From my perspective, it just seemed like a way to terrorize a neighborhood and intimidate the people living there, and intimidate the city in a way that they've been trying to accomplish for the last six weeks, and it wasn't fun. So were there orders? There were no orders to disperse.

Last week, over 100 agents from nine federal agencies stormed a bucolic public park in Los Angeles, claiming it was a hotbed of terrorism and lawlessness. In fact, heavily armed soldiers in camouflage found a group of young children attending a summer camp. This was a show of force meant to intimidate, shock, and awe, but just like Trump’s military parade in Washington, DC, it ended up pathetic and farcical. In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with longtime journalist Mel Buer, who was at MacArthur Park and witnessed this sad spectacle. We talk about what she saw  and how is simply part of a recent history of attacks on mostly brown people. We get Mel’s thoughts on both the broader national context, and how local people and longstanding immigrant’s rights groups are resisting and fighting back.

Mel Buer is an LA-based independent journalist covering labor, social movements, and community organizing. 

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

Let's start with you telling us what happened at MacArthur Park and some of the fallout from it, and then after that, we can get into the deeper historical background. Could you tell us first a little bit about MacArthur Park?

What kind of park is it in the first place? What's the neighborhood it's in? It was described by some federal agents as a hotbed of lawlessness, a breeding ground for terrorism, with members of MS-13 infiltrating every corner of the park when, in fact, there was a summer camp going on. There were young kids.

Tell us about what MacArthur Park is and then what you saw there.

MEL BUER

MacArthur Park is a park that's just in downtown LA. It is in a heavily immigrant neighborhood. The city council member Eunisses Hernandez referred to the park as the Ellis Island of Los Angeles or of the West Coast. You can find a pretty sizable unhoused population that lives in the park.

You also have quite a few immigrant vendors and restaurants, places where folks live in the area surrounding the park. It is generally a pretty nice place to be. I can't speak too much to the conditions in terms of what the unhoused folks are living under in the park, but I will say that on the morning of this photo op operation, whatever you would like to call it, we had received some social media posts and other information that a raid might be happening in MacArthur Park on Monday. So we, myself, my reporting partner Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, and a number of other journalists showed up at 7:30. We had no idea if and when this was going to happen. We were hoping it was just a rumor, as some raids have been just that—rumors. So we spent a lot of time just walking around the park in the morning. The neighborhood was just waking up.

A solid group of teenagers was having a soccer game on the soccer field; it was a generally quiet morning. Not much was going on in terms of overt reasons for needing to send the military into the park. Now, Ken Stein's reporting in the aftermath has noted that the operation was meant to be a sort of operation to stop illegal ID sales, and I can't speak to that. I don't have information about that. But what I can say is that the morning didn’t seem like much was going on. That's all I have to say about that.

PALUMBO-LIU

Then what happened? What I heard was around a hundred federal agents showed up to shut down a fake ID operation.

BUER

Right around 10:30. We were on the main sort of Wilshire, which is an artery that goes right through the middle of the park. We were sitting on a sidewalk bridge, just talking with each other, trying to get a sense of whether this was going to happen or not. We looked up towards Wilshire and Alvarado, and all of a sudden, there was this convoy of trucks, vans, horse carriers, and armored vehicles. They just kept coming, and they surrounded the park and jumped out. Suddenly, we were surrounded by dozens of very heavily armored officers, military personnel, Gregory Bovino, the CBP number one here in California, and a number of folks on horses. I don't know; it was a very—let me put it this way—I spent a lot of time in the first week after the George Floyd uprising kicked off in Minneapolis, and that was the last time that I had seen heavily armored individuals taking over a neighborhood. Folks have seen the National Guard downtown protecting federal buildings and showing up every once in a while to ICE raids here in Los Angeles, but this, I think, was on a different level in many ways.

The Border Patrol was hassling reporters. They were trying to push us out of the way. They got on the cavalry horses and walked through the soccer field and through an area of the park with trees where folks were sleeping and sitting underneath those trees. I haven't felt that way in a long time, seeing the military coming through a quiet neighborhood in a place where I spend time. It was pretty clear through the work of activists and through folks warning each other that this might be happening in the park, trying to clear out the park, that whatever they had come for, they weren't going to be able to do because it was functionally empty by the time they showed up. So it became clear that it turned into a photo op.

From my perspective, it just seemed like a way to terrorize a neighborhood and intimidate the people living there, and intimidate the city in a way that they've been trying to accomplish for the last six weeks, and it wasn't fun. So were there orders? There were no orders to disperse.

PALUMBO-LIU

What were they yelling at people? What was their interface with the public?

BUER

The public showed up pretty quickly. There were a lot of folks who showed up and were yelling at them on the sidewalk, telling them to leave the neighborhood. From what I could see, they didn't have very many face-to-face interactions with people. They just stood there, and Mayor Bass showed up and got on the phone with presumably someone from DHS telling them to leave. The whole interaction lasted, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes to an hour, and I really don't think that they got what they came for in terms of what they were hoping to accomplish in the park.

The public was very upset. Understandably, no one likes to see the military rolling through their neighborhood, upsetting the calm of a park where folks are playing, where there were folks fishing in the pond, and families walking around trying to get their kids to school or to pick up groceries—no one wants to see this occupation at all. It's a very jarring, alarming experience. Their anger is justified in standing on the sidewalk and saying something to these military officials. So did they leave the park and go into the neighborhoods at all? I think there were some news choppers that followed them farther into East Los Angeles. We lost track of them pretty quickly. It was difficult for us to determine where they went back to after that, as there are some rumors and reports that perhaps they did some immigration operations farther in East Los Angeles, but I can't confirm that.

The one thing that really strikes me about not just this operation but these raids is that oftentimes you're getting this information a little bit belatedly because people don’t always know where these raids are going to happen. It seems that when you're receiving this information secondhand or belatedly from people who just happen to be there when something kicks off, it really does give you the sense that they melt back into the city without getting a chance to know where they came from or where they were going.

Certainly, from a documentary perspective, it is frustrating to feel like anywhere in the city is a potential target. Exactly. And you don't have a sense of where they might be. Now granted, we have this new temporary restraining order that was issued over the weekend that is supposed to stop these roving patrols; this was on Friday, I believe, and hopefully, they stick to it so that we won't see as many of these raids happening in the way they have been over the last couple of weeks, yeah, month. In the meantime, it is a really frightening thing. One statistic I saw was that between just June 6th and the 22nd, over 1,600 people were arrested. I believe CHIRLA, which is a nonprofit legal aid group here in Los Angeles, put the number at over 2,000.

PALUMBO-LIU

Okay. So last Monday, this guy, Bovino, great name by the way, is saying you better get used to it. The fact that he would say that feels like it would go without a protest is amazing if you think of it. Yes, at a demonstration, of course. But then what I'm learning is they're going into swap meets, like neighborhood parties. It's just every place. And there is a kind of reaction coming across the board. Trump is losing on this issue. Even Republicans now are saying that this has gone too far and that immigrants are actually good for the country. What's your sense? You've been on this beat for a long time, especially in LA. What's your sense of the movement, if any, in terms of what they're trying to force down our throats and how people are reacting?

BUER

A lot of these groups are well established in Los Angeles. There are groups that have been established for decades who are specifically designed to build community resistance and community care for immigrants within a certain region, either in Los Angeles, Southern California, or anywhere. These folks are some of the most amazing people that I have the privilege to observe on any number of days. This movement is not something that just sprung up in the last month. I think a lot of folks who may not have had personal experiences with the immigration apparatus here—in the United States—or folks who may be a bit removed from the daily experiences of immigrants of any status may not be aware of what that looks like.

I will say that many organizers, particularly in California, are aware of it. They’ve grown up in mixed-status families, or their friends are in mixed-status families, or they are Latino or live in an immigrant-heavy neighborhood. What I would say is this movement has been going for a long time, and there have been a lot of people who have put years and years of blood, sweat, tears, and hard work into trying to shore up these safety nets for the immigrants in our communities to what I would consider to be great success. Particularly in Ventura County, where I was the other day after these raids in Camarillo and Oxnard, I was speaking to some organizers who had been organizing for a long time and who had, over the course of many years, built up the sort of apparatus that allows for rapid response networks to be so successful.

They found that they had some pretty good success keeping the impact of these raids to a sort of lower level than what you would normally expect if you didn’t have that apparatus to begin with, if that makes sense. So I think, in general, a lot of folks are—and this is just my armchair analysis; I haven’t looked at data—but I think, in general, a lot of folks are not interested in the overreach of the federal government into our personal lives, into our communities, and the continued mass deportations and the ramping up of this apparatus through billions of dollars of more funding. It continues to be the sort of thing that is really pushing this to the forefront of many people's minds, and I think that is a good thing. That we can stand shoulder to shoulder more united against this absolute brutality and that there are opportunities for people to do things, and that they’re finding these opportunities—I think that’s a good thing.

I wish that this wasn't happening, though, as I think many of us do. I really do believe that immigrants are the best of us. The reason this country is so good has been a deeply emotional experience seeing up close and personal how these raids have torn families apart and decimated communities. It is not, it should not be normal. It's not.

*

Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
Apple Podcasts · Spotify · Website · Instagram