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ICE’s Latest: A Military Sweep Through a Park with Little Kids

On horseback, with armored vehicles, Trump’s troops stomp through L.A.’s MacArthur Park.

Yesterday morning in Los Angeles, Donald Trump’s deportation agents staged an operation that was part Stormtroopers and part Keystone Kops. They made a military sweep of MacArthur Park, complete with troopers on horseback and ICE agents in military garb marching in formation, while federalized National Guard soldiers in armored vehicles waited on side streets in case the parade provoked a confrontation.

In fact, just about the only people in the park were small children and child care workers, who were suitably terrified and scurried away. Mission accomplished, I guess.

According to U.S. Army documents obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the sweep was meant to be a “show of presence”—presumably, a message to Angelenos that the armed forces supported by Angelenos’ taxes could show up at any park or public space (for which they also paid taxes) and threaten incautious park-goers.

Like all military operations, this one had a name—Operation Excalibur—and a mission laid out in the Army’s official briefing:

On order, 1-18th Cavalry Squadron provides static interagency site protection, mounted mobile security, and Joint Force Land Component Command (JFLCC) Reserve support to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and supporting federal agencies, whose intent at MacArthur Park is to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area (JOA).

MacArthur Park is notorious as a venue for drug sales, but that wasn’t the object of this show of force. It was chosen because it’s at the center of one of the most densely populated immigrant neighborhoods in L.A. In order to comply with Stephen Miller’s 3,000-detentions-per-day diktat, ICE’s modus operandi has sunk to arresting people who look suspiciously Latino and asking questions later, if they’re actually asked at all, and MacArthur Park is nothing if not a Latino-rich zone. The lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU and other NGOs alleging the illegality of the racial profiling on which Trump’s agents have come to rely has now been joined by California and 17 other states.

That these arrests have nothing to do with the criminal records that Trump insists the detainees have is confirmed by a Cato Institute study of all 204,297 ICE arrests from last October through midway this June, which showed that only 7 percent of those arrested had been convicted of violent crimes, a figure that rose to just over 10 percent when property crimes were added to that tally.

As yet, however, there have been no reports from ICE or anyone else of any arrests that were made during its sweep through the park—but that wasn’t why they made that sweep. The intent was clearly to intimidate, to show that armed government agents could appear in any place at any time (including, we must fear, at polling places on Election Day 2026—something about which Democratic members of Congress should begin probing administration officials as soon as yesterday).

It’s easy to forget that one of the proximate causes of our 250-year-old revolution was the stationing and deploying of British troops in the middle of colonial cities. Donald Trump and his neo-redcoats appear determined to go that route again.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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