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It appears that she is calling for street gangs to intervene in immigrant raids after Cynthia Gonzalez, the deputy mayor of Cudahy’s small city, received national attention and criticism for her now-deprecated social media video.
“In a social media post, her clients called on the community to exercise their freedom of speech and the Congress’s first amendment rights to express their views on recent ice enforcement actions,” said Damien Martinez, Gonzalez’s lawyer.
“Dr. Gonzalez encouraged anyone to engage in violence. The suggestion that she claimed violence was decisively false and not without merit,” Martinez said on behalf of the deputy mayor of UCLA’s Educational Ph.D.
There have been no official sightings of Gonzalez since the video began to circulate online. NBC Los Angeles contacted Gonzalez for an interview.
Gonzalez’s lawyer said he was trying to “challenge” her community to join other Angelenos to organize “peacefully” in response to ongoing immigration enforcement, but she explicitly mentioned two of the two groups most well-known in the video.
“I want to know where all the Choros in Los Angeles on 18th Avenue, Florencia, are,” she said in the video. “You guys tag everything and insist on hoods, and now your hood is being invaded by the biggest gangs, so there’s no peep from you.”
Known for its widespread and harsh criminal activity, Florencia 13 has poses a major threat to the community for many years. In August last year, several members of the group were charged with multiple murders, including beating a man and murdering fellow gang members for violating the rules.
While denounced immigration policies targeting undocumented communities, through her lawyers, she said she will continue to present her community and encourage people to exercise their freedom of speech and Congressional rights.
“Citizen engagement is fundamental to our country’s constitutional and political processes, and the constitutionally protected means of finding an alternative to a policy of mass deportation,” said Gonzalez’s lawyer.
Gonzalez, who was elected to the Gadahi City Council in 2022, works as an educator and administrator in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Her bio from the city’s website says Gonzalez is currently the director of the pilot school program, but the district told NBC Los Angeles that Gonzalez has been on hiatus since June 1st.
The city of Cudahy said in a statement Tuesday that it knew the video.
“The comments by the Deputy Mayor reflect her personal views and do not represent the views or official positions of the city of Kadahi,” the statement read. “The city will not provide further comment.”
The video comes along with President Donald Trump’s administration aggressively strengthening immigrant arrests in the Los Angeles area in recent weeks. Agents and border patrols from ICE were seen arresting and detaining people at work, and Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines to protect federal buildings and guards arresting security guards.
A spokesman for the US Lawyer’s Office for the Central District of California, including Los Angeles County, declined to comment when asked if Gonzalez was under investigation.
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