[[link removed]]

HOW TRUMP IS KEEPING AMERICANS FROM CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
July 4, 2025
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ As ICE agents run amok, Latino cities and communities have been
compelled to cancel their celebrations. _

A group of people on a car viewing fireworks, Bradyn Shock

 

One of the great things about the Fourth of July is the cornucopia of
local fireworks displays and parades. The celebration falls under the
category of national/neighborhood—a category that doesn’t really
apply to any other distinctly American holiday.

I’ve celebrated one July 4th on the banks of a small New Jersey
lake, where the fireworks from the town on my side of the lake
appeared to duel with the fireworks from the town on the other side,
giving the appearance of a small-scale civil war. I’ve celebrated
another as the Pacific Palisades Independence Day Parade wended its
way past the local American Legion post in 1968, under the Safeway
sign that featured an anti-war slogan my high school buddies and I had
soldered to that sign in the hours before dawn.

July 4th is local. It’s national. It’s political.

And this year, where ICE roams, it’s curtailed.

In Los Angeles, where just under half of the county’s ten million
residents are Latino, those residents—most of them U.S.
citizens—are too frightened to appear in public. Parents have
shunned their children’s graduations. Devout Catholics have stopped
going to mass. Bus riding has dwindled to about half of its usual
level. Restaurant kitchens are chronically understaffed. Supermarket
aisles on L.A.’s Eastside are empty.

_MORE FROM HAROLD MEYERSON_
[[link removed]]

If ICE were merely arresting undocumented immigrants who’d been
convicted of violent crimes, as ICE insists it’s been doing, this
mass disappearance wouldn’t be happening. But ICE is simply swarming
any place where Latinos gather, sending 50 agents, for instance, into
a neighborhood swap meet. From June 1 through June 10, the _Los
Angeles Times _reported
[[link removed]],
ICE detained 722 people around Los Angeles, some of them almost
instantaneously deported. Sixty-nine percent of them hadn’t been
convicted of any crime. Nor had the great majority of them crossed the
border during the Biden years; immigration to Los Angeles peaked in
the 1980s and ’90s. Most deportees were longtime residents of the
L.A. community.

And today, Trump’s deportation policies have caused the
cancellation
[[link removed]] of
scores of America’s birthday celebrations.

The city of Los Angeles’s signature celebration—the annual Fourth
of July Block Party in Gloria Molina Park, abutting City Hall—has
been canceled because downtown’s disproportionately Latino residents
fear that celebrating in the civic center’s public park could lead
to them being seized, or their relatives or neighbors or friends or
co-workers being seized. In the historic heart of Latino L.A., the
venerable neighborhood celebrations in Boyle Heights and Lincoln
Heights have also been canceled.

All the small cities that line the Long Beach Freeway, from the near
Eastside down to the harbor, 20 miles south, have canceled their own
celebrations
[[link removed]].
El Sereno has been holding its Independence Day parade for the past 66
years, but this year it’s been compelled to forgo it. Bell Gardens
[[link removed]], Cudahy
[[link removed]], Huntington
Park
[[link removed]],
and Whittier [[link removed]] (the
birthplace of Richard Nixon, where the yearly “Freedom Walk”
isn’t happening this year) have called off their own festivities.

In their announcements of the cancellations, some of these cities and
neighborhoods also announced the cancellation of other public events
that are normally part of their summertime fare. A massive bike ride
event known as CicLAvia, where Los Angeles shuts down city streets and
allows bikers and walkers to use them for one day free of auto
interference, was canceled in South L.A.
[[link removed]],
for example.

There still will be fireworks displays in L.A. on the Fourth, but only
in places where a nighttime ICE sweep would seize so many Anglos
(_Hey, it was dark;_ _they coulda been Latinos_) that, horror of
horrors, the agency might even have to admit error. So, there will be
fireworks at the beaches, at Dodger Stadium, at the Rose Bowl. But
throughout the towns and communities where Latinos have been
celebrating their American-ness for decades, as our nations’
immigrants have been celebrating theirs for centuries, there will be
no celebrations at all this year. Donald Trump has driven them all
indoors.

That, of course, isn’t Donald Trump’s only contribution to this
year’s national birthday. His presidency mocks the foundational
credo propounded on the first July 4th, that all men are created
equal. That is clearly not the credo of a president who has halted all
immigration to our nation save that of Afrikaners; whose own credo is
that only white racists need apply. His budget bill that he’s about
to sign will massively increase inequality in this country. His
presidency mocks a revolution that repudiated monarchial government in
favor of a republic. His is not a government but an Atlantic City
version of Versailles; his guiding star isn’t the Constitution but
the profane right of kings.

July 4th is our original No Kings Day; this July 4th must also be a No
Tinpots Day as well.

But give credit where credit is due. Until Trump, no president, with
the possible exception of the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis, ever
sought to keep Americans from celebrating the Fourth of July. By that
metric, Trump’s in a league by himself.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
[[link removed]]
to read the original article at Prospect.org._

_Click here [[link removed]] to support The American
Prospect's brand of independent impact journalism._

_Pledge to support fearlessly independent journalism by joining the
Prospect [[link removed]] as a member today._

_Every level includes an opt-in to receive our print magazine by mail,
or a renewal of your current print subscription._

* Fourth of July
[[link removed]]
* ICE Raids
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]