Commentary: A year after Trump unleashed his deportation machine in L.A., we can't let his goons win

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A year ago this Saturday, I was enjoying a beautiful day in Pacific Palisades when President Trump unleashed his deportation deluge in Los Angeles, setting off a chain reaction that would roil cities across the United States.I was at the reopening of the Thomas Mann House, shut down for months of cleaning after it had miraculously survived the Palisades fire.

As speaker after speaker hailed the author’s prescient warnings about the slow burn of totalitarianism in his native Germany, text messages overtook my phone with news of immigration raids near downtown on a scale and number not seen in decades.Masked federal agents soon spread across Southern California.Protests followed.When my father was crossing the U.S.Many of the people arrested had no criminal record, but that didn’t stop the White House from depicting the sweeps as a vacuuming of hardcore criminals.

Some protesters were charged with federal crimes on scant evidence.Masked agents asked U.S.

citizens of Latino heritage to produce ID to prove they were in this country legally.Janitors, veterans, students.Workplaces, residential streets, courthouses.

MacArthur Park, Home Depots, Dodger Stadium’s parking lot.No one and nowhere was safe from a toxic alphabet soup of federal agencies tasked with ridding the country of people without papers, damn the cost.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even deployed the National Guard and Marinesto quell dissent in a show of imperial might better suited to a “Star Wars” Sith lord.The raids rendered large swaths of L.A.as quiet as the coronavirus shutdown days; some areas still haven’t rebounded and might never.

That’s why commemorations will happen this weekend across the Southland to remember the people and tranquility we’ve lost over the past 12 months to Trump‘s immigration war.Although the official caravan of cruelty — led by former Border Patrol commander at la...