On Deportations and Riots

The Weekly Take

Photo by Flavio on Unsplash

[Note: In an attempt to get back to writing on a regular basis and as a way to cover more topics, I’m starting The Weekly Take, where I’ll briefly give my thoughts on one of the bigger news stories of the week. This will be in addition to my longer, more in-depth articles, which take much longer to research and write and are more difficult for me to put out as often as I’d like. Hopefully this will help me become more consistent with my writing, and will give regular readers of Thoughts Into Words more content in between my typical articles.]

Ice Raids and Riots in LA

The Context:

Last Friday, June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out a series of raids in Los Angeles, California, which sparked large protests, as explained in a timeline of the events by ABC News. While many of these protests likely started out as relatively peaceful, they quickly devolved into riots, which have included vandalism, arson, looting, and violence toward law enforcement.

On June 7, Trump ordered 2,000 California National Guard troops to LA, a number which has since risen to over 4,000. Trump then deployed 700 Marines, a move which many people have viewed as escalatory. Trump has been criticized for sending in the National Guard by LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom. The argument is that a state’s National Guard typically falls under the authority of the state’s governor, although there are times when a president can lawfully deploy them.

The Take:

This is a very tense situation, and there are legitimate grievances on both sides. As I’ve written about before, the Biden era immigration policies did facilitate the migration of massive amounts of people into this country, which has had real-world effects on state and local governments; and some of the people who were allowed in have gone on to commit violent crimes. However, most migrants are just regular people who took advantage of an opportunity to better the lives of themselves and their families, and I don’t believe that someone should be punished for that.

If someone enters this country illegally and then commits violent/property crimes — the only crimes where there’s actually a victim — then I have no problem with them being deported as long as they’ve been given due process. Any migrants who may have crossed the border illegally but are otherwise peaceful should be permitted to stay and should be given a simple and attainable path toward legal residency.

While some migrants do deserve to be deported in my opinion, the policy of having masked ICE agents raid homes and workplaces and place people in unmarked vehicles is abhorrent. Aside from the terrible optics created by such a policy, there are other issues as well. There’s always the possibility that ICE mistakenly detains a US citizen, which has reportedly already happened. The existence of militarized law enforcement agencies such as ICE also pose a risk to the civil liberties of everyday Americans, so naturally, using the actual military as a form of law enforcement carries an even greater risk of authoritarian overreach — if these agencies or the military can be turned on migrants today, it’ll be that much easier for them to be used against citizens sometime in the future.

This all comes as the Trump administration has been sending migrants to an abusive mega-prison in El Salvador — a country many of these migrants are not even from — without first giving them due process. The Trump administration has also been attempting to deport legal noncitizens for speech that is critical of the US’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. While many of the people who voted for Trump in the last presidential election support Trump’s policy of deporting illegal immigrants, the tactics that have recently been put to use are ugly and authoritarian, and they are also setting dangerous precedents that could potentially end up impacting average US citizens.

While I disagree with the way the Trump administration has gone about conducting these ICE raids and with the decision to send the military into LA, that doesn’t mean I support rioters damaging property, committing acts of violence, or looting local businesses. Both sides of this situation have escalated to unnecessary levels, and I hope things calm down soon — although it kind of feels like we should all brace ourselves for another summer of riots and protests, as recent demonstrations have been taking place all across the country.

There may be legitimate reasons to protest, but engaging in violence and property damage will certainly tarnish the overall movement, elicit harsher responses from law enforcement, and move more people to support the Trump administration’s authoritarianism, which will in turn give people even more reason to protest. Hopefully this cycle will quickly come to an end without too much violence.

[Note: I initially wanted to cover the recent escalation between Israel and Iran in this post, but as I started writing it I came to the conclusion that I should devote a longer article to that story. I’ll hopefully get that out by the middle of next week, so watch for that in your inbox. Thanks for reading the first edition of The Weekly Take; if things go according to plan you should all be able to expect much more content from me from here on out. Thank you all for your patience and continued support over the last year or so as I’ve struggled to write as often as I’d like, I greatly appreciate it.]

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