Riots rocked Los Angeles over the weekend, ostensibly started by protesters upset at deportation raids. Yet if there are any rioters who legitimately care about immigrants and aren’t just violent opportunists, they have harmed the immigrants’ cause.
The riots are just threatening the city immigrants helped build, hurting innocent residents, and setting up political for a broader immigrant crackdown. If any rioters are illegal immigrants, they should be arrested and deported. All Americans and peaceful immigrants deserve to be secure in their life, liberty, and property. If California politicians agree, they should be willing to identify anyone involved.
However, California should also seize this chance to get the federal government back to targeting criminals, not workers. Focusing law enforcement on deporting violent criminals and those who damage property takes resources away from Trump’s campaign to round up nonviolent people who are actually contributing to their communities.
We know that this tradeoff is real. Although ICE is now trying to rewrite history to claim that it was targeting violent felons this weekend, the crisis actually began after ICE conducted worksite raids throughout the city on Friday. ICE had warrants for the worksite, not the employees, but after checking their documents, it rounded up the workers, dragging out dozens of immigrants.
Whatever role ICE may have played initially, the California government should focus on stopping the violence and identifying the violent rioters in hoodies and masks who delight in causing chaos. The state should not give ICE any excuses for continuing its horrific deportation campaign that will devastate the city for years to come—even if ICE will continue it anyway.
There is little evidence that illegal immigrants are behind much of the violence. Of the 200 or so arrests, the government has only identified one as an illegal immigrant, and that person and any other illegal immigrants causing trouble should be held able and deported. But his case should not be used to tar the nearly 14 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
President Trump pinned the riots on “professional agitators,” and the LAPD chief Jim McDonnell said it was the same people as in past riots unrelated to immigration. “These are people who do this all the time,” he said. By contrast, illegal immigrants usually try to stay out of trouble, as they’re generally much less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.
The indiscriminate raids we saw late last week were not a response to criminals. Just the opposite: they were demanded by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller in a fiery meeting at ICE headquarters two weeks ago. “What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” Miller barked at officials, according to the conservative Washington Examiner. “You’re horrible leaders… Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”
As a result, ICE has started arresting thousands of people every day, diverting agents from the FBI, ATF, and other agencies away from tracking down actual criminal fugitives. Even before this recent switch, only about half of ICE arrests were criminals, and many of them for minor immigration or traffic offenses. President Trump authorized these actions when he signed an executive order on his first day in office that rescinded ICE’s prior policy of requiring agents to target immigrants who were public safety or national security threats.
In Los Angeles this weekend, one of the workers ICE snatched was a father of a U.S. citizen who had lived in the United States for over two decades without incident. ICE spent much of the week before the worksite raids, rounding up noncriminal immigrants who were complying with immigration court proceedings and ICE check-in appointments, including a 9-year-old boy and his father and two parents and their U.S. citizen child.
ICE is unable to conduct mass deportations without nabbing millions of peaceful people because there just aren’t that many criminal immigrants out there. Illegal immigrants have a far lower criminal incarceration rate than native-born Americans, going back to at least 2010.
California doesn’t track illegal immigrant criminals in its justice system, but Georgia, Oklahoma, and Texas do. They all find they are less likely to be incarcerated or convicted of crimes than native-born Americans. Texas offers the best evidence. In the Lone Star State, illegal immigrants are about 48 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans, 36 percent less likely for homicide.
Since most illegal immigrants are just working and minding their own business, not engaging in riots or criminality, ICE’s deportation operations will impose massive economic and social harms on U.S. cities with no commensurate increase in law and order. They will sweep away customers, close businesses, and punish whole economies. They will tear apart families and communities.
Still, riots will not stop the harm. They will exacerbate them. Riots often start with legitimate protests and spiral when criminals take over as social order breaks down, attracting other criminals who are just there for looting, mayhem, and violence. Riots are not the voice of the oppressed, they are the battle cry of deviants. These rioters destroy the very communities the protests start off trying to defend. The harms from the 1992 LA riots persisted for years, as one of us (Alex) saw firsthand growing up around Los Angeles.
Importantly, violent protests decrease public for a cause, while nonviolent protests are twice as effective in achieving political goals. Clearing away the violent agitators will return the focus to legitimate concerns about ICE’s goals and tactics.
California should not tolerate lawlessness, regardless of the cause. Rather than simply resist a military takeover of the city, California should embrace the opportunity to redirect ICE and the federal government toward identifying and arresting real criminals who harm immigrants and native-born Americans.
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Alex Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at Cato.
