are significant, the “massive militarization of ICE is the real heart of this law – didn’t J. D. Vance say just that a little while ago?“
Since law enforcement in the United States is primarily the province of state and local governments, Skocpol thought (last spring) that our country was protected from an authoritarian takeover. That was then.
But now I see that the Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.
Included in the $170 billion Republicans in Congress appropriated for border and immigration activities are $45 billion for detention centers, $30 billion for ICE to staff and run the centers, $46.5 billion to complete the border wall (though the money can be shifted to other DHS operations), $5 billion for Customs and Border Protection facilities, and a few billions more to round out the picture. These figures dwarf current spending. The 2024 ICE budget was $9.6 billion. The Bureau of Prisons budget for 2024 was $8.3 billion.
And remember: the raids and detentions are scooping up peaceful, working class immigrants, not murderers, rapists, drug dealers, or anyone else who poses a threat to the community. Few have criminal records or histories of violence.
Professor Skocpol identified the aim of Trump’s militarization of ICE “to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.” She concluded:
“This is the key story unfolding right now. Governors and civic groups and media outlets need to get clear on this imminent threat and work together across the board to reveal and push back against the emerging ICE police state.”