Column: Wasn't the president supposed to be deporting criminals?

This will strike the literal-minded as illogical, but I think Huntington Park Mayor Arturo Flores, a Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, had a righteous point when he declared at a news conference with Southern California mayors that immigrants being rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in communities like his “are Americans, whether they have a document or they don’t.”“The president keeps talking about a foreign invasion,” Flores told me Thursday.“He keeps trying to paint us as the other.

I say, ‘No, you are dealing with Americans.’”California’s estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who have lived among us for years, for decades, who work and pay taxes here, who have sent their American-born children to schools here, have all the responsibilities of citizens minus many of the rights.Yes, technically, they have broken the law.

(For that matter, so has President Trump, a felon, and he continues to violate the Constitution day after day, as his mounting court losses attest.) California Downey, known as the ‘Mexican Beverly Hills,’ has been roiled this week by Trump immigration raids roiling Southern California, sparking both fear and outrage.But our region’s undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants are inextricably embedded in our lives.They care for our children, build our homes, dig our ditches, trim our trees, clean our homes, hotels and businesses, wash our dishes, pick our crops, sew our clothes.

Lots own small businesses, are paying mortgages, attend universities, rise in their professions.In 2013, I wrote about Sergio Garcia, the first undocumented immigrant admitted to the California Bar.

Since then, he has become a U.S.citizen and owns a personal injury law firm.These Californians are far less likely to break the law than native-born Americans, and they do not deserve the reign of terror being inflicted on them by the Trump administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense ...