She wants the resistance to ICE to prevail.
She wants the resistance to ICE to prevail.
W e’ve all heard of the heckler’s veto. Karen Bass wants a rioter’s veto.
The Los Angeles mayor maintains that everything would be fine if federal agents weren’t enforcing federal law in her city.
“This was chaos that was started in Washington, D.C.,” she said at a press conference the other day.
She’s not suggesting that the feds secretly gave agitators masks, stones, and fireworks, and provided them the coordinates of the retail stores most ripe for looting.
No, she’s complaining about law enforcement officers engaging in acts of law enforcement that resulted in their getting targeted by violent protesters.
“On Thursday,” she continued, “the city was peaceful. On Friday, it was not, because of the intervention of the federal government.”
She glosses over the fact that it is quite possible — as, in fact, has happened for decades in this country — for federal immigration officers to conduct raids without being confronted by mobs.
It is her assumption that federal immigration laws cannot be enforced in her city without a violent reaction. This shouldn’t be a condemnation of the raids, but of her city, or at least the people in it who feel compelled to resist federal agents.
Bass’s attitude would take Los Angeles well beyond its status as a sanctuary city, which involves not affirmatively cooperating with the feds, and make it something else — effectively a no-go zone for immigration officers and a jurisdiction that affirmatively resists them.
“We need to stop the raids,” Bass said at her press conference. “The only thing it does is contribute to chaos.”
She emphasized the point in a CNN interview: “People in this city have a rapid-response network. If they see ICE, they go out and they protest. And so it’s just a recipe for pandemonium that’s completely unnecessary.”
What she wants is for that rapid-response network to achieve victory, to chase federal immigration agents out of the city although they have every right to be there.
When she says that these activists “go out and protest,” she’s resorting to euphemism because their protests involve obstructing ICE operations.
The responsible thing for her to say, given her politics, would be that she opposes ICE raids and the city won’t cooperate with them, but the federal government is fully within its right to conduct these operations and they should not be in any way impeded, let alone attacked.
Instead, she supports rioters having the right to determine federal immigration policy within the 502 square miles of her city, a morally bankrupt position that the federal government can’t and shouldn’t accept.