ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- The Trump administration's invasion of the City of Angels is really quite devilish.

A Mexican American friend says that what surprises him most is that this is occurring in a city that is overwhelmingly Latino.

My friend is half right. Occupy L.A. is happening not despite the fact that Los Angeles is a Latino city but because it is a Latino city.

After Hurricane Katrina, then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared the Big Easy a "chocolate" city. Well, in the first quarter of the 21st century, Los Angeles tastes more like dulce de leche.

The administration wants to get rid of as many Latinos as possible. The idea is to bleach the country and make America white again.

This is a Latino purge. Deportations are just a means to an end. The storyline is about racism and nativism and changing demographics.

What did you think the occupation was about? Arresting criminals? Upholding the rule of law?

Get real. In the Trump White House, those are punchlines. If the felon-in-chief cared about upholding the rule of law, he would rescind the more than 1,500 pardons and commutations he handed out like party favors to Jan. 6 rioters. Then he would turn himself in to the nearest federal prison, where he could get three hots and a cot.

When Depression-era bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he took down banks, he responded matter-of-factly: "Well, that's where the money is."

President Donald Trump invaded Los Angeles because that's where the Latinos are.

In 2023, America's largest minority accounted for nearly half -- 47.2%.- of the population of the nation's second-largest city. Los Angeles is home to Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Venezuelans and others. But about 75% of the Latinos there are Mexican or Mexican American. In fact, there are more Mexicans in Los Angeles than in any other city outside of Mexico.

Those are the numbers. But who's counting? MAGA. That's who. As a mostly white movement, it's haunted by figures like that.

Meanwhile, we know how the Mad King feels about Mexicans. For a guy who the international markets refer to as "TACO," Trump has never been very friendly to our friends south of the border. He considers them all to be violent criminals, rapists and drug traffickers who are totally ruining the United States.

Everyone believes things that aren't true. But it takes a special kind of stupid to get things 180 degrees wrong. Like when people used to say that Latino parents don't value education, when that's all they value.

Likewise, anybody who has ever visited a construction site, or driven by a strawberry field, or welcomed these unsavory characters into your home to do their chores and raise their kids, knows that immigrants aren't hurting America. They're propping up the old girl.

Trump has shown repeatedly that he doesn't much like or appreciate Latinos. He is terrified of changing demographics -- especially in the Southwest, which was part of Mexico until the mid-19th century when President James K. Polk pilfered it. Polk was intoxicated by the elixir of Manifest Destiny, a concept that Trump does like and appreciate.

With Latinos now accounting for about 20% of the U.S. population, the president is hell-bent on not letting that figure climb. As a 78-year-old white male born in a racially segregated society in 1946, the president had a good run. And he doesn't want to see his children and grandchildren be "replaced" and not get the chance to enjoy the white privilege that made so much of his life possible.

So Trump attacks Los Angeles. The multi-agency assault -- which involves multiple federal law enforcement agencies, at least 4,000 California National Guard troops (federalized by Trump) and at least 700 Marines -- should be called Operation Overreach.

The Marines? Seriously? Living 30 minutes from Camp Pendleton, I have several friends who are Marines. They tell me that Marines are good at breaking things and killing people.

Is that what they're going to do when they square off against fellow citizens in Los Angeles? Should we change the hymn for the corps?

From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of...Malibu?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. As a Mexican American with a family whose Tejano roots in this country go back at least 175 years -- decades before Trump's grandfather, Frederick Trump, floated into the United States aboard a steamship from Germany in 1885 -- what the "American" in me wants to do most of all is fight, fight, fight.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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