The Price to Pay for President Trump’s Roving Patrols

Called the Latino Metropolis in a 2000 book by that name by Victor M. Valle and Rodolfo D. Torres, the greater Los Angeles area has more persons of Latino ancestry than any metropolitan area in the world.  Because Latinos are stereotyped as foreigners, President Trump with limited public resistance has made Los Angeles the epicenter of his so-called “mass deportation” campaign.  Besides mass deportations, the administration seeks to deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, many of them Latino, born on U.S. soil.  As seen in past mass deportation campaigns, the human costs of the campaign will likely have impacts on generations of Latinos and their sense of belonging in America.

Not all Latinos are immigrants.  Latinos in the United States are undocumented immigrants, lawful permanent residents, and U.S. citizens by birth or naturalization.  Latinos live and work in our communities and attend our schools and churches. Latinos serve in the military and are lawyers, judges, police officers, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.  Latinos serve as the Secretary of State, a Senator from California, and in many political offices.

Last week, a district court entered a temporary restraining order barring the U.S. government from employing roving patrols stopping Latinos indiscriminately in the Los Angeles area in the name of immigration enforcement.  With officers armed and often masked, patrols have no less than terrified Latinos.  In addition, National Guard and Marines patrolled MacArthur Park, a heavily Latino area, in a show of force that, as intended, terrified the community.  The parking lots at Home Depots in the San Gabriel Valley have been the sites of immigration enforcement.  From my experience growing up in that valley, just about everyone there probably was Latino. 

Whatever the outcome in the courts, damage already has been done by the Trump administration’s war on Latino immigrants.  Consider a chapter from LA history.  In the midst of the Great Depression, state and local law enforcement rounded up Latinos, U.S. citizens as well as immigrants, and removed them from the country.  They were rousted in public places, such as the park near the church La Placita, now ironically near what has become Olvera Street, which celebrates the area’s Mexican roots.  To save jobs and public benefits for true Americans, the Mexican repatriation removed approximately one million persons from the country.

For years after the repatriation, persons of Mexican ancestry in the Southwest feared being in public.  Some refused to leave home without passports, which reportedly is the case with some Latinos today.  Some Mexican Americans in post-World War II Los Angeles claimed to be Spanish, a whiter and more acceptable group.  I know this first hand as my Mexican American mother claimed a Spanish identity and would not teach her sons Spanish, which she had been punished for speaking in the public schools.  Latinos did not mobilize politically for decades after the repatriation.

The repatriation led to many people leaving the country.  The family of late California Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, a U.S. citizen by birth, left southern California on their own terms.  Living in Mexico for years, the Reynosos resorted to what today would be called self-deportation.

During the repatriation, hate coming from the highest levels of government – and repeated in headlines of the Los Angeles Times, combined with operations sweeping up Latinos on the streets of Los Angeles, sends a clear message to all Latinos and people of color:  You do not belong.  How else could anyone understand comments like President Trump’s claim that Mexicans were “criminals” and “rapists” in kicking off his successful 2016 bid for President.  Salvadorans and Haitians cannot be expected to feel welcomed when the President of the United States refers to their native countries as “s—holes” and proclaims that the United States should not be allowing them to remain here.  No immigrant of color can feel welcome when Trump claims that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.”  Haitians cannot feel wanted when falsely accused by the President of “eating our pets.”

Long after Donald Trump leaves office, the nation will live with the aftermath of the vicious attacks on Latinos and other immigrants.  The sting of censure and diminished sense of belonging will remain for many years and generations.

KJ