Why Were Trump’s Agents Casing a Puerto Rican Museum in Chicago?
Plus: The lessons of L.A. Taco.
LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens. You know that. I know that. But it is wholly unclear if Trump’s masked forces in tactical gear do.
It was utterly confounding to Chicagoans this week when it appeared that Homeland Security agents were skulking outside the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture ahead of its annual Barrio Arts Fest this weekend. The museum is in a neighborhood, Humboldt Park, that is half Latino and predominantly Puerto Rican.
DHS denies that its agents’ visit had anything to do with the upcoming events, but that doesn’t pass the smell test: Museum staffers told ABC 7 Chicago that they heard agents talking about the festival. (Worth noting: In addition to the museum’s Barrio Arts Festival, locals told me there is also an upcoming Colombian festival across the street next weekend.)
“There’s footage of them looking around, asking how to come in and out, and occupying the parking lot,” said Federico A. de Jesús, a former Obama administration official who is now a consultant. He spoke with The Bulwark after a Wednesday press conference at the museum that featured more than a dozen local, state, and federal officials, including Rep. Delia Ramirez, state senator Omar Aquino, and Cook County Commissioner Jessica Vazquez.
The press conference was intended to show that what DHS is doing is a waste of money—and that the community stands together: Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Colombians side by side, and won’t be intimidated.
“I think they messed with the wrong community here,” de Jesús said. “The underlying message to Puerto Ricans was . . . ‘If they think they’re okay because [they’re] citizens’—one comedian has joked that they’re ‘Latino premium’—‘there’s no such thing anymore.’”
“We’re all the same to them,” de Jesús added. “They don’t know, and they don’t care” that Puerto Ricans are citizens.
Veronica Ocasio, a director at the museum, which went into “high alert,” said she was “literally in disbelief.”
“Between the hours of 3 and 5 in our parking lot, Homeland Security presented themselves in force, Gestapo-style intimidation, to our staff who was not ready,” she said. “And we as a staff, as the National Puerto Rican Museum, will not allow this bullying or intimidation to happen here.”
Signs of what is to come—and how the media can better prepare for it
TO REPORT ON IMMIGRATION UNDER TRUMP is to be confronted with nonsensical, head-scratching incidents like the one above. And of course there are also many difficult, painful, and violent stories of government agents coming after workers who provide cheap labor—from agriculture, to the restaurant business, to the garment industry. I spoke with reporters at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) conference in Chicago to gauge how they felt their peers and news organizations were doing—six months after my first newsletter warned the media was not ready for the arrival of mass deportations. Turns out I was right about this being a national story far beyond the confines of the border, and the danger of false objectivity in the face of a crush of racist, unlawful, and unconstitutional policies.
But it’s also important to highlight journalists who are covering this huge story well, with intelligence, energy, and creativity. And that conversation, for me, begins with Daniel Hernandez, a former drug-war correspondent for Vice who is now the Los Angeles Times food editor. He’s the kind of guy who notes in an interview that the humble taco “is the basic unit of life in Los Angeles.”
Why the hell am I highlighting a food editor in a story about immigration?
As Trump put boots on the ground in L.A.—including not just ICE and other DHS personnel but Marines and the National Guard—journalists in the city mobilized. But I was moved by unique coverage in the food section—using that unusual platform to tell rich human stories. For example, a piece by Stephanie Breijo detailed how street vendors were using the milk from their agua frescas to neutralize the irritants protesters were hit with. That story was assigned by Hernandez.
“These vendors have to work,” Hernandez told me of his thinking behind the story. “They are going to work until they get picked up because they have to pay rent, so despite the protests they’re going to be right out there. Two hours later she [Breijo] came back with a story of how they were using extra horchata milk to aid the injuries from tear gas deployed by the LAPD and federal strike forces. [The story] took gumption and enterprise. But came from a sense that Latinos in the U.S.—we are going to get through this.”
The speed with which the Trump administration has discarded norms, breaking and smashing the fragile immigration system, has “stunned the journalism class,” Hernandez said.
“There’s been a lot of both-sidesing” in press coverage, he said. But “it’s really hard to both-sides fascism, it does not look good. You still have to elevate your game and meet the moment.” And here, Hernandez praises another news outlet: “No one is doing it better than L.A. Taco.”
L.A. Taco is a local website that until a few weeks ago was known for a little news reporting, especially focusing on local neighborhoods, but mostly, yes, for its coverage of tacos. The site’s ascendance in the wake of Trump’s deployment of forces in Los Angeles has been covered in NPR and the Washington Post, so I won’t belabor it here. But they’re doing important work, as evinced by their story this week titled “27-Year-Old Hit With ‘Less-Lethal’ Munition Grapples With ‘Life-Changing’ Injury.”
Hernandez makes an interesting point about what L.A. Taco is reminding the news media. And it’s not about self-aggrandizement, even though Hernandez was, back in 2018 and 2019, the editor-in-chief at L.A. Taco and responsible for establishing its editorial and ethical standards. He says he does not take credit for their success now, but thinks the website’s example shows that the foundations of journalism can be learned and executed well even by small, scrappy, unconventional teams. One L.A. Taco journalist, Lexis-Olivier Rey, was a skater and photographer before learning to write articles. Another, Memo Torres, became a journalist at the age of 40 and now is the site’s director of content and social media.
THIS TAKING STOCK of the state of immigration coverage comes at a time when ICE is about to become supercharged—with vast oceans of money to spend on new hires, new tools and weapons, new vehicles and planes, new detention space.
If you think the fear and terror that ICE causes now is bad—sending people on the run, sending churches into hiding, making museums go on high alert—how much more intense do you think things will get when the feds are even more amped up in the months and years ahead?
“I don’t think people are prepared for the implementation and what that’s going to look like,” a veteran CBS News journalist told me. “They have all this money now, what are they going to do with it?”
Then again, as Marcela Garcia, an opinion writer for the Boston Globe, told me, maybe the ICE-on-steroids budget will help wake up Americans.
“There may be a silver lining,” Garcia said. “When people realize there’s this army—at the expense of other programs for vulnerable people and debt future generations will pay for—that’s when people will wake up and the so-called resistance will realize what’s going on.”
I subscribe to The Guardian and an interesting email came across this morning about a lawsuit that The Guardian just filed (essentially based on a FOIA request that went unanswered) to get the underlying data that ICE is aggregating to put out 'statistics' on who they have arrested and currently are detaining. I would keep an eye on this - if they can make any progress with the courts, the data they uncover could be quite fascinating and very newsworthy. Hoping the Bulwark folks can pick up on this and at least keep it in the mix of things they are tracking. Thanks to all the Bulwark folk for keeping us all informed and making us feel a little less insane as we navigate this chaotic situation. Cheers -
Must add.. this was never, ever about removing criminals from the United States. This has always been about fearmongering, power, control, grift for all the private detention centers, racism and white nationalism.