Gentle readers, I’ve just returned from vacationing with my family for two weeks, during which time we remained blithely unaware of all but our own tourist itinerary. Now, having come home and reconnected to the great wide world, I find that these two weeks have been fraught, both in my hometown of Los Angeles and around the world.
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I seldom write about topics outside my field of expertise in law enforcement, but please allow me an opportunity to express what I believe to be common-sense thoughts on the current situation in the Middle East. The lessons learned in a career spent on some of the meaner streets of Los Angeles sometimes have application in the international arena. One of these is that a bully will continue to terrorize his neighbors until one of them socks him in the nose. As this pertains to Israel and Iran, we see that the former, having long contended with aggression by the latter’s various malignant proxies, has at last given a solid wallop to the head of the snake, to which I can only say bravo.
I have no patience for Jew-haters, no matter how they may try to disguise their animus as reasoned pragmatism. How long, one must ask, should Israel be expected to stand idly by as the maniacal mullahs of Tehran, who for decades have called for the Jewish state’s destruction, advance ever closer to acquiring the means to achieve it? And for that matter, if allowed to deliver a nuclear strike against Israel, how much more time would Iran require to attack the U.S., as has been their expressed desire?
And now to matters closer to home. Longtime readers may recall that I was born in Los Angeles, as was my father; by L.A. standards, this makes me the equivalent of a Bostonian who traces his roots to the Mayflower. As a resident and especially as an employee of the city, I had the opportunity to witness the decline of some of its neighborhoods brought about by unchecked immigration from Mexico and Central America.
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This decline is evident across much of the city, but nowhere has it been more visible than in the area of MacArthur Park. Straddling Wilshire Boulevard just west of downtown, the MacArthur Park of my youth was one of the city’s jewels, a place where my family picnicked and rode the paddle boats on the park’s lake. No sane parent would take his family there today, as for years it has been a hotbed of crime and drug abuse, nearly all of which can be attributed to illegal immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and other points south.
This, we have been told, is the price we must pay for the many blessings attendant to mass immigration. Yes, some of the threads in the great American tapestry may be out of place, but when one steps back to take in the broader view, what a vibrant picture is revealed.
This may be true up to a point, but that point has been reached.
In my 30-plus years as a police officer in Los Angeles, I met many, many illegal immigrants who were decent, hard-working contributors to this vibrant picture and whose expulsion would strike me as an injustice. But I am old enough to remember when our houses were cleaned, our lawns were mowed, and our produce was picked without allowing millions of unvetted people to flow into the country. If the level of illegal immigration seen prior to 2021 had been maintained, if we had perceived the slightest desire to maintain the border, perhaps most Americans would continue to shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, what can we do?”
But when President Biden, or whoever it may have been who exercised executive power and wielded the autopen in his name, threw open the doors to all and sundry, when a week did not go by without some unfortunate soul losing his life to the predations or criminal negligence of some illegal immigrant, the great tapestry began to unravel at the edges and lost a measure of that storied vibrancy. Maybe, said many Americans, inviting all those people in wasn’t such a good idea after all.
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And that, as they say, is how we got Trump.
Control of the borders was a dominant theme of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign, and, as things turned out, a winning one. But not in Los Angeles and other “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where governors like Gavin Newsom and mayors like Karen Bass, both of whom proved their fecklessness during January’s wildfires, seem to believe they are empowered to enact immigration policies independent of the federal government’s. “The ICE raids are coming,” the politicos were told. “We will not help you,” was their answer.
And the raids came, engendering outrage from these same politicos, who in turn encouraged it among the constituencies to whom they pandered. When, as was easily predictable, ICE agents conducting operations in Los Angeles were met with violent opposition, LAPD officers were delayed in their response to assist, by two hours, according to acting ICE director Todd Lyons, by 38 minutes, according to LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, which in any case is sorry enough.
And what was President Trump to do when presented with a situation in which outnumbered federal agents were set upon by mobs, and with local authorities unwilling or unable to assist? He summoned the National Guard and a small contingent of U.S. Marines. Take that, Karen Bass.
Sadly, dimwittedness in Los Angeles municipal governance is not confined to the mayor’s office. While questioning Chief McDonnell about the LAPD’s response to the rioting, city council member Imelda Padilla asked him if he would consider warning city officials of any impending ICE raids. McDonnell was far more measured in his response than I would have been. “That would be completely inappropriate and illegal,” he said.
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That Padilla should have to be told this is instructive on how Los Angeles has reached the pretty pass in which it now finds itself. President Trump has truly been fortunate in his foes. How easy it is to appear reasoned when compared to Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass? How they, or any of the other, lesser lights of California politics can think their gaseous bluster will inspire Mr. Trump to back down is a deep mystery. The raids will continue, to the president’s glee, all through the long, hot summer.
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