In Los Angeles, Fourth of July feels very different this year

By Robert Greene, CalMatters

This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Los Angeles approaches Fourth of July weekend wounded and anxious. 

One of its more questionable traditions — nightly explosions of illegal fireworks in residential neighborhoods beginning around Memorial Day, ostensibly to practice for the big night — have been noticeably quieter than in past years. Perhaps it’s because the January fires that killed 30 people and wiped out much of Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Malibu and adjacent areas have dampened the local taste for sparks and combustion.

But it’s not just the fireworks. Independence Day parades, parties and other celebrations have been canceled or postponed in one community after another: Downtown Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Cudahy, Bell Gardens, Rowland Heights, Huntington Park, Whittier. In those cities and neighborhoods, each with sizable populations of immigrant families from Latin American countries, many people who otherwise would be waving American flags along parade routes and lining up for grilled hot dogs are avoiding public places for fear of being targeted by federal immigration agents as they continue their campaign of arrests.

Across the region, once-crowded swap meets are desolate, taco and raspado carts are abandoned, Home Depot parking lots — where homeowners routinely hired day laborers on the spot — are empty.

It’s in some sense a reverse of the spring of 2020, when coronavirus lockdowns cleared freeways, offices, schools, churches, courthouses, restaurants, beaches, parks. The difference is that five years ago a swath of the population kept coming to work, notwithstanding the health risk, to continue delivering the food, mowing the lawns, cleaning the houses and watching the kids for those with the means to follow the stay-at-home orders. Now some of those same essential workers are the ones in hiding, not from COVID-19 germs, but from immigration agents masking their faces, covering their badge numbers, removing their license plates and sometimes arresting U.S. citizens as well as lawful asylum seekers and refugees. 

Federalized National Guard troops and U.S. Marines are deployed but don’t actually patrol the streets, and in fact they are rather hard to find. But the point is, they are here, part of Trump’s do-over of another 2020 episode. Perhaps he wishes he had sent the Marines into Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle during the George Floyd protests. Perhaps he sees Los Angeles in 2025 as his second chance. He has hinted at sending troops into every city governed by Democrats.

This city has seen more than its share of natural and human-made disasters, but to see Marines deployed against illegal entrants before now, you’d have to turn to the movies. In 2011’s “Battle: Los Angeles,” American audiences got two things they seem to crave: Scenes of L.A. being destroyed, followed by Marines destroying aliens. 

It’s a rich genre. Martians blew up L.A. City Hall in the 1953 version of “War of the Worlds” before being felled by a COVID-like microbe (the Marines, in this one, did not prevail). In 1996, aliens obliterated the Marines’ air station at El Toro and the Library Tower in downtown L.A. before being destroyed by a Marine and a cable TV guy in “Independence Day,” a movie that no doubt will be televised this week, as it is every Fourth of July. 

Trump’s policies treat gardeners, dishwashers and others as though they were those kinds of aliens. Invaders, rather than Angelenos and an essential part of the local economy, as well as neighbors, friends, family. The sweeps and round-ups are real injuries to real people, real traumas to communities, and not some summer blockbuster. 

Still, consider one more L.A. movie. There is a scene in “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” in which federal agents surreptitiously monitor a suburban San Fernando Valley home and then invade, with no warrant and with identities obscured and faces covered. The message is clear — the feds are the real aliens.

That’s how it feels in Los Angeles. Yes, we are a nation of laws, but must they be enforced with such contempt, such heartlessness?

Who will rebuild Altadena? What will become of the local workforce and customer base? Who will cook the food and wash the cars? Who will take care of all those homes and yards in the neighborhoods depicted in ET, and then who, in the next neighborhood over, will raise their kids to be engineers and U.S. senators, as Alex Padilla was? And when they are in the Capitol, will their dignity, and ours, be demeaned and assaulted as Padilla’s was?

Trump responded to the Eaton Canyon and Palisades fires by lecturing us that we had it coming, for reasons that are indecipherable or just fictional — we didn’t rake the forests, we didn’t turn the spigot on the half-pipe. He said he would withhold disaster relief unless we do something about illegal immigrants who cast illegal votes, although there’s no evidence for any of that nonsense.

Read More: From save our state to sanctuary, California’s immigration views have shifted dramatically

Yet he is targeting, along with a slice of our population, our efforts to limit the emissions that heat the globe and lead to drought, flooding, wildfire and other climate disasters — not just here, but from North Carolina and Kentucky to Hawaii and around the world.

And on Monday, his administration sued Los Angeles, claiming its policies to steer clear of federal immigration enforcement was the cause of rioting that accompanied protests against the sweeps.

The twin assaults — January and June, nature and nativism, fire and fear — nip at L.A.’s soul. It’s hard to shake the feeling that half the nation is, along with Trump, relishing scenes of Los Angeles suffering. 

On this particular Fourth of July, it’s a challenge to gin up much enthusiasm for hosting the nations of the world next year in World Cup soccer. Same with the 2028 Olympics, which so far generates little of the anticipation leading up to the 1984 games, when L.A. reveled in its self-discovery as a multicultural city of the future. Both looming events now feel eerily like they are meant to be capstones on Trump’s drive to subdue the city. 

Los Angeles is resilient, and will eventually recover its spirit, as it has many times before. But summer is just starting, and it threatens to be long, hot and combustible.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.