Los Angeles
Let's not look away
We need to talk about Los Angeles. Or as activists are calling it, the testing ground.
You may remember that Los Angeles was one of the first cities hit by the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That was June of 2025. Ten months later, ICE hasn’t left. A mayoral election is on the horizon, FIFA and the Olympics are on their way, and communities are being terrorized throughout downtown LA — all the while, many Angelenos have no idea what’s happening.
The size of Los Angeles contributes to that. But the wealth inequality and the segregation — both by design — are what’s really keeping these communities apart. The city itself is built to look away.
When I started writing this, I thought it would be a break from American Lies. But here we are.
What’s happening on the ground
Raids began in June of 2025. Protests erupted. Stephen Miller dubbed the community response a violent insurrection. The mainstream media cycle moved on — to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to St. Paul — but ICE never left Los Angeles. California now has the second highest number of detainees in the country, surpassed only by Texas. And some of the private prisons holding those detainees are operating outside the bounds of state and local law.
California City is one of them. A CoreCivic facility that was never designed to hold the population it’s now holding, California City is maxed out. You may have heard of it because of Masuma Khan, a seventy-something year old mother who had lived in the United States for over twenty years. She was a victim of green card fraud. While detained at California City, they withheld her medication and nearly put her on a plane.
Masuma Khan is now the namesake of SB 995, a bill currently being argued on the floor in Sacramento. If passed, it would fine companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group $25,000 per day for every day a violation is reported. This matters because right now, at the federal level, there is virtually no oversight of these private prisons. State regulation isn’t the ceiling — it’s the floor we don’t even have yet.
Activists and organizers have been relentless. Protesting, helping families reunite, confronting politicians, showing up. But the city’s leadership has been largely silent. California City has been mentioned publicly by the governor exactly once.
They want us to look away. And the systems are designed to help us do exactly that.
This is not unprecedented. Say it with me.
I need you to remove the word unprecedented from your vocabulary when describing what is happening to immigrant communities right now. Like yesterday. Because the American government has banked on this specific lie so many goddamn times, that this is new, that this is exceptional, that this could never happen again.
It is not new. It is not exceptional. And it has happened before in Los Angeles.
Operation Wetback. 1954.
First, the name. Let’s sit with it for a moment. Wetback is a slur. It was a slur in 1954 when the United States government named a military operation after it. It is a slur right now in 2026. The decision to name it that was not accidental. It was a declaration of exactly how much humanity the people being targeted were afforded by their government.
Dwight Eisenhower was president. What followed was a militarized sweep to deport Mexican immigrants from the American Southwest. What is critical to understand is that legal immigration had been significant in the first half of the twentieth century and not unlike 2026, American citizens got swept up in the dragnet. Constitutional rights were violated. Human rights were violated. Families were separated. People who had every legal right to be in this country were put on buses and boats and dropped across the border.
Sound familiar? It should. It is the operational playbook being run today, seventy years later.
The lynching of the twentieth century (and present, but that’s a chat for another day).
Between 1877 and 1950, at least 4,000 Black Americans were lynched in the United States. These were not random acts of individual violence. They were community events. They were attended by families. They were photographed and turned into postcards. They were announced in local newspapers in advance. Local law enforcement didn’t stop them — local law enforcement often participated.
The federal government was asked repeatedly to pass anti-lynching legislation, which they didn’t, until 2022! The message was not subtle: certain lives were not going to be protected by the state. Certain communities were going to be terrorized into compliance and the rest of the country was going to look away. The mainstream of white America looked away. They had been told it wasn’t happening to them. They had been told they didn’t need to care.
Japanese Internment 1942.
One hundred and twenty thousand people. Two thirds of them American citizens. Removed from their homes, their businesses, their communities, and placed in internment camps by executive order following Pearl Harbor. The Supreme Court upheld it. The press largely supported it. And white Americans, by and large, let it happen — some of them moved into Japanese American homes and took over Japanese American businesses while their neighbors were behind barbed wire.
The government told white America this was about national security. It was about race. It was about property. It was about making sure certain people understood that their citizenship was conditional.
Judicial System
If you follow me across platforms, you also know this is why I am an advocate for felons being able to vote throughout their tenure in prison and afterwards. Because what the government is comfortable doing to one (group) of us, they are comfortable doing to all of us.
The lie underneath all of it
For white America, the lie has always been this: we don’t see it happening, it’s not happening to us, so why do we need to care? It won’t ever happen to us.
But what we are watching right now is a government that is practicing. Los Angeles is the testing ground. The income disparity, the segregation, the sheer size of the city — all of it makes Los Angeles the perfect place to run an operation and count on communities not being able to find each other. When we are kept separate from each other we are denied each other’s humanity. We only know who the other is through news organizations, through television, through movies — all of which have largely moved on.
Splitting the United States was by design. Los Angeles pioneered it. And what is being done to immigrant communities in downtown LA right now is banking on that separation holding.
This is always the design of the system. It has always expected white Americans not to go to bat for their brothers and sisters. And historically, we haven’t.
How can you help?
Los Angeles activists need our help. Many are facing arrests both by the Los Angeles Police Department and by the federal government. They need money, and they need media attention. Unbiased media attention. You can support their efforts here.
If you’re media or know anyone in traditional media, please send me a note at info.amymaccc@gmail.com
For the on the ground news follow:
We interviewed Catie and Alexandria over on The Foolish Optimist dropping May 18th, and will be speaking about this on YouTube later this week. Read with me TheBookShop.Org.