Op-Ed: Trump Turns Urban Ethnic Cleansing Into Reality Show
In yet another indignant, delusional, and inherently racist diatribe, this time before troops at the Army base in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, President Donald Trump packaged his sensationalist approach to what amounts to ethnic cleansing in urban cities as a vow to “liberate Los Angeles” from “Third World lawlessness.”
“What you’re witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty, carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags,” Trump said in his disturbing speech on Tuesday as he defended his decision to dispatch 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 Marines to Los Angeles to carry out his mass deportation order “from the attacks of a vicious and violent mob.”
“Within the span of a few decades, Los Angeles has gone from being one of the cleanest, safest, and most beautiful cities on Earth to being a trash heap with entire neighborhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks,” he continued. “It’s horrible.”
“As the entire world can now see, uncontrolled migration leads to chaos, dysfunction, and disorder.”
What Trump is presumably referring to is the slanted coverage of protests in LA on conservative propaganda platforms like Fox “News” and X, formerly Twitter, in which the city is seemingly set ablaze as a massive amount of violent protestors light up Waymos, wave Mexican flags, and harass federal agents all across the city in total anarchy.
And based on the number of texts I received from kin I hadn’t heard from in a long while, mainstream media’s framing is not distant enough from that false depiction, leaving folks to buy into at least some of the bullshit Trump is peddling.
Let the man I said in 2016 wanted to be Sweet Potato Saddam tell it, “If we didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles. It would be burning today just like the houses were burning a number of months ago.”
I live about 10 to 15 minutes from the Santee Alley area of LA’s Fashion District, the pocket of downtown LA where last Friday, ICE conducted raids there as well as a Home Depot near MacArthur Park (where I have shopped), and similar areas populated heavily by Latinos and undocumented workers.
People from those communities instantly rose up to protect their neighbors from being kidnapped and shipped to whatever country the Trump administration feels like that day.
There was an uprising in Compton, but it was nothing the massive Los Angeles Police Department and neighboring jurisdictions couldn’t handle. And even if some Waymos were lit up, it was violent of ICE to enter these areas to terrorize, and it was violent of the police to shoot at protestors and press members.
The people had a right to protect members of their community and then go to the Alameda area, where migrants were detained.
Their indignation, unlike Trump’s, is righteous.
Meanwhile, outside that tiny pocket of the city, the rest of LA carried on with their day in solidarity with the protestors, offended, or clueless of what was happening in a part of town they don’t frequent anyway.
But, I am not surprised that the White House is reportedly delighted by the chaos of their creation in LA because the media would much rather focus on the mess they made than confront the racist lie that this was all done to help protect.
Last year, Trump, speaking to Time magazine, citied the racist “Operation Wetback,” the deportation initiative taken along the border with Mexico during the Eisenhower administration, as a model on how to use the military to carry out his campaign pledge of deporting 15-20 million people.
This was long part of his mass deportation plan; however, as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell highlighted, though Pew Research Center estimated the number of undocumented migrants in the U.S. was around 10.5 million in 2021, to make good on his promise to deport at least 15 million, the Trump administration would need to deport 11,000 people a day to keep up the pace of deporting four million a year.
By that metric, Trump should be at least at 1 million deportees by now, so he is hundreds of thousands behind.
Hence, per the Washington Examiner, Stephen Miller, the racist architect behind both the Trump administrations’ minority-targeting policies, lashed out at ICE officials at an emergency meeting late last month.
An official claimed, “Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone.”
The episode is said to have “confused” ICE officials as to who Miller wanted arrested.
Spoiler: anyone not white.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
In reality, despite the administration’s mandate to arrest 3,000 immigrants per day, Trump’s henchmen are only arresting dozens of people a day, as was the case in LA, where the aforementioned attack on LA’s Fashion District resulted in 46 arrests.
The White House now says more than 300 arrests have been made, but given the Pentagon predicts that the deployment of the Marines will last 60 days and cost $134 million, this is all a waste of resources that won’t garner the proper interrogation it warrants from a largely lily-white mainstream media ecosystem.
Los Angeles, where 35% of LA residents are foreign-born, was chosen as the Trump administration’s test model for how to use the military for mass deportation, because the city represents arguments made by longtime racists like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller that urban America incubates all of the ills plaguing the nation like DEI and violent migrants, the people who threaten white hegemony.
It is not enough that former President Obama, once known as “the deporter in chief,” deported 3 million people while in office, or that President Joe Biden surpassed a Trump record of yearly deportations in 2024.
For them, all these Brown and Black immigrants have to get the hell out of at least these cities with Democratic mayors by way of military force or by the fears they stoke.
It was already clear that they weren’t just targeting criminals, with data and reporting showing that the mass arrests that have taken place under President Donald Trump’s administration have included people with no criminal records.
“It’s a shame you are declaring a civil war on your own people,” an LA resident protesting the Trump administration’s actions said to a reporter for Al Jazeera’s “The Take.”
In the wake of this, people are terrified to go to work in LA’s Fashion District and other neighborhoods like Koreatown, and children are afraid to go to school, fearful that their parents will be snatched while they’re away.
Folks are not able to live their lives as a result of a stunt to cover up a lie and use military force and propaganda to try and scare the color out of one of America’s most diverse cities.
Trump’s LA experiment, a rightfully categorized “brazen use of power,” is set to expand to other cities like New York, Philadelphia, and wherever else you can think of a Democratic mayor and good food from multiple ethnic groups.
If you think these stunts, if left unchecked, will be limited to the estimated about 3% of the US population, and about 22% of the foreign-born population were undocumented in America (per Pew in 2021), you are mistaken.
A Black man born in the U.S. nearly escaped deportation to Jamaica this week after showing his birth certificate.
The “where are your papers” people only see color, and Black folks generally should never forget the ongoing pattern of us, too, being displaced.
If this were America talking about another country, this would all be called ethnic cleansing in our nation’s urban centers.
But just because some of the privileged folks in media can afford to ignore the larger implications of what Trump is doing doesn’t mean the rest of us can or should.
Michael Arceneaux is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book, “I Finally Bought Some Jordans,” was published last March.
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