L.A., Abrego Garcia, and the Big Lies of Trump tyranny | Will Bunch Newsletter

“There’s A Riot Goin’ On!” You might think that’s this morning’s headline in the New York Post, but it’s actually the title of a 1971 LP from Sly and the Family Stone that marked the end of possibly the greatest three-year explosion in the history of U.S. pop music. The band’s exuberantly flamboyant leader, Sly Stone, turned up the funk, threw in a few psychedelic mushrooms, and changed Black music in a way that somehow has lasted until this day. Stone, who found some peace at the end of his life after a rough ride, died Monday at age 82. He left us with some words of wisdom for America’s current moment: “Stand for the things you know are right/It’s the truth that the truth makes them so uptight.”

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The Guatemalan native only gave her name to the Washington Post as Xochitl. She was in the McDonald’s next to the busy Home Depot on Wilshire Boulevard near downtown Los Angeles last Friday when she saw the masked men burst from a van, as 100 or so mostly brown-skinned men and women ran frantically in every direction.

“They were just grabbing people,” Xochitl recounted two days later, after watching her neighbors getting handcuffed. “They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.”

Masked, plainclothes officers of the state, cruising America’s second-largest city in unmarked vans. Snatching individuals off the street without warrants and whisking them away to locations unknown, or detention centers where members of Congress have been barred — unlawfully — from entering. It sure sounds like the places that Xochitl and many of the terrorized migrants at the L.A. Home Depot had once escaped from — places that Americans once called, with more than a hint of condescension, “banana republics.”

But it happened here. In the United States. On June 6, 2025, exactly 81 years to the day after American troops landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy and struck a bloody blow to the heart of 20th century fascism. No one could have ever guessed on D-Day that fascism was playing the long game.

The aggressive Southern California raids led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which not coincidentally came just days after President Donald Trump’s right-hand henchman Stephen Miller barked at ICE leaders to hit an arbitrary quota of 1 million arrests this year, yelling “Why aren’t you at Home Depot?!” — was the flashpoint for a tumultuous week like few others in modern American history.

In metro Los Angeles, the ICE raids continued into the weekend amid a backdrop of accelerating public unrest, as demonstrators confronted federal agents, blocked a major freeway and chanted obscenities against ICE and the Trump regime. A handful of self-driving Waymo cars were burned in the street, but the bulk of the violence — from tear gas assaults to brutal beatings captured on video — was committed by state security forces.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the regime would finally comply with court orders and bring home the wrongly deported Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia — but only because the Justice Department threw its massive resources into a nationwide witch hunt that resulted in Abrego Garcia’s indictment.

If the provocative ICE raids and the charges against the Salvadoran refugee were meant to change the national conversation away from the ugly dogfight between Trump and his former seeming co-president and biggest donor, world’s richest person Elon Musk, the ploy worked.

Even though the confrontations were largely confined to a handful of blocks in the nation’s most sprawling metropolis, the black smoke from the skeleton frames of burned-out EVs, the stray Mexican or Palestinian flags emerging from a thick pea soup of tear gas, and the urban-warfare pop of flash-bang grenades proved catnip to TV news producers.

That’s why I thought it was so important to start this piece where the provocation began, and who it began with. The spark that is now simmering in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, starting to jump to other cities like embers fanned by the Santa Ana winds, didn’t start with the brave Americans who went outside to resist tyranny.

No, the blame is clear. The flames of chaos were started right there in the former calm of that Home Depot parking lot, where decent family men and women were pleading for one of their multiple, backbreaking jobs when the Trump regime and its masked-up secret police threw a lighted match.

The story of what’s really happening in Los Angeles is the story of Trump’s American authoritarianism: It starts with a Big Lie — the fallacy that mass deportation would only target murderers, rapists, and other hardened criminals — that hides the true purpose of bending some laws and totally ignoring others, for the sole purpose of amassing more power for the regime.

There is a common thread to the thuggish intensity of the expanding ICE raids, the White House’s over-the-top response of federalizing California National Guard troops and now even sending in Marines, and its aggressive investigation of Abrego Garcia. It is this: This so-called government exists only for the purpose of attacking its many enemies — real or perceived — or rewarding its small circle of friends, and then it invents lies about make-believe “insurrections” and a fictional rule of law to justify its crude retributions.

In recent weeks, the number of undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE and other federal authorities has roughly doubled, but the number with no previous criminal record — not even a traffic violation — has also risen to more than 40%, as agents scramble to meet Trump’s and Miller’s arbitrary rantings about arresting more than 3,000 people a day. Hardworking people like the moms and dads that Xochitl saw swept up at the Home Depot are defenseless pawns in a mad king’s power chess game.

Surely Trump and Miller knew that Los Angeles isn’t only the home to more undocumented essential workers than any other U.S. city, but that American citizens there would also likely erupt in outrage. The president’s decision to cite a so-called “rebellion” to federalize the National Guard in the Golden State against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom — a power play that hasn’t been pulled since 1965, back when the federal government actually opposed racial segregation — lacks any thread of legal justification.

If the National Guard call-up — with hundreds of soldiers forced to sleep on concrete floors and so far having little to do while they’re awake — was an overreach, Monday’s news that the White House has summoned some 700 Marines from Twentynine Palms was beyond ridiculous. The move defies both history and legality, since the military can’t be deployed on U.S. soil without invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act, which has not been done.

But nothing has truly defined the utter lawlessness of the 47th president and his minions more than its handling of the Abrego Garcia case, after judges including the Supreme Court with its three Trump appointees ordered the White House to “facilitate” the return of the man a federal prosecutor conceded was wrongly deported to a notorious gulag in El Salvador. Rather than comply with the rule of law, Bondi’s Justice Department worked frantically to backfill a case against Abrego Garcia — stretching to prove he is a gang member and a human trafficker, after he was stopped in 2022 with a carload of fellow immigrants.

When you become an enemy of the Trump regime, a Justice Department that’s loyal only to the president’s whims — and which has abandoned investigating actual criminals like foreign bribegivers or cryptocrooks — will comb through every detail of your life. That’s why, for example, Trump nemesis Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, is under felony investigation over a routine mortgage application.

In the Abrego Garcia case, a Tennessee-based federal prosecutor resigned because, according to ABC News, he came to see the investigation as politically motivated. Said one lawyer for the Salvadoran native: “They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable — just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case.” The man who was illegally flown back to his birth country in shackles was railroaded home by a corrupt U.S. government.

The rising tide of protest is showing that a lot more everyday folks can see through the over-the-top lies than either the White House or a compliant pundit class had counted on. Even native-born Americans are starting to see what too many migrants already understand: that this is no longer the refuge where they’d once yearned to breathe free.

“I’m starting to feel something ugly,” a 45-year-old Nicaraguan asylum seeker named Josue told the Post outside the Los Angeles Home Depot. “It’s a familiar feeling not unlike the sense of insecurity I felt in my own country. It’s almost as the same scary, ugly, latent sense of peril.”

Question: Can someone sue to try to force ICE to unmask and to provide identification? Who would have standing? What about stopping arrests when immigrants are doing their regular check-ins, following normal processes? — Amy Fried (@asfried.bsky.social) via Bluesky

Answer: Amy, although there’s some wiggle room on the masks and IDs, it seems clear that federal agents involved in key aspects of the Trump regime’s mass-deportation drive are skirting existing laws at best, and probably violating them in some cases. With the current unrest in Los Angeles and elsewhere. federal agents or troops are required, under a provision in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, to wear visible identification when responding to civil disturbances. ICE agents are also required to identify themselves when making an arrest, which appears to have not happened in the high-profile seizures of students Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil. Once our national nightmare is over, a new Congress must pass additional laws clarifying that federal law enforcement officers are working for the public, not against it.

Although I think the answer can be seen on the rubble-strewn streets of Los Angeles, most of you who responded joined me in scoffing at a Guardian columnist’s question: Has Trump peaked? Wendy Farquhar noted the president’s war on higher education is just now underway. “Trump is not peaking, he is just getting started,” she wrote. “If we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately.” Naomi Miller said she fears incalculable damage before a new Congress arrives in 2027, writing: “It is clear that the MAGA base will support him to the end (and beyond...).”

📮 This week’s question: The civil unrest in Los Angeles triggered by ICE immigration raids on Latino day laborers has captured America’s attention. Are the L.A. protesters heroes, in your eyes, for resisting the Trump regime? Or do their demonstrations, which have included car fires and the waving of Mexican and Palestinian flags, empower Trump and hurt the progressive movement? Please email me your answer and put “L.A. protests” in the subject line.

On Saturday night, CNN devoted a big chunk of its primetime to what it hoped would be a national living room event: a live-broadcast of the Broadway play Good Night, and Good Luck, with George Clooney starring in a theatrical version of the movie he directed in 2005. It covers the true 1954 story of how legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow decided — during a moment when America seemed paralyzed by the fear of an anti-Communist “Red Scare” — to challenge the leading “red-baiter,” Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The decision to air an aggressive interview and Murrow’s devastating commentary about the senator’s smear tactics, bucking pressure from advertisers and higher-ups, is hailed as a historic high point for the truth-telling power of U.S. journalism. After weeks of heavy promotion, CNN brought in top media people and even college journalism students for a freewheeling post-play discussion about the political and other challenges to press freedom in modern America.

With democracy under attack, the First Amendment has never been more important. But there was one problem. Although ratings-starved CNN had counted heavily on big viewership numbers for Good Night, and Good Luck to reenter the national conversation, it hadn’t banked on Saturday also seeing arguably the biggest breaking news story of 2025 so far, the heated unrest in the streets of Los Angeles over immigration raids. While the nation’s remaining news junkies craved information, CNN stuck — other than a very brief bulletin — with its talking heads on the power of journalism, as opposed to doing actual journalism. One can only imagine Murrow himself screaming at the control room during commercial breaks, demanding live coverage from Southern California while frantically huffing a pack of Camels.

It was an ironic and unintended lesson in how the big business of TV news has, in some ways, changed over the last 71 years. Another teachable moment came just hours later when ABC News’ veteran White House correspondent Terry Moran posted a social media takedown of Trump’s anti-immigration guru Stephen Miller — calling the president and the top White House aide “world-class haters” in a more pointed, if somewhat similar, diatribe to Murrow’s McCarthy takedown. But instead of a hit Broadway play, Moran was hailed with a suspension by his ABC bosses for crossing the line of what is known as “objectivity.” What today’s norms around “objectivity” really mean is the strange notion that journalists like Moran can’t be trusted unless they take what they’ve really learned through their access to the powerful — and keep it to themselves. News bosses never explain why Murrow or Walter Cronkite, who famously editorialized against the Vietnam War in 1968, are heroes today for doing the exact opposite.

What would Edward R. Murrow do today? For all the justifiable angst about the news business, Murrow — who first achieved fame for his riveting radio broadcasts from London during Nazi air attacks in the 1940s — would surely be heartened by the bravery of the journalists who continued reporting from the streets of L.A. even as the situation there grew more dicey, with riot police firing tear gas and then rubber bullets into the disturbance. In a shocking moment captured on video, a state trooper appeared to deliberately take aim at Australian newswoman Lauren Tomasi during her live report, striking her in the leg. It was a reminder that for all the flaws of Big Media as an institution, journalism survives through the courage of the individuals who still practice it. More than a hit play, it is reporters who take a bullet to bring you the real news — or who speak truth to power — who are keeping the spirit of Edward R. Murrow alive in 2025.

Remember the good ol’ days when the threat facing America was a corporatist center-right GOP White House under the direction of Mitt Romney? That’s how it felt in the summer of 2012, when Romney’s out-of-touch contempt for “the 47%” of the working class helped propel Barack Obama to a second term. On June 10, 2012, I wrote: “In Mitt Romney’s America, corporations are people, my friend, but apparently schoolteachers, cops and firefighters are 3/5 of a person. From coast to coast, Republican governors like [Pennsylvania’s Tom] Corbett are showing up to slash thousands of actual, paying jobs and then asking, ‘Where are the jobs?’” Read the rest: “Corporations are people, my friend. Teachers and firefighters, not so much.”

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