It Could Happen Here - How LA Resisted ICE

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Mia and James are joined by journalists Mel Buer and Sean Beckner Carmitchel to discuss two months of ICE raids in LA and how the community has come together to resist them. https://linktr.ee/mel_buer‪ @acatwithnews.bsky.social‬ @melbuer.bsky.social‬See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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bunch of just masked guys are grabbing people off the street, but that works too. Stephen King, good pivot, haven't done that one yet. I'm your host Mia Wong, with me is James Stout, and we're also joined by the wonderful freelance journalists Mel Buer and- Oh fucking Christ! Ow! You'll get there. Holy shit! Yeah, so that happened simultaneously as I inhaled and like apparently a piece of popcorn just like fucking railgunned into the back of my throat.

We're leaving this all in! Also with me is- Man, we're all professionals here, let's go. Holy shit! This is going great. Is Real's freelance journalist, John Patrick Carvich. Oh, good lord. I'm so good at my job. So what we're going to be talking about is the continued resistance to ICE and ICE actions in LA and in sort of broader parts of California as stuff has shifted and intensified.

So both of you two, welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Happy to be here. So I think the place I want to start is, could you give people just kind of a brief reminder of what happened during that sort of big flare up several weeks ago of protests and ICE actions in LA? I can probably speak a little bit more to that. So as part of the federal immigration raids that Donald Trump promised, Los Angeles was one of the first targets of pretty large scale and pretty frankly random immigration raids. So it started in early June where you started to see,

you know, masked agents without oftentimes badges or names on their badges or sometimes even serial numbers. First they started in Home Depots, areas like that, just sort of running around parking lots, tackling people and throwing them into buses. Pretty understandably, Los Angelinos started to protest, and they started to protest pretty hard. And that happened for a few weeks.

Eventually, the Marines and the National Guard were both deployed to federal buildings, more large-scale protests. And that sort of brings us to the last few weeks, which I think Mel can probably speak to. Yeah, so, you know, the National Guard and the Marines were deployed like mid-June, right? Yeah. And we kind of saw a little bit of petering out of like the mass protests that we saw

at the beginning of June, but still there were a number of organizations and groups that were trying to keep tabs on the sort of roving patrols that were happening in Los Angeles throughout the month of June and early July. So these groups were taking in tips and trying to maintain a sort of map of rapid response locations to the ICE detainments, kidnappings, suspension of constitutional rights, if you will. And so what we saw was, you know, a good number of weeks of social media sort of proliferating these posts about where ICE patrols had gone and because the you know and this is something that organizations have spoken to in the last

couple of weeks but because their counter surveillance I suppose you could say by these organizations was pretty successful the sort of ice patrols began to not happen throughout the later half of the day they would happen early in the morning they would you know hit location, grab as many people as possible, pull them into the van and take them away. And they had gotten it down to something like less than 10 minutes that they were on scene. And it made it a little bit difficult for folks

to be able to respond forcefully to those events. And they kept it to parking lots, car washes, businesses, random street vendors, places that they could enter quickly and leave quickly. We saw in the middle of June and in the later half of the month that if they were trying to execute warrants, for example, in a neighborhood, they would be blocked in almost immediately by neighbors.

So you can see that there was a pretty consistent response by Angelinos across the board as much as they could. And while this was happening, there was also a pretty dedicated group of individuals who were spending a lot of time outside the Metro Detention Center downtown and downtown LA, which is where many of these vans were going in and out of before they were taking detainees elsewhere. Yeah, so, you know, across the board, what we've seen is quite a bit of organizing. Much of this organizing is decades in the making, especially in Los Angeles, but also in places like Ventura County and a little bit up north where you see the same kind of work that's

being done. In the later half of the month, early July I should say, we began to see some pretty intense movements by Border Patrol, most notably in MacArthur Park on July 8th, I believe, and in the Camarillo-Oxnard area, which is right on the border of Inchart County and other counties name escapes me, at two cannabis farms that next week. And those were large scale operations. A lot of militarized Border Patrol, National guard, I believe helped with both of those operations as well. And also saw some pretty intense community response to those.

So Sean, you'd mentioned you wanted to talk a little more about the organizing, right? The way people had organized to try and kind of resist this or at least like do what they could. One of the things that I think is interesting, this isn't unique to Los Angeles. We're seeing groups organize what I've been hearing called Negro patrols here in Los Angeles. There's also pretty heavy touch of this from San Diego.

One of the things that I thought was really, really interesting was in Los Angeles has been preparing for a moment like this since the late sixties, frankly. You know, you have groups that have a pretty solid through line since the mid sixties at the dawn of the Chicano movement. And these are groups that already have experience with large scale attainments, not throughout the city. Like we were seeing the last few weeks,

but there's this really impressive level of organization where, you know, I saw a detainment in Boyle Heights of a gentleman who was accused of hitting a police officer within, I think, three minutes of them arriving. Not only was there one or two people, but there was like 15 people already on scene. Boyle Heights is pretty singular in its preparation, however, it was not uncommon. I mean, in MacArthur Park, there was a detainment of a few people who were walking down the

street. I was maybe eight minutes away when I heard about the raid. There was already like 10 people there, including a college professor, including members of Union del Barro and attendance union. I have a bit of a theory that I don't know if Los Angeles was chosen because they wanted to prove a point. And there is a part of me that wonders seeing how quickly people are responding to these rates. There's a part of me that wonders if that point was even made. I think the government's actions can be understood in like owning the Libs and

like if your Facebook uncle got to make government policy, it wouldn't look that different from this. So I think that was certainly like the point early on and they'd have detained a lot of people in LA, like, but yeah, they're organizing, you have very entrenched working class communities, even going back way before the sixties. Right? Like if we look at the Zoot Suit, right? If we look at the Bracero program and the attempts to expel people after that, if we look at United Farm Workers across LA County, we have a long history

of organizing. So it's a hard target for them, for sure. Will Barron And I think it's really interesting listening to you two talk about this. It matches a lot of what I was hearing about the way that it all kind of decentralized in between sort of May and June. And the thing that it reminds me of really interestingly is what was happening to sort of other protest movements but reversed. You know, if you look at like the Palestine encampments, right, where it's okay, you put

a bunch of people in one spot and then they all get crushed because the police can bring overwhelming numbers. And it feels like the raid response has almost been the reverse of that, where ICE has had to adopt, at least in that period, had to adopt the sort of hypermobile in and out rapid strike kind of thing. Because they were suddenly faced with a scenario where if they tried to stay en masse in an area it went really badly for them. And that's absolutely fascinating to me. One of the things that I think is interesting is the first few days, you saw a pretty heavy amount of raids sort of in the central corridor near downtown, or, you know, near East Hollywood,

things like that. And those were extremely heavily protested. You know, there was a protest sort of the first day of when the raids really, really started in the garment districts or in the fashion district, excuse me. Within minutes, there was like 75 people there. And, you know, they were shouting, you know, they were there before all of the vehicles for federal agents were actually there. That's the one where you saw quite a bit of union folks who arrive extremely quickly.

And one of the other things that I think is really interesting about this organizing is you're also seeing regular people who I don't know if they normally would organize something where they're sort of facing off with federal agents, you're starting to see them mobilize in a way that I don't know if you would normally see them. One of the ladies that I spoke to as part of the rapid response sort of network is a teacher. And I talked to her and I was like, hey, like, why do you do this?

And she told me, she's like, look, like I teach in a heavily immigrant community. My job is to take care of these kids. And unfortunately now, part of that is driving around the neighborhood and looking for white vans filled with people wearing masks. That's both incredibly moving and beautiful and also one of the most hideous things I've ever heard in my entire life.

There were quite a few teachers at the SEIU rally, which was on the 9th of June, which was with David Huerta, the president of the SEIU, was detained, I guess allegedly for obstructing federal agents if I recall correctly. Yeah, I met a lot of people who were older, who I think were like solidly liberal in their politics, but not particularly radical. And it was a really interesting combination of these older people who were outraged and somewhat inexperienced in street politics and younger people who were outraged and somewhat inexperienced in street politics. It wasn't the same crowd that you see the people who I'd seen in 2020 when I covered stuff in LA. I haven't really covered much of

the Palestine stuff in LA, but a lot of the people who I interviewed in June were citizen children of non-citizen parents. They felt like an obligation on behalf of their community and their family to show up. And it was really moving to see people who were clearly very afraid by the third night of unhinged state violence. I know Sean was there too, but the amount of less-lethals that were just being discharged by the third night, the protest was split up and so was the policing. Like there wasn't really ever a point where all the protesters were able to get together because the police had so many roads blocked off. And like you would just turn down the street and they'd be firing less lethal.

You turn down the street, there's tear gas, you turn down the street and there's pepper balls like all over downtown LA. And these people were very afraid, but they still kept coming out. And that was quite like inspiring to me. Yeah. And I mean, I think that's the situation that we're in, right? Where, you know, the sort of the fear and the horror has to, is being forced to give way to action because the only alternative to that is just watching them take your family

and take your neighbors and taking the people you love and care about until one day they take you. And it doesn't have to get to there. Me, you know what else is going to take you? Oh God. Specifically take money from your wallet. It's these incredible products and services which we're lucky enough to be able to share with our listeners. Open AI is a financial abomination. A thing that should not be. An aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

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solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back. I notably did not want to do an actual pivot there, but we're back. I think, you know, speaking on sort of the climate of Los Angeles and at the same time, this sort of insistent joy that Los Angeles has, there's a very famous song, most of your listeners may have heard it, La Chona, which is basically just a song about a woman

who won't listen to her husband and gets drunk. And you see it at every single protest in Los Angeles involving immigrant rights. And one of the interesting things about it is multiple times at the protests, I would see this beginning of dancing to La Chona and then multiple times it would be broken up. I think this was the 13th mid-june and Eventually it got to a point when I remember saying, you know these protesters seem to really want to listen to this song and

I have a feeling it's gonna end up being played in a weird spot What ended up happening is by the end of it? I saw a bunch of people with like these gnarly bruises all over their body, welts from less lethal, fire in the middle of the street, dancing to La Chona. They finally got their chance.

And it's whenever the Dodgers win. This speaks to the specific culture of Los Angeles. I have seen more fires and people dancing around them to that song than any other song including protest songs throughout the last five years but there's also you know, I live in Boyle Heights and one of the really interesting and kind of horrific things is I had sort of been queued up and trained to listen for things is I had sort of been queued up and trained to listen for the ice cream man, both the actual van and there's a guy that does respatos who just walks down the street, honks a bicycle horn and I am an actual child and every time I heard that bicycle horn, just

like I'm sick, so I would just like run out with a wad of cash and by respatos and for about a week you didn't hear him. A lot of businesses were closed. And then after about a week you started to see younger people that looked kind of like the guy that used to do it. You know, usually the son or the daughter sort of working for their parents. Now we're starting to see you know a little bit of a more of a return to regularity. But you know one of the things that was really interesting about all this organizing is you have unions.

You also have like former politicians and things like that. I got an email from a former city councilman with the subject line that just said, it is happening here. And I remember thinking, that's probably not good. That's probably bad. No. good. That's probably bad. No. Yeah.

Yeah. That's not great. Talking of it is happening, I think both you and Amel, you were there, you went up to Camarillo, right? The raid on the cannabis grow operation and subsequent standoff. That was just like different scene from like DTLA. Can you explain, if people aren't familiar, maybe very briefly explain the operation and the consequences?

So, Sean and I just sat in federal court for five hours prior to that in downtown LA, where a federal judge was listening to arguments being made in the hopes of getting a temporary restraining order on the grounds that these roving patrols in Los Angeles were unconstitutional. And we left court and one of our sources who is also there at the federal courthouse was talking about how they had heard about this raid happening in Camarillo and Carpinteria, two different cannabis grow houses. And by the time we left, it had been happening for five hours at that point. So they, under a warrant, had raided both of these cannabis grow operations, which are

quite large. We're talking hundreds of workers who work in these processing centers and greenhouses and such. And local organizers, particularly organizers with VC Defensa, which is in Ventura County, who has been doing really successful organizing, following ICE vehicles wherever they go to try and head off these roving patrols.

They've really thrown a wrench in things up there. One of the organizers was following one of these border patrol vehicles and watched as the border patrol vehicle drove past the gates of a military base out there. And then kind of got an idea that, okay, something big is happening. This is not normal. Like, this is not usually what happens when we follow these cars.

Usually they're going into neighborhoods or things of that nature. And so almost immediately, these groups were organizing to try and see where these cars, armored vehicles were going. And they hit two different locations. One of the locations, the one in Camarillo, just outside of is kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's flanked on all sides with farm fields. There's dirt highways and two-lane highways that kind of bisect everything. And what they did when they started this raid is they blocked off the roads leading into and out of this particular greenhouse. Right. And so they had checkpoints like roadblocks, barricades at like four or five different locations at these intersections around the greenhouse.

And at every single barricade there were people. So, you know, there were these sort of like face-offs between heavily militarized border patrol agents, kitted out in the nines, you know, everything that you could possibly think of. They had, you know, these massive vehicles. National Guard helped them, you know, block off these roads. The local police helped them block off these roads, which local police helped them block off these roads, which if you know about the sheriff in Ventura County, he's one of the only guys who doesn't care about sanctuary state ordinances. So it was a standoff, essentially. And when Sean and I arrived, it was right around dusk. So it had been many hours since these raids began.

And essentially what Border Patrol found is that they couldn't leave because these roads were being blocked off. They got some vans through, but the vast majority of those vehicles were still there and they weren't prepared to be there that long. They had to airdrop supplies, water, food in order to shore up these folks. And as word got out of the sort of community response to this event, more people showed up. So by the time Sean and I got there, we were driving up Les Poses and suddenly there's

cars just parked on either side of the road. And we ended up parking, I think, like three quarters of a mile away from the nearest blockade and had to hike in because there was no space for cars. I mean, we get up there and it's just about dusk and you can hear the chanting in the distance. And it was a really horrible and also moving experience to walk up on, you know, community response to this. And, you know, the standoff continued for another couple of hours. But it was, you know, half of the folks there are concerned community members, folks of mixed status families who understand the absolute terror of what happens when the government is chasing after

your dad, you know, and also individuals who are looking for parents uncles you know they had no idea where their family members were I think the total number of people who were detained and are probably going to be deported ended up somewhere around 361 across two farms yeah it's it's significant. Absolutely insane. Um you know and the standoff lasted for a couple extra hours into the night. People turned on their car headlights so that we had light out there. There was you know a pretty solid group of individuals who were in communication with other blockades asking for folks to shift to other locations, sharing supplies and water, you

know. And then border patrols started getting antsy. You could see them playing with their guns, you know, their riot munitions weapons. They were shifting. They were forming and reforming. And organizers kind of understood that something was about to happen. So they backed off, strategically retreated because there were marches planned for the next day.

They were leaving. I could see off in the distance, I didn't witness this directly until we drove up on it, but you could see off in the distance that all of these cars, this line of cars was going around the back end of the factory on a side road and then ending up a little bit farther down Les Poses. and there was flashing lights everywhere. Turns out that they were trying to make their getaway and they hit what I think was probably a traffic jam because folks were ready to go. They had packed up their cars and they were leaving. I mean they tear gassed everybody so they could make their getaway.

So like Sean and I by the time we drove up on it, because we saw in the distance, it was like that cloud is not normal. This is a dust, like that's tear gas. Let's get in the car and go see what's going on. We drove up just as the last canisters were being spent on the road and it was just a fog, and cars, people were panicking.

You know, you're getting tear gas in your your freaking car, man. It was pretty intense, not a great experience. Yeah. I saw some videos from downtown LA on the first day of protests. My little Sean was there covering it. They had agents in gas masks in their vehicles and they were tear gassing in front. And that seems to have been like their protocol, right? They will just tear gas the fuck out of the block and then we'll wear our gas mask inside our vehicles and leave. But I wanted to explain, people I've seen this a lot will be wondering why Border Patrol were adventurous. So like just to clarify or Oxnard or wherever they were at, the United States border isn't just a land border. The United States has four edges, just like, well, that's lots of edges,

but you know, just like anything that's a big square, the ocean is a border too, and border patrol has this somewhat arbitrary 100-mile enforcement zone in which they operate. So when you see border patrol operating a long way from a land border, that's because they are still within 100 miles of a border, to include the Great Lakes up north. Most of the United States population lives inside a Border Patrol enforcement zone. Right. So, you know, you won't see as many unless there are warrants to be served. For example, in Omaha, Nebraska, where there was a raid on a factory there that was a warrant investigation.

Generally speaking, though, yeah, that's why you see it in Boston, in Chicago, in Florida, and in most of California lives, you know, with inside that border. And so, you know, the thing that I can say is that that next day, when we went up and spoke to organizers kind of got the skinny on how they were able to mobilize so quickly. As we were leaving that March, you know, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order in Los Angeles County, seven cities, I think, that were party to the suit. It's not just Los Angeles County. It's the entire district of the CBD.

Thank you. Yes. Yeah, it was quite a few cities filed suit as well as the ACLU, United Farm Workers, several individual plaintiffs, which blocks them essentially from having a large scale raid with no warrant. So a judge basically told them, hey, you have to have a reason to be stopping and detaining people. The judge, I don't want to read too much into a judge's personal thoughts, but it became pretty clear even when they were having the hearing that the judge had pretty much had her own concerns that I don't think were even in the filings.

And it also, B18 is essentially the basement in a federal building, which is where a significant amount of the people are being held. And it forced them to allow lawyers access as well as a lot of them were essentially in these rooms that were like 50 to 60 people. And there was one phone in the middle of it. So they were not getting private counsel. And with the restraining order, which I believe ends time next week, now they actually have to provide, you know, access to lawyers, you know, basic constitutional stuff.

Yeah, man, let me tell you, it was really, really bizarre to sit in a federal hearing. Now look, I've read transcripts from other reporters who listen in on these federal immigration issue hearings that we've had over the last six months. It is a whole other experience to be sitting in a courtroom with your little notepad, listening to the government's lawyers try and make the case that, no, we're not actually racially profiling people here. We are just stopping them based on their appearance, facial expressions, what they're wearing, potentially the language that they choose to speak, and all of us sitting in the gallery are like, okay, you actually made that argument in open court. Cool.

You know what I mean? Like, absolutely insane to hear that come out of a DOJ lawyer's mouth, where they're like, we take umbrage with the fact that you're saying that we're racial profiling. By the way, here's all the things that we are doing, which is essentially profiling people. So the TRO is essentially just enforcing the Fourth Amendment, which is saying you cannot conduct these roving patrols and stop people without probable cause or warrant. You just can't do it.

And what that's done is we have seen much less of the immigration enforcement activity that was a feature of June and early July. And it's kind of moving to the periphery. I know that there are things happening in San Diego, James, and we've seen some potential reports out of Sacramento. We've seen reports up north in San Francisco, you know, in terms of the enforcement zone in California. We're also seeing ramping up immigration activities in places like Chicago and other cities, Utah, for example. And now, in the last week and

a half, we've seen half of the Federalized National Guard be taken off deployment and sent home. And as of today, the 21st of July, they're sending home the Marines, you know, which good, right? But it's very clear that whatever they were trying to accomplish in Los Angeles to make a point to be a battering ram to set Los Angeles, which is always kind of been known as the sanctuary city and the surrounding area as like the example of what immigration enforcement activity in this new era of Trump 2.0 what have you will look like and ultimately I don't think they were successful I mean you

look at the raid in MacArthur Park for example where it was meant to be this you know big operation ostensibly to try and crack down on fake ID processing. I shotgun talk to more of the context around MacArthur Park than I can. But they showed up and organizers had already cleared the park. You know we were there for two and a half hours before they even showed up and we watched as organizers put up signs,

they were sitting at the Home Depot, at the street, making sure the folks knew that there might be a raid today. Like organizers had combed through the entire park and said, this might happen today. If you're of mixed status or your status is not one with papers, you might want to go home. They cleared the soccer field, which had 45

people playing soccer on it, you know, and so by the time these armored vehicles are running down the street and doing all of their theater, there's no one there at all. You know, there's journalists, there's us, you know, there's a couple of unhoused folks who said, you know, screw that, I don't want to leave. But the vast majority of people had already gone. And so all that they got out of it was a really shitty hype video. And a mayor and a governor who were like, really, really pissed off. And, you know, a city that's just not going to just roll over and let this kind of crap happen. You know, and I think that's really emblematic of like what's been going on in Los

Angeles for the last six weeks is they did not get the response that they were expecting. And they weren't prepared for that response. And for the you know for that to be a continuous response to unconstitutional, oppressive, violent actions by ICE and by the agencies that are enabling ICE. So, you know. I think when we say city, we should be clear that we're referring to the city qua community,

not city as government entity. There really hasn't been any, certainly here in San Diego or at San Diego Police Department, technically don't assist ICE, but they do show up to form a cordon around them to prevent any confrontation between them and protesters. And we saw every police agency, literally every police agency in LA County and also Ventura County sheriffs were there for the biggest protest days. The city hasn't used its resources in that sense to stop this. They've made rhetorical statements, but they haven't done anything with their police. Yeah, and I think this speaks to a kind of larger thing, which is that these people thought

they could just come into cities around the country and just shock and all everyone in Raleigh went over because they think they're the Nazis. The thing about the Nazis is that people supported them. All the shit the Nazis were able to do happened because people wanted it to happen. And in a country where people don't want that shit to happen, where everyone looks at this and goes, what the fuck is going on? Where like 79% support for like the effects of immigration on the US right now, where everyone's looking at this and just being like, no, they can't do it.

There aren't enough of them. I don't know. Like it's just so stunning to me watching them, like, have to do the tactical adaptations that, like, normally, like, protest groups have to do because the cops have too many more resources than them. But they're having to do it because there's just like every single person walking down the street is like, fuck you, eat shit. And so they're just like outnumbered everywhere they go.

It's... And that's not to say it's not like fucking horrible because yeah, resisting fascism fucking sucks a lot of the time and a lot of people get hurt. And it's hideous. And also it's what has to be done. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI along with other AI companies are dead

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what do you think is the future of sort of what ICE is going to be doing and what the response is going to be and what Border Patrol are doing in the sort of month to come? It's hard to say. One of the things that I'm curious about is we won't really know what the federal government's plan is until I think it's the, we'll just say late July when the next hearing is. So the temporary restraining order ends in late July.

Generally speaking with temporary restraining orders on law enforcement, what you see is they either continue while the hearings commence or you see a pretty large mountain of evidence that says, hey, we did this, this, this, this, and this, that's changed it so we're now sort of in cooperation with the order. That is likely one of the reasons why we've seen fewer raids here in Los Angeles. Ultimately, a temporary restraining order is, I don't want to call it a wild or extreme action at all, but those are generally signed when a judge agrees that it is extremely likely that, given the current situation,

the plaintiffs have a case. So unless the federal government comes by with like this gigantic mountain of new training and all these new plans and things like that, my guess is we'll probably see at least some of the things in that temporary restraining order continue. I also think it's possible that the federal government is just going to say, you know what?

This temporary restraining order only applies to this specific area. We'll just go somewhere else. It's the central district of California, right? So like San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, LA, Riverside County as well, I think. Yep, Riverside. Yeah, it doesn't include San Diego, it doesn't include the Northern District, which is most of the rest of the coast of California, or the Eastern District, which is most of the valley and further northeastern California.

So yeah, it's perfectly possible they could go somewhere else and still do their shit within California. Or like you say, there are so many targets, right? Because immigrants are part of the fabric of our society. They are everywhere. And thus, you know, they can just go for wherever they think a soft target is. Well, and it's also worth noting that, you know,

these organizers are gonna continue to organize, right? So these groups, Central CSO and Union Del Barrio and, you know, the various other groups, again, have been around for decades. VC Defensa has been around since 2016. This is only a portion of the organizing that they do. They didn't start with or they will not end with just these patrols. So they've built out infrastructure and mutual aid group networks that are buying groceries

for folks in mixed status families that are covering the sort of bills that are not being paid because people are too afraid to go to work. They're doing childcare, they're getting kids to school, they're trying to provide legal defense. These are coalitions of individuals who live in these areas who are doing long-term organizing to shore up the community, whether or not there is an onslaught of immigration enforcement activity in a certain geographical area. So in terms of organizing,

it's just going to keep happening. And that's good, right? And I think that what's heartening to see after the last seven weeks of really intense, really scary, really horrifying kidnappings and detainments on the streets in Southern California is an equal and often more stronger response to it from the community that reminds you that this is not the end and folks are prepared for picking up the slack when things fall through. People are not falling through the cracks. People are not having their lives shattered without someone watching and trying to help. That's an important piece there.

I would say that in terms of the response and what happens next, it's a multi-front thing. You have these legal cases finding their way through the courts. You have from all levels, right? And you have individuals who are trying to keep track of folks who have been detained and deported and sending money back to Mexico or whatever, other country that these folks are being sent back to. Making sure that things are as much as they can. There aren't any rips in the safety safety net and I think that's the main lesson of the last seven weeks is like that sort of response is incredible and you can replicate it

anywhere that you are you know a lot of folks like to you know kind of roll their eyes at the idea of like organizing starts with talking to your neighbor no actually it does right and you, there's these models, especially in Southern and in Central California where this organizing works, right? It's not particularly ideological in many ways. Sometimes it is but the basic function of it is to make sure that your neighbor doesn't fall into a hole, right? And they'll do the same for you. So, you don't fall

into a hole should something happen to you. So, you know, start there and take a look at these models that these absolute fucking heroes, pardon my language, are doing in this area and know that you can also do that. So. Yeah, these people in every facet of this are just you somewhere else or hell, maybe they are literally you. I don't know. If it is you, hell yeah, keep up the good work. Sean, do you want to explain to us very briefly the FBI arrests and the case against at least

one of the Centro CSO members? Well, right now there's only one criminal complaint, and that's for Alejandro Oriana, who is accused of conspiracy to commit civil disorder as well as aiding and abetting a conspiracy to commit civil disorder. The criminal complaint, all it really says is that he gave a dispense with face shields to protesters who were dressed like they might do something bad. At no point during the criminal complaint does it even say, hey, he handed it to a guy,

and then that guy committed a crime. It doesn't even go that far. It just goes, ah, those guys look kind of, I don't know, they look like they're about to do something and says that, you know, these people were dressed in such a way where it might interfere with law enforcement activities, like, you know, it would deaden the impact of Weapons Leapful Weapons. Yeah, I mean, the impact of Weapons Leapful Weapons on your face is potentially fatal. Yeah, and, you know, beyond that, there was a search warrant for another member of Centro

CSO, who was roughly handled by FBI agents on a walk through the park and was given a search warrant and her phone was taken. I asked the U.S. Attorney's Office if they were related and first was told, I don't know what you're talking about, which I thought was a little interesting. Never gotten that response from any official. And then a few hours later, got an official response that said, no, it is another case. So what that means, time will tell. But I think it's likely that there will be more to come on top of that. I think it's interesting to note that the first arraignment for Oriana was an absolutely packed court in support of them. Where can people find you to use work and where can people support you as you do a whole bunch of incredibly critical journalism on

the continuing resistance to the fascist deportation campaign? A lot of my reporting goes to Blue Sky, so you can find me at melview or bluesky.social I have a newsletter, wordsaboutwork dot blog. And you can also find me on my Instagram. My link tree is linked in all sorts of places. So you can find all of those links in one convenient place. Including the description of this episode. Yay. Yeah, those are the places where you can find me. You can find me on A Cat with News on all social media platforms. Although most of my sort of breaking stories come on Blue Sky first.

And I'm a freelance journalist, so usually you can just Google my name and you'll see some stories there on my Blue Sky and Instagram, there's a link tree if you want to support. Hell yeah, and to everyone listening to this show, always remember, ye are many, they are few. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app,

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We're journalists and hosts of the podcast, Finding Sexy Sweat. At an internship in 1993, we roomed with Reggie Payne, aspiring reporter and rapper who went by Sexy Sweat. A couple of years ago, we set out to find him. But in 2020, Reggie fell into a coma after police pinned him down and he never woke up. But then I see, my son's not moving. So we started digging and uncovered city officials bent on protecting their own.

Listen to Finding Sexy Sweat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. on Earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced.

He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you. Listen to Shock Incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I

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