LOS ANGELES—You see a guy with a big-ass tattoo of St. Jude on his forearm and you know there’s a story and that a lot of that story is going to be horrifying.
Diego’s story is this: His wife was diagnosed with stage-four cancer, and the CT scans showed her organs covered with tumors. There was some question about whether to proceed with surgery or just let the disease run its murderous course. The procedure might not save her, and, even if it were successful, it would leave massive damage to her organs, a permanent colostomy bag, and a remaining lifetime, to whatever degree extended, of disability and pain. But give a person—a mother, with kids at home—a choice between that and certain death, and she’ll roll the dice.
“I didn’t want the decision on my conscience,” Diego said. “I told her I’d support what she decided, either way.” He had a lot of time to pray—the surgery went on for 15 hours—and when she had been stitched back up, the news was better than anybody could have expected. The scans had been misleading: The cancer was mainly on the surfaces of her organs, but had not penetrated them. She came out in far better shape than had been expected.
An according-to-Hoyle miracle? Maybe, maybe not. But her cancer is in remission, and Diego has a big-ass tattoo of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. For a while, he and his family seemed they would enjoy the blessing of the one thing he kept bringing up over the course of our conversation on a beautiful afternoon in downtown Los Angeles: a normal life.
Diego was just 10 years old when he and his family crossed the border at Nogales. His father had had some difficulty with the journey—leg cramps after three days of walking through the mountains with his four children—and at times worried that the coyotes (immigrant smugglers) would abandon the limping man and his family in the desert. They were not the only family making the trek, and human trafficking is not exactly an enterprise known for its “no man left behind” sensibility. Diego doesn’t remember much about the journey, other than thinking that he was going to miss his friends back home. He and his parents made it across the border, where they were quickly pulled over by the highway patrol, who called the stop in to the federal authorities. “But when he couldn’t get an answer from anyone in immigration, he just told us to go back,” Diego remembered. “You know how that works. We said ‘yes’ and made a U-turn, and then made another U-turn when he went away.”
They proceeded onward to California and what sounds, for all the world, like a normal life: Diego finished high school, got a job, married his wife and had children, and lived as a typical Southern Californian for many years. Ask him how long he’s been in California, and he’ll say, “My whole life.”
“He hasn’t set foot in Mexico since he first set foot in the United States—it is a foreign country to him.”
At one point, Diego secured protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program meant to help people such as him hold onto something like a normal life while the august ladies and gentlemen in Congress spend another 50 years or whatever it takes trying to figure out what to do about the 11 million or more illegal immigrants living in these United States. The Trump administration has tried to kill the program and has succeeded in hobbling it, and there is a persuasive argument that Barack Obama overstepped his legitimate presidential powers in creating it in the first place, so nobody really knows what DACA status is really worth. Diego works as a manager in a food-services business where he estimated that undocumented workers of one kind or another make up about 70 percent of the workforce, some of them childhood arrivals from Mexico like himself, others more recent immigrants from Mexico and points south. He hasn’t set foot in Mexico since he first set foot in the United States—it is a foreign country to him and, like most Americans, he doesn’t know much about it beyond what he sees in the news.
“I had DACA for a while, so I’ve seen the benefits of it,” he said. “If you have no documents, the opportunities aren’t there. Right now, the biggest thing is just how scary it is to go to work.”
Diego’s story isn’t exactly a Horatio Alger tale—he didn’t go off to an elite university (or even a community college) or found a successful tech company or tell his story to Oprah. But one of his children is in college now, and the other might go that way, too, after high school. And do you know who else went on to higher education? All of those doctors and nurses who took care of his wife while she was undergoing cancer treatment, a medical workforce that is notably immigrant-heavy. “It wasn’t just Caucasian doctors,” he recalled. “There were a lot of Asian doctors. A lot of immigrants.”
The Trump administration is reportedly operating under a self-imposed quota of 3,000 immigrant arrests a day and doesn’t seem to be too picky about prioritizing its targets—a matter of “quantity over quality” as one enforcement agent told the New York Post. Breaking up smuggling rings and infiltrating organized-crime groups takes time-consuming and expensive police work, so, instead, we have masked men in unmarked cars raiding the Bubble Bath Hand Car Wash in Torrance, California.
Diego doesn’t love the enforcement surge, of course—not as it is being executed, anyway—even though he concedes that some kind of enforcement is necessary. What really gets him, though, is the stuff that has come with the Trump administration’s crackdown: the ugly attitude toward immigrants categorically, and the fresh outpouring of casual racism that is suddenly a part of his previously more or less normal life. “It’s like … a disappointment,” he said. “I leave my house now, I look both ways, like I’m crossing the road.” But it isn’t traffic he’s looking out for.
Despite all that fear hanging over him and his family, Diego spoke a great deal about gratitude. “Even going through all that, and knowing that we had the best doctors—you know, stage four, your chances aren’t good. And, right now, she’s really good,” he said. “You have that here, and that’s a thing that you’re grateful for. Even with whatever’s going on in L.A., New York, Chicago. … I am really grateful for the opportunity of being in this country, even though it wasn’t my choice.”
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to have a life,” he continued. “I’ve met my wife. I have kids. I see the opportunities that they have now. My daughter is in university. She has a plan for the things that she wants to do. My son is in high school, and he has all these plans for what he wants to do. I’m the head of my household, and I go to work not knowing if I’m going to be able to come back home. … What would happen to my family?”
It is, of course, the case that there are proportionally more illegal immigrants working in car washes and kitchens and on tomato farms than there are who end up as hyper-educated oncologists, and there’s no need to muddy that water unnecessarily. But the water is muddy. There are gang members from El Salvador included in that 11 million figure—and some of them go on to commit heinous crimes—but there are also guys with kids in college majoring in psychology and wives with cancer in remission and hard jobs in commercial kitchens and St. Jude tattoos on their forearms who have been planted in these fruited plains since they were fourth graders. And those are very different stories.
(The Trump administration has already changed its stated position on certain categories of illegal workers (on farms and in hotels) a couple of times, but it isn’t doing that out of a newly discovered sense of nuance or dutiful priority: It simply convulses in response to stimulation, with no more thought than one of those twitching dead frogs kids used to run electricity through in middle-school biology classes.)
“People are afraid,” Diego said. “Everybody is. They’re afraid to go out to a restaurant. They’re afraid to go to work.” He mentioned a colleague who now spends hundreds of dollars a week on rideshare apps rather than a few bucks on a transit pass because she is afraid she will be rounded up at a bus stop. (ICE raids have targeted mass transit in Los Angeles County, brandishing their firearms at literal little old ladies from Pasadena.) Immigrant-services groups have been printing up flyers with warnings and advice that would have sounded outlandish a few years ago: what to do if there is an ICE raid on your church, if ICE is targeting patients in a hospital, or if there is ICE activity at an elementary school.
(The flyer does not cover every possibility, e.g.: What do you do when ICE agents drop their tactical pants and publicly urinate on the campus of a high school?)
“I’m close to my kids, but, you know, I need to work, and they’re busy,” Diego told me. “I don’t text and send messages all day. But, now, it’s, ‘Hey, how are you, how are you doing? How’s your day going?’ They worry. I know that they can’t have a normal day, because they’re just thinking about whether they’re going to see me tomorrow.”
I asked Diego what he’d say to the people in power if he had the opportunity to address them directly, and he replied that he didn’t think that they would listen even if he did. What about the American public at large? What should they know? “We’re not all bad people,” he said. “We work. We pay our taxes. It’s tough for someone who’s been here for so many years. One day, you’re just going to go and get your stuff and leave for somewhere else that you don’t even know?”
Taxes. College tuition. Overtime hours. Cancer in remission. The dream of a normal life, slipping away as America mutates into something stranger and dumber and meaner than it was when 10-year-old Diego and his father and brothers and sister first set foot on the northern side of the border.
“My favorite holiday is the Fourth of July. Really.”
“You know it’s bad when white people are walking around with their f—ing passports,” said Armando Gudino, executive director of the Los Angeles Worker Center Network, an advocacy group representing several discrete blocs of workers from the car wash business to garment workers. “Seriously. Americans I know, born here, are walking around with their f—ing passports. I know this one woman, who is light-complexioned, who said, ‘I know I don’t look Latina, but look at what they’re doing.’ So, that’s it: Non-brown-looking Latinos getting scared gives you an idea of how bad things are out here.”
It is possible that the fair-skinned are overreacting. “Nobody is rounding up Canadians and asking them, ‘What hospital were you born in?’” Gudino said. “I don’t know what f—ing hospital I was born in, and I’m second generation. Government is essentially disappearing Angelinos from their communities and their families with racial profiling, warrantless arrests, blocking their families and their access to attorneys, taking them into these dungeons without basic sanitary conditions, making people go without necessary medication for days.”
(Journalistic convention compels me to note that Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called these allegations “disgusting and categorically FALSE,” all-caps in the original. The fact that I live on Earth and am not mentally disabled compels me to note that McLaughlin works for a serial fabulist, Kristi Noem, who works for another serial fabulist, Donald Trump, who once created an imaginary friend to lie to the New York Post about his sex life, in an administration packed to the gills with pathological liars such as J.D. Vance, who has an especial penchant for lying about poor, non-white immigrants who have the bad taste to move to places where there are white people, such as Springfield, Ohio. I wouldn’t want to mislead Dispatch readers into believing that DHS denials of these claims—or of anything else—are worth taking seriously. Hooray for journalistic convention.)
It sometimes seems that nobody east of about Albuquerque has any real idea of what is going on in Southern California, which has at least this much in common with New York City: It isn’t much like the rest of the country, but you can’t understand the rest of the country if you don’t understand what’s happening there.
There’s a lot of old-fashioned, jacked-up Ford Super-Duty “Real America”™ out there in the fifty shades of beige sprawl of Los Angeles County, from the cinegenic Googie architecture of Pann’s Restaurant (that’s the one Vin Diesel wakes up in early in xXx; the one Tim Roth robs in Pulp Fiction is the Hawthorne Grill, owned by the same Greek-American family) to the endless dismal tide of prediabetic road-ragers in GMC Yukon XLs choking up all the byways between where you are and where you want to be. There may be all sorts of exotic, greenie-weenie weirdos working for Gavin Newsom, but the oilmen still have got honest-to-God working pumpjacks nodding day and night on both sides of La Cienega Boulevard bringing good old-fashioned petroleum up out of the golden California landscape. Powerlines and low-density development sprawl in every direction, and billboards direct injured Angelenos to attorneys (“The Amigo Rideshare Injury Lawyer”) and no-credit-check car dealers.
There is much that is familiar, but Los Angeles is very much its own place. Among other things, it has a very intense sense of old-school class politics that you don’t really see that much of in the rest of the country. It is different from Bernie Sanders-style class politics in that it involves people who are actually working class rather than people with MFAs who are playacting at being the Vanguard of the Great American Proletariat. Gudino’s work at the Los Angeles Worker Center Network is very much a part of that, focusing on “wage theft” (the practice of which ranges from outright shorting workers on their paychecks to denying them legally mandated breaks and benefits) and organizing workers outside of the manufacturing and public-sector workforces that dominate conventional labor-union politics.
Employment is, of course, the great magnet of illegal immigration, though not the only draw, and as the Trump administration and the business lobby consider special carveouts for favored industries, almost nobody ever makes explicit the underlying economic theory, i.e., that the United States needs to keep wages low in certain labor-intensive industries by importing poor people. And if those poor people happen to have no legal status and are therefore disinclined to make too much of a ruckus when this or that workplace rule or mandatory benefit is ignored, then nobody is going to make a big deal about it in the quarterly report.
“We have eight different worker centers that function independently, organized around particular industries,” Gudino explained. “One of those is our car wash-worker center, which is ground zero for all things in modern-day Gestapo operations. We have another for warehouse workers, one for garment workers, and so on. What they provide for us is a direct line to what is going on in the streets of L.A.”
And what is going on down at the car wash?
“We have agents rushing in, almost always not identifying themselves, masked,” Gudino claimed. “They go in profiling, detaining, attempting to question, arresting, and carrying off people in what we now refer to as kidnappings.” It sounds crazy, but the feds really are just trolling Home Depot parking lots without any thought that there are genuine born-in-the-USA American citizens who sometimes do day labor. There is also a good deal of what might be called caudillo theater, groups of federal officers preening and swanning around in MacArthur Park, some of them on horseback, and brandishing weapons at … nobody in particular, helicopters cruising overhead. It isn’t a show of force, exactly—more of an aesthetic exercise, puppet-theater Falangism. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the man who plays Renfield to Trump’s outer-borough Dracula and who demanded that federal agents give up the procedural investigatory stuff and just start occupying Home Depot, is finally getting his way, with ICE agents sprinting in slapstick fashion through the onion fields of Oxnard and demanding that people at bus stops produce their papers not obviously based on anything more than the fact that they kinda-sorta look maybe illegal to the boys at ICE.
“That’s the environment we’re seeing across the city,” Gudino said. “People sitting on a bench waiting for a bus, and the only problem is that they’re brown, slightly toasted-looking Latinos, stopped and arrested and carried away. That’s our complaint.” Gudino’s group has filed a lawsuit seeking to pause the arrests while the procedures are reviewed for possible constitutional violations of the sort he refers to as “Gestapo bulls—t.” But he is not confident that the roundups will end, or even slow down, regardless of what the courts say.
“The odds that these motherf—ers are going to stop pushing people up against a fence and putting them in a van?” he said. “Zero. They’re not going to stop. If the judge grants a preliminary stay to assess the goings-on by the FBI and others and they don’t stop—now you’re in violation of a federal court order. It’s going to get a lot messier. It’s going to get a lot more interesting.”
Go from Skid Row (where, thanks to the genius of Los Angeles housing policy, you can now buy a two-bedroom condo for $3.1 million) past the Grammy Museum and under the 110, and you’ll find yourself at the door of the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, an affiliate of Catholic Charities of Los Angeles. It is a large undertaking: some 60 to 70 staff members, many of them lawyers, representing 800 to 900 clients a year in court and providing other services to another 10,000 or more.
Lots of people. Lots of resources. Lots of demand for their services. Considerable backlog. Esperanza’s lawyers face some of the challenges you might expect working with low-income immigrants (Spanish is only the beginning of the foreign-language issue) and some that are new and unusual, i.e., clients who have disappeared into a chaotic federal detention system and who cannot be located by their families and others attempting to help them.
“You may have noticed there’s not a lot of detention centers around in downtown Los Angeles,” said Kimberly Plotnik, program director at Esperanza. “The detention centers are often placed far out in the community. It’s hard to get to, and, once you’re there, it’s effectively a prison. People are walking around in jumpsuits. It’s very hard for family members to get through and very hard to access an attorney once you’re there.”
Plotnik and her colleagues do not put it this way—for obvious reasons—but what they describe is a system in which the government is creating powerful new disincentives for attempting to comply with U.S. legal procedure. “Normally, generally speaking, clients in removal proceedings show up to court, they’re in a process. They’re doing the right thing and they go through a process,” Plotnik said. “What we’re seeing is those norms disappear.”
“At this point, with every option there’s risks that could lead to them being separated from their child, being separated, from their families, to potentially return to a country where they’re at risk of being killed.”
Kimberly Plotnik
Program Director of the Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project
For example, even when a removal case has been dismissed, ICE is arresting and detaining the defendants as soon as the proceeding is complete. “This is a huge change,” Plotnik added. “They’re here without status, but we have not normally seen people without status just be rounded up and put into detention. That’s completely new.”
In addition to legal advice, advocates have, out of necessity, begun to spend more time on what Plotnik calls “family preparedness.” In short: If you show up at court for your hearing and, for your troubles, get sent off and held effectively incommunicado at some detention camp, where do your children live? Who takes care of them?
“We have to be honest about the realities of every choice that they make, because each choice brings complex consequences,” Plotnik told me. “And at this point, with every option there’s risks that could lead to them being separated from their child, being separated, from their families, to potentially return to a country where they’re at risk of being killed. So the various options are really difficult.”
“Those conversations are really challenging.”
If the low-slung sprawl of central Los Angeles seems like a world away from the boutiques and trendy coffee shops of Silver Lake or the Bobos in Paradise delights of Echo Park, the distance between the people doing the on-the-ground work with immigrants and those miserable white kids whose hobby is organizing protests traverses a Nietzschean chasm vaster than Riverside County.
Dispatch multimedia producer Victoria Holmes and I attended a little Independence Day rally that was organized by the Women’s March people on a little triangular sliver of park off Hollywood Boulevard, where there was much shouting about immigrants by a riffraff of young and overwhelmingly Anglo and teal-haired and black-veil-wearing protest groupies. They were singing the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles,” blissfully unaware that they are precisely the people being mocked in the song, too-progressive-for-their-own-good cool kids who, under the leadership of arch-villain and mandatory-meditation-in-schools advocate Jerry Brown, set up death camps to liquidate the uncool with “organic poison gas.” (It is of some interest that characters from 1979 punk songs are still on the scene, at least at the edges. Things move slowly, until they don’t—Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra, that parochial Californian, could not foresee President Donald Trump.) A young graduate student in mathematics, down from Santa Barbara to take in the big show, consented to be interviewed and then turned paranoid, asking if we could blur out his face, unaware that his anonymity had already been ensured by his inability to say anything interesting. I kind of wanted to sing him a chorus of “Holiday in Cambodia,” but I fear it would be lost on him.
Everything is simple when you’re waving a placard at people with whom you are in violent agreement, but in the real world, things are more complicated.
In the real world, there are somewhere between 11 million and 14 million immigrants illegally present in these United States. Some of them are family men and good citizens in all but legal status, brought here as children by parents seeking work on farms, in hotels, on construction sites; some of them are gangsters. Some of them are not people Americans probably would elect to take as immigrants if we had been asked about it; some of them we are lucky to have. Their stories—and their sometimes desperate situations, and their aspirations toward that “normal life” that many of them dream of—doesn’t have much to do with transgender ideology or Hamas or veganism or Jeff Bezos’ wedding, in spite of chants and placards brandished by the awkward young white upwardly mobile Angelinos who have for some reason appointed themselves to speak on behalf of people about whom they know little or nothing.
There are many difficult things to balance in this. One—often overlooked by our progressive friends—is that U.S. immigration policy is meant to serve U.S. interests, which probably are not best served by taking in every person who has suffered some injustice, including many serious and cruel injustices, in a badly governed country somewhere in the world. Many business leaders insist that there is a labor shortage, and many progressives who would normally be inclined toward skepticism when it comes to self-serving claims from the business community accept that at face value, with no attention to the underlying economic assumptions. Drug crime and the mafias that dominate the industry are serious problems, but immigration is really incidental to that at most, the main driver of drug crime in the U.S. being U.S. demand for drugs.
Would wages for farm workers and hotel cleaners be higher if there were less immigration overall and fewer illegal workers in the market? Probably. Would prices for food and hotel rooms rise as a result? Probably. Are the people who dislike high levels of immigration on cultural rather than economic grounds racists and xenophobes? Some of them. Are there good-faith, non-economic objections to high levels of immigration and, particularly, to uncontrolled immigration? Of course. And as a matter of practical politics: Would Donald Trump be president of these United States, doing untold damage to our institutions and standing in the world, if Republicans or Democrats had taken a halfway serious approach to the very real issues related to immigration 20 years ago? I don’t think that he would.
How these things get worked out in Los Angeles is probably going to be different from how they get worked out in Greenwich or Detroit or Seattle. I think of Los Angeles a little like I think of Miami, Las Vegas, and New Orleans: I am glad that those cities are there and that they have the respective characters they have, but you don’t want the whole country to be Calle Ocho or the Strip or Bourbon Street. (And, in fact, there is a lot more to those cities than their most famous thoroughfares.) Los Angeles is complicated, home to a lot of tech and media, a lot of eastward- and southward-facing international trade, but also to the nation’s largest and most economically significant garment-manufacturing sector. Los Angeles County, in and of itself, has as much socioeconomic complexity as a good-sized European country, with a population somewhere between those of Austria and Greece. We aren’t going to sort that complexity out by staging Operation Overlord in miniature in the parking lot of Del Taco.
The Trump administration’s big idea is the cruelty theater of “Alligator Alcatraz” and parading thick-necked federals in tactical vests through MacArthur Park and arresting the compliance-oriented people who actually show up at their hearings—because they are the easiest ones to arrest. It’s the familiar process-as-punishment stuff, basically a way of creating extrajudicial punishments as a means of deterrence. Republicans had also ried to put a $1,000 application fee for asylum-seekers in their big spending bill, an act of purely histrionic vindictiveness that was trimmed to a less dramatic $100 in the final legislation, plus another $100 a year so that we at least have the moral satisfaction of financially penalizing penniless asylum-seekers for the backlog of our slow-moving federal bureaucracy. It’s dumb stuff.
But what’s the big, smart idea competing with Trump’s big, dumb one? You aren’t going to hear it emanating from beneath the aquamarine locks of the idiot children of Los Angeles, their eyes ablaze with the fire of social justice and the big, stupid grins on their faces betraying just how much fun this is for them. It is theater, and the point of theater is catharsis, which in our time is a top-shelf luxury good if ever there were one.
But there’s at least one guy out there, somewhere between the shadows and the California sunshine, who just wants a “normal life.” I’m sure he’d vote for that, if he could. For now, that’s just one more prayer to the patron saint of lost causes.
