Clashing Jurisdictions In Occupied L.A. — Explained
Navarrette Nation Substack — The Explainer 5/13/25
Advisory: Americans are tired of opinions. What they want instead are clear and simple explanations for what they see going on in a world that seems to get more complicated by the week. In that spirit, the Friday edition of Navarrette Nation Substack will now be titled “The Explainer.” Every Friday, the one big story of the week, explained. Simple as that.
Critical Thinking At A Critical Time
Every Friday
715 words; 8 min
My old friend, the comedian George Lopez, has a funny line about how Menudo — a traditional Mexican stew that combines hominy, chiles, spices and the lining of a cow’s stomach — is a Spanish word that, in English, translates to: “Yeah, put that in.”
That joke, which always makes me hungry, comes to mind as I think about something that is not the least bit amusing: the Trump administration’s tyrannical and heavy handed invasion of Los Angeles, which is less about deportations than it is about dominance.
The brutal crackdown on the largest city in the most populous state in the country — which has now been going on for a week — revolves around the four p’s: petty, power, personal and punitive.
At its core, the overreach and overreaction that led to Occupied L.A. is really about what happens when a mad king in a red cap sets out, for petty and personal reasons, to use all the power he can muster to punish a blue city in a blue state. It’s what small men do.
As I wrote in a syndicated column this week, just like famed Depression-era bank robber Willie Sutton knocked off banks because “that’s where the money is,” so too did President Donald Trump decide to launch his mass deportation effort in Los Angeles because that’s where the Mexicans are.
Fun fact: The City of Angels is home to more Mexicans than any other city outside of Mexico.
You remember Mexico? That’s our trading partner, trusted ally and dependable neighbor that Trump insisted — back in June 2015, when he launched his first run for president — sent the United States all its rejects. These were the worst people on Earth supposedly. Mexican immigrants are just a bunch of criminals, the Republican claimed.
Trump ought to know. He is, after all, a convicted felon who, until he won the presidency, was facing four different criminal cases.
If Mexican immigrants really are a net negative, you wouldn’t know it from the fact that California — which is home to an estimated 5 million undocumented immigrants, most of them from Mexico — recently climbed from the 5th largest economy in the world to the 4th. Nor could you deduce it from the fact that California Agribusiness, which feeds the world and depends heavily on Mexican immigrant labor (much of it illegal), generates more than $50 billion annually.
Meanwhile, Trump’s assault on LA — which makes up an area of more than 500 square miles — requires a lot of personnel, and the president doesn’t seem to care where the extra manpower comes from.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, there are now — on the ground in Los Angeles — at least a dozen different agencies, both law enforcement and military.
On the ground in Los Angeles, there are now a handful of legitimate federal agencies and at least one entity that is quasi-legitimate because it’s only been “federal” for a few days.
The legitimate federal entities include Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). They also include the approximately 700 U.S. Marines that are expected to be deployed in Los Angeles any day now. The quasi-federal entity is the California National Guard, which should be under the control of California Gov. Gavin Newsom but which Trump federalized to help suppress an “insurrection” that doesn’t exist.
The state has contributed hundreds of officers from the California Highway Patrol. The sheriff departments in several counties in Southern California have sent hundreds of reinforcements to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And at the tip of the spear, you have thousands of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department.
There is the menudo. “Yeah, put that in.”
Some people think all badges are the same. They’re not. Just like some people think all uniforms are the same. They’re not.
All of these agencies are supposed to perform different functions, from doing crowd control to protecting public safety to safeguarding federal buildings. But only one agency — ICE — should be enforcing federal immigration law.
If personnel from any other entity wanders anywhere near that wheelhouse, we’re going to have big jurisdictional problems. And we’ll probably wind up with dozens of lawsuits resulting in settlements that total hundreds of millions of dollars.
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Fresh Ink —
Creators Syndicate
Nationally Syndicated Column, 6/5/25
Ruben Navarrette
Top 10 Worst Things Trump Has Done in His Second Term
SAN DIEGO -- If presidencies were akin to attractions at Disneyland, President Donald Trump's second term would be Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
When it comes to spreading demagoguery, creating mayhem, generating chaos and turning people against one another, Trump really is in a league of his own. He has a knack for doing the wrong thing.
Trump's second term in office is not yet 150 days old. Still, in that relatively short time, he has managed to do substantial harm on multiple fronts to the United States and some of its most valuable institutions.
Trump has made so many blunders, scrapped so many norms, created so much upheaval, ginned up so much confusion, fractured so many families and done such damage to America's soul that it seems impossible to count the broken dishes in the china shop.
In fact, some of my fellow journalists think that Trump's strategy is to overwhelm the Fourth Estate with news. He wreaks so much havoc on so many fronts that it makes it difficult for his critics to keep up, let alone point out what he is doing wrong. His most egregious infractions range from the unfair to the unconstitutional to the unconscionable.
For their sins against the American people, Trump and his administration must be held accountable. In the 2026 midterm elections, Republican members of Congress must answer for Trump's excesses. After all, for the last several months, they have stood silently by as the president defaced, defiled and destroyed the institutions and traditions that make America great.
Yet, we can't have accountability without first having a detailed accounting. Americans need to keep score at home.
I recently made -- largely for my own benefit -- a list of the top 10 worst things that Trump has done in his second term. The list is incomplete, because new items are constantly rolling in.
Even so, as of this moment, here's just some of what Trump and his administration have to answer for:
No. 1: Instituting a new and sweeping travel ban on citizens from 12 countries, hearkening back to the infamous "Muslim ban" that Trump launched during his first term.
No. 2: Weaponizing trade policy by imposing punitively high tariffs on imports from more than 50 countries, and then making matters worse by pausing them, restarting them, and pausing them again.
No. 3: Creating the Department of Government Efficiency and then giving billionaire Elon Musk virtual free rein to insult and lay off thousands of U.S. government workers.
No. 4: Damaging relations between Ukraine and the United States by publicly humiliating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a cringeworthy Oval Office meeting in February.
No. 5: Trying to do away with birthright citizenship to prevent the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens as spelled out in the Constitution.
No. 6: Turning international students into collateral damage in its war against Harvard because the private university refused to bend the knee and surrender to a hostile takeover by the Trump administration.
No. 7: Unleashing, without due process, a flurry of legally dubious deportations, not just of undocumented immigrants but also of legal residents, green card holders, even U.S. citizens.
No. 8: Accepting from Qatar, a nation that bankrolls Hamas terrorists, the gift of a Boeing 747 for Trump to use as Air Force One, despite national security concerns raised by Senate Republicans.
No. 9: Hosting a private gathering in May of the highest-paying customers of his personal cryptocurrency business, despite bipartisan concerns that he's selling access to the White House for personal profit.
No. 10: Challenging the concept of judicial review by suggesting that presidents don't answer to the federal courts, and even suggesting that judges who strike down his policies as unlawful ought to be impeached.
Again, that's not all. Trump will go down in history as a morally defunct conman, carnival barker and convicted felon who left America worse off than he found it largely because he never asked what he could do for the presidency -- only what the presidency could do for him.
Trump deserves most of the blame for the mess he made. But he had an unlikely accomplice: Democrats. They were so clueless, gutless and rudderless that they managed to lose the White House to someone like that. They should be ashamed. In 2028, they need to think about everything they've done up to now -- and then do the opposite.
In fact, now that I think about it, Democrats deserve their own list of mistakes, sins and failures. Coming right up, folks.
To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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