Donald Trump didn’t send dozens of masked federal immigration agents to a Gavin Newsom press conference in downtown Los Angeles because they had urgent business in Little Tokyo. He sent them to make a point: in Trump’s America, federal power can be weaponised for spectacle, humiliation, and intimidation.
Newsom called it “sick and pathetic.” Karen Bass called it “a provocative act.” Both are right, but outrage is not a strategy. You cannot stare down an authoritarian with a press release.
The raid (if you can call a small army of Border Patrol agents in masks detaining one person a “raid”) was timed to the minute. Newsom was on stage talking about redistricting, the dull mechanics of democracy. Trump’s people staged a parallel theatre: the black-clad presence of the state, right outside the doors, reminding everyone who holds the monopoly on force. It was a set-piece out of the strongman’s playbook. Bluring the line between political conflict and police action until they’re the same thing.
If this really is, as Newsom said, “everything you know about the authoritarian tendencies of the president of the United States,” then the logical next step is not to hope it stops. It’s to make it harder for the machine to function here. California can’t shut ICE down, but it can make its work slow, expensive, and public.
That means no state or local official so much as picks up the phone for ICE without a judge-signed warrant. It means ICE can’t tap into California’s driver’s-licence database or automated licence-plate readers unless they persuade a judge. It means schools, hospitals, and courthouses are sealed to them without a judicial order. It means private detention centres have to meet such strict health, fire, and language-access codes that ICE either upgrades them or gets out. It means every Californian caught in this system gets a lawyer, not after the fact, but from the first knock on the door.
Trump’s people understand the politics of spectacle. So should Newsom. If the governor wants to show that California won’t be intimidated, the most potent spectacle he can create is a state that refuses to be the scaffolding for federal deportation raids. That’s not “defying the law” it’s refusing to be commandeered for a purpose the people of this state reject.
The Little Tokyo stunt wasn’t about catching one person. It was about showing that the president can turn the tools of the federal government into an instrument of political theatre, aimed squarely at his opponents. If Newsom really means it when he says “we will not be intimidated,” he has to move past condemnation and into construction. Building legal, bureaucratic, and political barriers so high that next time Trump wants to stage a raid for the cameras, he has to do it without California’s help.
