Ballots in Los Angeles were still being counted last week when the resistance to President-elect Donald Trump began to take shape. By Friday, the city’s incoming police chief, Jim McDonnell, was promising the Los Angeles Police Department would refuse support for Trump’s much-ballyhooed deportation schemes.
“The national election has caused many Angelenos to feel a deep, deep fear,” McDonnell said in a statement to the city council, which was debating — and ultimately approved — his nomination.
“I want to be unequivocal,” he added. “LAPD will protect LA’s immigrant community. We will not cooperate with mass deportations.”
McDonnell’s statement responded in part to a lurking concern about his record: During his time as Los Angeles County sheriff, that department, which operates the jails, cooperated with federal immigration authorities who would deport people after they were arrested. Although the number of prisoners turned over to the feds fell during McDonnell’s time in that office, some immigrant advocates equated his participation with support. That concern was only ratcheted up by Trump’s election and the sudden fear that Washington’s long arm was about to reach into this city’s longstanding embrace of immigrants.
Mayor Karen Bass, who chose McDonnell for the job, wasted no time in asserting her authority over this closely watched matter of police policy.
“My message is simple,” she said. “No matter where you were born, how you came to this country, Los Angeles will stand with you, and this will not change.”
Those policy pronouncements place Los Angeles squarely at odds with the Trump campaign’s immigration rhetoric, with its shrill insistence that it will launch “mass deportations” on the false theory that illegal immigrants are causing a spike in crime. (In fact, illegal immigrants offend much, much less frequently than people born here) Trump has been spouting versions of that fabricated argument since he launched his first campaign in 2016, and he shows no signs of letting up.
