Bulwark Takes - ICE's Reign of Terror In LA: “We Can Go Anywhere!"

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Sam Stein and Bill Kristol break down the disturbing scenes unfolding in Los Angeles, where ICE and National Guard troops are patrolling MacArthur Park like it’s a war zone. Despite no riots, no unrest, and no request for help from local authorities, federal forces in camo and on horseback are conducting an overt show of force, all under the banner of immigration enforcement.

All right, hey guys me Sam Stein managing out of the bulwark back with Bill Crystal and we are going to be talking about ice And what's happening in California because I think people are still or people may be not Recognizing that the federal footprint in California has not actually gone away since several weeks ago when they first sent the guard and the military to quell the Uprising and put that in quotation marks is like a couple blocks of protests over the ice raids in Los Angeles. So I want to just play some footage here of what's happening in MacArthur Park where you basically see, I mean, I guess it's a militarized presence of, you know, ice officials and a mix of law enforcement officials just walking through

the park in this incredibly intimidating fashion. For what purpose, I'm not entirely sure, honestly. So let's watch the footage and then Bill, I want you to just kind of ruminate when we get to the other side of that because it is, it's crazy. Okay, Bill, what did you make of that? Because I know it's totally been on top of your mind, you've been wanting to write about it,

we haven't gotten around to it, but clearly you've been moved by it. Yeah, the horses, the military vehicles, the Humvees. What is all that about? And they say, actually, if you look at the National Guard memo explaining what the Guard's going to do, they're going to work with ICE, really, at ICE's direction. So remember, these are Title 10 US Army soldiers now at this point, National Guard. I don't know that there are the active duty troops there,

working with ICE in an area where there's no, there haven't been any riots or disturbances or whatever it was that they alleged. Which it was a little bit of three weeks ago when they first came in. They haven't been for quite a while. But this is a park in a slightly, I guess, run down area of LA.

It has a certain amount of drug dealing, perhaps, and other things. And instead of, but the cops are dealing with that, or not dealing with it, but they're whatever, doing what cops are supposed to do. Anyway, there was no request for help from the LAPD here on that issue, and it's not an issue that presumably the military is supposed to be dealing with normally.

Instead, they say in the memo, we want to, I think, show presence. Is that the show of- I think that's right, yeah. Show of force. Yeah, show of force, show of presence here in want to, I think, show presence. Is that the show of force? Yeah, show of force, show of presence here in LA to tell people that the border patrol guy said this publicly, explicitly. We want to show people that we can go anywhere.

We can go anywhere in LA. So that's the situation we now have, where I used to be. This is the border patrol, sadly. LA is not on the border. Right? The border patrol has decided decided and Trump has decided and Secretary of DHS has decided that the Border Patrol can go anywhere. They can be supported by National Guard troops anywhere. They can go to a place that's having no disturbances, no riots,

no challenges to the safety of ICE agents or federal facilities, which is the excuse for bringing in the guard, remember. And they just because they want to show force and intimidate people. That's bad. I mean, that is really something that we don't do in America. I mean, we don't have credible forces sort of mobilizing with a quasi militarized way to say nothing of the masks and all this, but no other than quasi in a really militarized way. No, it was pretty overtly militarized, right? The horse backs, the masks on, the camo gear, all that stuff. And for what? I guess that's the thing that we're getting at. There's nothing to put down here. There's no disturbance. There's no need for this. This is totally

within the realm of local law enforcement, even if there were disturbances that need to be put down. So what is the actual thing they're trying to do here? And obviously it's an act of intimidation and it's a warning to anyone else across the country, specifically I think to elected leadership and people who run the cities, this could be you. Like this, we can easily do this. And therefore you should, I don't know,

participate in anything we want to do when it comes to ICE. Right, because one of the excuses for this has been that LA is a sanctuary city and therefore they, yes, it's a total attempt to intimidate mayors and governors and others, police chiefs, from making their own decisions, so to speak, about how much they want to cooperate and some of the deportation efforts against immigrants. And it also, I think, is an attempt to get more self-deportation by immigrants, or mostly just to drive them. They're working, they're running little food trucks, and not little, they're running food

trucks there around MacArthur Park. It's a big thing. Stalls, it's kind of a street shopping, I guess you might call it, area. And they don't want that. And they're trying to drive the immigrants into the shadows, and then'll go harass them and hopefully they think drive them out of the country. That would be true I think of some undocumented immigrants but also their families and also presumably their kids and also maybe some documented immigrants who don't want to be hassled or worried that they made a slip up eight years ago on their documentation once

they're picked up. I mean the degree to which we are really engaged in, I don't know what to call it, I mean, kind of ethnic cleansing seems a little traumatic, but a real attempt to just go after these people, to intimidate them, but I think your first point is very important too, to intimidate blue state officials,

elected officials and other appointed officials is also a very big part of this. I've underestimated that part of it a little bit, the degree to which from the beginning this was about empowering Trump's police force against the law enforcement agencies available to blue state mayors and governors. I think people don't quite fathom the actual impact that this is going to have culturally, obviously, but also economically. So our colleague, Adrian Carrasquillo, he just basically was in Chicago. He's following this church that's basically at the front lines of the mass deportation

movement. They're trying to protect their community, heavy Hispanic, Latino population of the church. And in and around that area, I mean, the people he was talking to were like foot traffic down significantly 60, 70 percent, restaurants down, bars, people don't go out anymore. He was doing the same thing the other week he did a piece on the Latino music industry that is in the United States. Foreign artists not getting their views renewed, businesses that depend on crowds showing up at these festivals seeing incredible reduction. And you know, we haven't seen it in the macroeconomic data yet. But I look around and you have to imagine

like this is going to like gut whole neighborhoods within major cities and and not just major cities, obviously, but across the country, but I think it's concentrated in the cities. And I can't imagine, for instance, in LA, you said self-deportation. I think that's the goal. I think they want people to leave this country. I think that's it.

They want to leave this country because they have an idea that if they leave this country, it will open up social services and jobs for native or born Americans. And that's what they want. Yeah, you're probably being too nice to them with that last clause or sentence, because I don't even know if they care about opening up. They don't want those people here. They don't want the things they do being done, which is one of the food trucks for those

neighborhoods. They don't care if those neighborhoods fall apart and get much worse off than they are, because that will just increase the self-deportation there. Now then they say when they're challenged, the agriculture secretary said, oh, well, they're 34 million able-bodied people on Medicaid. Most of those people already have jobs. I mean, that's the whole point of Medicaid, right? The single biggest group of people on Medicaid are Walmart employees, and Walmart doesn't

provide health insurance sometimes, and people have to, therefore, they use Medicaid. So the idea that they're going to go work in the fields is ludicrous. But- Ludicrous. Now, Trump is, the one area where Trump sort of occasionally indicates he might want to change mass deportation is, of course, for his buddies and big ag. Or big- The hotelieres and the addicts.

Or big hospitality. No, seriously. And he knows those guys, and they call up, pick up the phone. If they can't get him, they could certainly get Trump's cabinet secretaries who were all tight with these big shots and so that's where he kind of thinks gee I don't know the owner should be able to keep the guys working in the fields but they do not want a I'm just put a very simple if there's a thriving or at least busy and and well populated let's just say you know working-class Hispanic can be

Latino community in LA, which features a park and it features food trucks and it features people getting day jobs, going to the 7-Eleven or Home Depot to get a day job. But it features all kinds of things and it features music. They don't want any of it. That's not the America they want. They want to get rid of these people. Let me ask you about the Democratic response to this because it's been interesting to watch.

Karen Bass went to the front lines, grabbed, apparently grabbed a cell phone of someone there to get some answers. It was kind of a dramatic scene, but she's been heavily criticized for how she's handled some of the stuff. Gavin Newsom was in South Carolina, I think it was yesterday, and he addressed it. He just went off on it, saying this is un-American, this is dangerous, they're trying to spread fear, chaos and disorder. It's interesting to see Democrats get put their backs in more on this stuff. It wasn't that long ago, four months ago really, where the party was really disjointed on immigration, felt like they had just a horrible hand to play and thought they had to cozy up to Trump,

frankly. Now, not so much. But I do wonder, are they overtalking? I don't think so. But you can see Trump clearly thinks he has the upper hand here, too. I don't think so. I don't think they have any choice.

I mean, they've got some points. I've just got to stand up and say this is wrong. And they just have to say, you know what? I respect the Border Patrol. I'm happy they've done a good job. They're doing a better job. They've been given the tools if you want to praise Trump for two seconds, the tools to do a better job at the border.

Biden already was giving them some of those tools, but whatever. But what are they doing in LA? I mean, I just think you've got to make it. And I do think there's a kind of civil liberty streak, I hope there is still, among Americans that gets nervous when they see these guys, masked guys in camo outfits, riding horses and riding on Humvees and on other vehicles coming through a park in LA, where the kids are literally playing soccer. I mean, little kids, I guess they have day camps

and so forth in this park for community people and stuff. And so they're trundling through, you know? And as JVL writes, it means like they're getting, what is it, like 60 billion eventually, if you add it all up, something insane. Well, 170, if you add all of it up. But some of that's for the wall. No, ICE will become the largest, by far the largest federal police force, much larger

than the FBI, with many fewer constraints, much less professionalism. That was an excellent triad of JVLs yesterday. People should read. No, I mean, they're going to hire 11,000 new ICE agents in three years. It is, and they're not going to hire them. They're going to pay for them, they're going to hire them, they're going to staff up. I mean they're going to do what they can because this is kind of Trump's force. You know, it's such a important, I mean, that's sort of conventional, I've been following

more immigration experts these days, and they still, some of them understandably, I guess are still living in the old world. It's going to be very hard for them to hire all these people. You know, there's very, a lot of things they have to go through to hire a border and ICE agent and stuff. You know what? They're not going to go through any of them. They're going to waive the vetting.

They're going to hire them. They're going to hire them. They're going to spend the money. They're going to build detention facilities. The Favarda Everglades thing, that doesn't live up to the standards they're supposed to have for ICE detention facilities. Obviously, it gets flooded the first day. They don't care.

So people should not be reassured that in a normal course of things, they couldn't spend this money well, they're going to spend it because they want to intimidate because they want these people to leave. And they're going to spend it because they want to set a baseline for what a immigration police state should be. Because once you spend the money, once you budget the money, it becomes a lot harder to say next year, we're going to pull back because they've spent it all. All right. Well, Bill, that's a lot harder to say next year we're going to pull back because they've spent it all. All right.

Well, Bill, that's a really positive note to leave on. You know, you get you take what you can. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. Everyone obviously should be following you at Morning Shots and we will talk to you soon. you