CalMatters: What it’s like to live through LA’s long deportation summer

Last week, Nigel Duara for CalMatters paints a somber picture of the impacts on life in Los Angeles of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, which has terrorized communities but in the end will not result in the removal of the eleven million undocumented immigrants who live in the United States.

Duara writes that silence 

“is the consequence of the largest planned deportation in American history. The Trump administration’s goal is to make life as unnavigable, unstable and uncomfortable as possible for people in the country illegally. The administration’s hope is they leave on their own, or with their kids in tow. . . .  

What remains are places that used to be: a shuttered restaurant, empty benches on weekends at MacArthur Park and even an abandoned taco stand, meat still on the grill hours later. The silence is the point.

Beneath that silence, behind locked doors, is a population in hiding. They were dishwashers and garment factory stitchers. They sold fruit on the street. This is the echo of the city they left behind. . . . 

LA’s long, nervous summer entered its third month in August, but the immigration worksite raids in June and the smaller number of street-level stops in the following weeks have not brought the city to a standstill. 

But it is a city diminished.”

I hope that the Latino Metropolis can recover.  If it does, as I have written before, recovery will take generations.

KJ