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The US population includes an estimated 65.2 million Latinos, a quarter of whom refers to California as their home. For more than a century, Latinos were absent from two U.S. Senate seats in the state. In 2022, Sen. Alex Padilla overturned the intentional neglect of Latino Senate candidates by both major political parties, winning 61.1% of the vote.
On Thursday, amid the height of the Trump administration’s biggest ever immigration attack, Padilla was forced to remove her at a Homeland Security press conference in her hometown of Los Angeles. He boldly tried to exercise his parliamentary responsibility. He was pushed out of job-related meetings to ask questions. For many Latinos, the abominable treatment of Padilla by the Trump administration symbolizes shared dissatisfaction. They are being kicked out of conversations about our lives, our families and our future.
The Trump administration’s immigrant raid is a completely Latino issue. Not because immigration is a Latino issue, but all issues are Latino issues – Trump’s immigration enforcement has always been racially motivated. The announcement of the Trump campaign in 2015 saw the 2015 announcement of the Trump campaign, calling for Mexican rapists and criminals, building walls across the southern border, sticking to paying Mexico, and focusing on the 2024 campaign on immigration and criminality. The central story was “us” and “them.”
While immigration is a concern for all cities and states, Trump’s immigration enforcement appears to focus solely on Latino communities. In Los Angeles, Trump’s attacks explicitly target the majority of Latinos neighbourhoods and cities, including Westlake, Paramount and Compton, and go beyond data-based enforcement measures to errands such as washing up and sitting in church parking lots for Latinos racial profiling near schools.
Last week, Los Angeles was a zero-ground overreach of Trump’s federal government. Padilla’s silencing and removal follows a refusal to grant four U.S. House representatives from the Los Angeles federal detention center on Saturday and three representatives from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center in Adelanto on Sunday.
While immigration attacks raise serious policy and human rights concerns, the Trump administration’s unequal treatment of Latino Congressional leaders represents a different kind of danger. It is a test for the rule of the Democratic Republic.
America has three comparable branches: legislative, enforcement and judicial. A separation system of power, checks and balance is designed to prevent tyranny and ensure a balanced government. For the past five months, the Trump administration has overturned our governance system.
The Trump administration has circumvented Congressional budgetary measures by eliminating foreign aid. Trump officials deliberately ignored the judicial order. They blocked sitting members of the House and Senate from entering federal buildings, preventing them from conducting surveillance, undermining their enquiries.
Like Trump’s immigration enforcement action, administration overreach is racially motivated. For a long time, Latinos have expressed that no one has listened to their needs. They are excluded from the conversation and are never at the table where decisions are being made. Research has revealed that Latinos bear the brunt of underestimation across key social institutions such as academia, private companies, philanthropy and news media. The list continues.
Unfortunately, when Latinos achieve a position to wield power, such as Padilla’s rise to the Senate, the position itself tends to decrease, so that Padilla is silent at a press conference – the standout Latinos is denied the power that non-Latinos enjoys in parallel. This week’s event will offer a new chapter on Latino institutions and diminishing dignity. Members of the Congress were denied entry to do their job, and in the case of Padilla, they were forced to be eliminated and detained.
One thing that is consistent is the repeated dehumanization and needs of Latinos. Latinos are not monoliths, but the Trump administration certainly treats us that way. His administration unleashed a Carte Blanche attack on Latinos. From Latino community members being arrested for sneaking up at places of worship, worship services and children’s school graduation ceremonies to targeted attacks on the sustainability and operation of Latino-led nonprofits, to physical attacks by US senators. The Latinx Conquest is currently the region that promotes the world’s fourth largest economy (California) and is fully exhibited in Los Angeles, the global epicenter of media and entertainment. The lack of Latinx participation that makes sense in shaping narratives, trends and public imagination is a source of concern.
The conversations about the vulnerability of American democracy, the revival of fascism and authoritarianism, and the future of the constitution are essentially discourses about Latinos and all Americans. As long as Latinos are silent, exiled and reeled to the periphery by conversations about the future of this country, they remain that future. Testing how America responds in real time to wholesale attacks against the second largest demographic group is a currently shared challenge. And the group’s leader is Padilla.
Sonja Diaz is a civil rights lawyer and co-founder of the Latina Futures 2050 Lab and UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Institute.
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