by Kevin Barrett, The Unz Review:
Is the United States of America imploding? There are a multitude of signs suggesting as much, beginning with Trump’s June 2025 imposition of martial law on Los Angeles, America’s second-biggest city, to crack down on immigration protests that escalated into riots.
Some observers claim Trump provoked the riots, deliberately or otherwise, by sending federal National Guard troops and Marines under orders to aggressively confront protesters while the gatherings were still peaceful. According to Trump’s critics, federal troops incited the violence by attacking peaceful protesters, who responded by defending themselves. As troops battled protesters in the streets, unruly groups of young people took advantage of the chaos to burn automobiles and loot stores.
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The protests were an angry response to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeting Hispanic communities. Trump promised during his presidential campaign to deport all 10-million-plus illegal immigrants. Though everyone agrees that will never happen—the logistics are just too formidable—Trump nonetheless wants to go down in history as the mass deportation president. So the Trump regime has pressured ICE to raise its deportation numbers by hook or by crook, and ICE has responded by randomly targeting Hispanics.
Hispanic-Americans, most of whom are citizens or legal immigrants, don’t appreciate being raided, arrested, forced to show ID, and generally being treated like criminals purely on the basis of their ethnicity. Like African-Americans sick of being pulled over by the police for “driving while black,” they don’t like being raided for “living while Hispanic.”
And they are tired of seeing hard-working but undocumented friends, neighbors, and family members being brutalized, held for extended periods under horrendous conditions in ICE gulags, and finally deported to countries they often don’t even remember. (Many illegals were brought to the US as children, grew up there, and know little or nothing about the countries to which they may be deported.)
Trump has responded to criticism through authoritarian statements and actions, including the arrest of Democratic lawmaker Rep. LaMonica McIver, who visited a New Jersey ICE facility alongside two other Democratic representatives on May 9 to oversee that prison and check on reports of inhumane treatment of prisoners. After a confrontation with ICE personnel, Rep. McIver was indicted for “assaulting or impeding a law enforcement officer.”
