The City of Angels

Every seam in my hometown bears the imprint of immigrant hands.

I would not be here if my mom’s family were not offered a pathway to the US through the asylum process. That’s not a metaphor, it’s the literal truth. Their lives, and mine, were shaped by the violence of political regimes and displacement, but also, by the hope and possibility of safety and building a life in Los Angeles. They brought their culture and tradition and recipes and language with them, keeping us tethered to a motherland I’ve never stepped foot in, but can feel deep in my bones.

So much of our lives are shaped by geography and the circumstances in which we are born. It’s sheer LUCK!! Yet, for some reason that I’ll never understand, we live in a country where that luck is framed as merit. As if being born in a zip code with resources, or a country with a blue passport, is a personal achievement, and not a literal cosmic roll of the dice. I cannot imagine not having empathy or care for someone who was dealt a different hand than mine; I cannot believe we live in a world where so many people don’t.

Los Angeles is a special and strange place, built by dreams and hard fucking work. I am lucky to have been born there. It is home to millions of families who have given everything and risked everything for the possibility of a better life. For themselves, for their children, for a future they may not even get to experience. And in doing so, immigrants from all over the world have enriched our lives in immeasurable ways: they’ve enriched our communities, our neighborhoods, our culture, our creativity, our food, our economy. But we also need to stop talking about immigrants only in terms of what they give us. That framing — “they work hard,” “they contribute,” — it makes their humanity conditional.

Immigrants are not just labor. They are not a commodity. They are people. They are our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, our neighbors, our friends. They are artists, activists, entrepreneurs, caregivers, healers. They are engineers and doctors and lawyers who left careers and businesses behind. They are people with ambitions and dreams who had the humility and faith to start over. They learned a second or third or fourth language, and bravely spoke in broken English, only to be taunted by someone who can barely speak the one. Immigrants are the heartbeat and backbone of our communities, not a footnote to them.

There is no part of my life that has not been made better and more beautiful because of immigrants. The languages I speak at home, the meals I cook, the art I love, the friends and family I hold closest to my heart — none of it exists in isolation from immigration.

On Friday, ICE raids targeting the downtown LA garment district, where generations of mostly Latinx and Asian workers have been the backbone of LA’s (and much of the US’s) fashion industry, made a violent descent on LA and nearby suburbs. Within hours, organizers, community members, and regular-degular Angelenos mobilized to protest, standing up for and in solidarity with their neighbors, demanding an immediate end to the raids and ICE’s terror. Over the last few days, the city (specifically in and around Downtown LA) has seen rapid escalation, with the National Guard deployed by Trump (without CA Governor Newsom’s consent or approval), and just in the last few hours, marines have also been deployed to Los Angeles. (There is a detailed visual timeline here.) This kind of sweeping authoritarianism, militarization, and inhumane treatment of immigrants is exactly what Trump promised.

These ICE raids are not about safety. They’re about fear, cruelty, and erasure. And they’re happening in one of the most immigrant-rich cities in the country, in communities that have long been exploited for their labor and discarded when politically convenient. The people being targeted in LA right now are the very people who built the city, and who continue to hold it up.

No one is “illegal.” We’re all human. Our borders are made up, often by violence and war and colonization. We’re all shaped by circumstance, by history, by hope, by survival. And luck. So much luck.

A city that survived fire could never be taken out by ice.

Whether you’re in or outside of LA, we’re all in this together. We keep each other safe. Please consider supporting the organizations at the frontlines of this work, who provide immigration defense, legal resources, workers rights and advocacy, and more:

Immigration Defenders Law Center: @immdef_lawcenter

Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights: @chirla_org (sister org: CHIRLA Action Fund: @chirlafund)

CA Immigrant Policy Center: @caimmigrant

The Immigrant Legal Resource Center: @the_ilrc

Day Laborer Network: @daylaborernetwork

Garment Worker Center: @garmentworkercenter

Apologies in advance for any typos or formatting errors —writing this while navigating a lot of emotions, rapidly evolving news, & a day of transit.