Like a toddler with a gun, Americans are learning that fascism, when it happens here, can be rather stupid and still quite frightening.
Take the display of force in Los Angeles. On Monday, National Guard soldiers and federal immigration agents cosplaying as veterans of the Global War on Terror — some on horseback, all in military fatigues and carrying assault rifles, transported in an armored personnel carrier with a big gun on top ― staged an invasion of MacArthur Park, normally a popular gathering place for local residents, many of them immigrants from Central America. Lines of agents swept across soccer fields as a Black Hawk helicopter circled above, succeeding mostly in inflicting emotional trauma on children attending a summer camp.
It was a scary and un-American scene in a city of immigrants that has, for weeks now, been occupied by soldiers and terrorized by a federal government that views masked agents harassing people of color as just good content.
“MacArthur Park is the Ellis Island of the West Coast,” explained Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez. “It was chosen as this administration’s latest target precisely because of who lives there and what it represents: resilience, diversity and the American dream,” she said, adding: “What you see happening [there] is coming to you … So wake up.”
But it was also a big waste of money, intended not to remove hardened criminals from America but to terrorize some Americans for the entertainment of other Americans. Leaked military documents confirm as much, describing Monday’s deployment as intended “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area.”
No arrests were made — a local ABC affiliate described Department of Homeland Security personnel as “just standing there” — but the outraged reaction among locals generated the desired headline on Fox News, which described the city’s Democratic mayor, Karen Bass, as the prime actor and indeed the villain in Monday’s events, her arriving to denounce the show of force at MacArthur Park characterized as obstruction (“interferes”) of federal agents “during a sweep of illegal immigrants in gang-plagued area.”
That it was all a spectacle does not make it less troubling. The clownish performance of toxic militarism comes alongside real human rights abuses: law-abiding immigrants being snatched from courthouses as the worst of the worst — people who couldn’t meet the standards of their local police and so instead joined ICE, where no experience or entrance exam is required — help render them to either a private prison or concentration camp.
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Of the 238 men sent to spend the rest of their lives at CECOT, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, some 75% had no criminal record to speak of. Andry José Hernández Romero, an LGBTQ+ barber from Venezuela, had applied for asylum lawfully and was immediately detained before being rendered to a country he was not from, accused of being a gang member because of tattoos dedicated to his mother and father. He remains there on the orders of the Trump administration, per the Salvadoran government. There, according to lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a former detainee, he and others — the vast majority never even charged with a crime, anywhere, ever — are subjected to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”
Human beings, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, are “confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.”
Just as Los Angeles-style shows of force will come to other American cities, thanks in part to Republicans in Congress approving a deficit-busting budget that allots more money (some $175 billion) to immigration enforcement than most countries spend on their entire military, so too is the U.S. getting its own extrajudicial prison camps.
There’s already one in Florida, with the local Republican Party hawking merch (“Alligator Alcatraz”; please laugh) and President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem publicly cackling at the idea of immigrants detained there being killed if they try to leave. The 5,000-bed tent facility, built on an abandoned runway in an isolated part of the Florida Everglades and guarded by National Guard troops, was built in about a week — “We believe that the nature and vast scope of the illegal alien presence deserves a rethinking of detention processes and standards,” a planning document states — and opened earlier this month.
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While conditions at all U.S. detention facilities are horrifying, particularly as ICE is detaining a record number of people in over-capacity prisons, early reports suggest that Florida’s answer to CECOT, where immigrants’ guilt or innocence will be judged by soldiers, is achieving a new level of degradation on par with its model in El Salvador.
“There is no water here to bathe,” Leamsy Izquierdo, a Cuban immigrant, told local media, saying he had not showered in four days. “They give you food only one a day,” he said, “food that even has worms in it.” The lights are always on; it’s freezing inside; and detainees are not allowed to go outside and see the sun, Izquierdo said, claims that were supported by at least three other inmates, one of whom said they were also being denied medicine.
All of which is to say, call “it” what you will — fascism; right-wing authoritarianism; the logical zenith of 21st century American conservatism — it has already happened here. It is ugly, it is dumb and it will be spreading in the coming months as the administration ramps up its efforts to remove one million people a year from the country they call home. They may never succeed at destroying the diversity that made America a great nation, but they will try, and their performances will be televised.
“Better get used to us now,” as one official with Customs and Border Protection told Fox News, “cause this is going to be normal very soon.”
