‘The problem was created by Trump’: Three eyewitnesses describe what’s really happening in Los Angeles

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and today we are taking you to the streets of Los Angeles where federal agents, including many in face masks and unmarked cars, have been snatching and disappearing people off the streets, taking them from Home Depot, parking lots and farm fields. Outside immigration courts abducting them from their homes, leaving lives and families shattered with all the inhumane violence and brutal glee of fascist brown shirts. Unless you have been living under a rock and actively refusing to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening in our country, you have no doubt seen videos of these immigration raids on social media and on the news you saw federal agents tackle and arrest union leader David Huerta, president of Service employees International Union, unite Service Workers West, while he and others were exercising their first amendment right to observe and document law enforcement activity at a workplace raid on Friday, June 6th, you’ve heard the reports of President Donald Trump sending National Guard troops in active duty Marines into LA against the explicit wishes of California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom.

And Trump is now openly demanding that ICE and other armed agents of the state specifically target and invade other major sanctuary cities with elected democratic leaders to carry out his mass deportation campaign. And you have hopefully also seen and heard the voices of resistance rising from the streets, even with a curfew in place in downtown LA over multiple days, even in the face of militarized police openly violating their first amendment rights and brutalizing protestors, journalists and legal observers alike residents across America’s second largest city, and I’m talking union members, students, grandparents, and retirees, faith leaders and concerned citizens from all walks of life have continued voicing their descent online and in the streets, protesting the Trump administration’s authoritarian attacks, rallying support and protection for immigrant communities, filming ice and police abuses and demanding accountability. What is happening in Los Angeles is already setting the stage for what’s to come around the country.

We know what the Trump administration wants to do to immigrants, to protestors, to our civil rights, and to the very concept of state sovereignty. I mean, we are literally seeing it play out in real time. What we don’t know is how much Trump’s plans will be frustrated, thwarted, and even reversed by the resistance that he faces. What happens next depends on what people of conscience people like you do. Now in this two parts series of the podcast, we’re going to do our best to give you a panoramic view of the Battle of Los Angeles, bringing you multiple on the ground perspectives to help you cut through the noise and all the misinformation and to better understand what’s actually happening, where this is all heading, and what you and others can do to stand up for your rights and stand up for yourself, your family, your neighbors, your coworkers, and your community members.

For part one of this series, I spoke with three different journalists who have been doing distinct and equally essential coverage of the raids, the protests, police abuses, and community mobilization efforts happening in la. First I speak with Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, writer, author, and the host of Rising Up with Sonali. Then I speak with Javier Cabral, editor in chief of the award-winning independent outlet, LA Taco, which has been doing vital real-time video reporting on social media throughout the raids and the protests. And lastly, I speak with Michael Nigro, an award-winning filmmaker and multimedia journalist who is among the numerous journalist colleagues who have been assaulted by police while doing his job reporting from the front lines in Los Angeles.

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Hi, I’m Sonali Kolhatkar. I am the host, founder and executive producer of Rising Up with Sonali, an independent nationally syndicated television and radio program that’s broadcast on free speech TV and Pacifica radio stations. I’m also an essayist op-ed writer, reporter, and a published book author, and I’m really excited to be here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Sonali, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I’m a huge fan and appreciator of your work and everyone listening, if you’re not already, you should absolutely be listening to supporting and sharing Rising up with Sonali. It’s really, really essential work and we will link to that in the show notes. And you guys probably, if for any reason you aren’t already following son’s work, you’re definitely familiar with her and her critical voice. It was just a few months ago that Sonali was giving really important updates on news shows around the country, about the fires going on back home in Southern California. And here we are just what, four months later and now we’ve got the National Guard back in my home of LA and the protests that we are covering here on this episode. It’s been a lot and it’s kind of surreal to even be having this conversation, especially as a southern California boy now in Baltimore asking if you can kind of tell me what the hell is happening in my home.

But I really value the perspective that you’ve been bringing, and I know that right now there’s just so much crap and misinformation and bad information floating around online. And it really struck me in the first few days of the LA protests and the police backlash that it was hard to find good information about what was actually happening. And that was a very surreal experience for me to not fully know what was going on back home and to not know exactly where to look. So thankfully, I had folks like Sonali, I went to accounts that I trusted and I knew were doing good work and Sonali is very much one of those. And so I wanted to give you guys access to Sonali and her great work and perspective here. So with all that upfront Sonali, I kind of wanted to just turn it over to you and ask if you could give us a bit of a play by play of the past week down there. What has it actually been like and how has the reality on the ground differed from maybe the unreality that we’ve been hearing from the White House on down?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Yeah, I mean it’s been really interesting. It’s been, as you said, it should be contextualized with the Eaton fires that took place five months ago. And I think LA and Angelinos are kind of a breaking point. And so we, you’re seeing that attitude on the streets in la. It really actually started in San Diego the week in early June when a restaurant was struck by an ice raid and the people who were working in the restaurant were rounded up. The people who were eating at the restaurant were outraged. And then it moved into Los Angeles a week later when on June 6th, ice went into a Home Depot parking lot in Paramount in LA County and also in the Garin District. They went to an outlet that they knew they could find people who were working these jobs. They rounded them up and that started getting people angry and people were mobilizing.

But really what was the turning point was that same day on Friday, June 6th, David Huerta, the president of S-E-I-U-U-S-W, was in a confrontation, verbal confrontation with an ice agent rounding up around a raid and was sort of coming to the defense of one of the immigrants that they were trying to take away. He was very roughly shoved to the ground. His head was smashed against the sidewalk. He was arrested and well, first he was hospitalized and then arrested. And these are ice agents that are not supposed to have any jurisdiction over US citizens, let alone labor leaders. And so David Huerta, he’s a beloved labor leader, his arrest sparked this huge rage and anger in Los Angeles. It’s a strong union town and we are known for, this is the site of numerous UTLA teacher strikes and longshore workers striking and fight for 15 fast food workers.

Striking nurses have done strikes here. We’ve had in recent years, a SAG after strike writers and filmmakers striking. So this is strong labor center, and when they arrested David Huta, all bets were off. It mobilized the crowds of labor rank and file labor. And there was a huge, huge, huge rally on Monday, June 9th, the day that David Huta was arraigned, I went there. In fact, there was something on the order of 10 to 15,000 people gathered in Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles. I walked through that rally people out in a festive atmosphere, but they were angry. They were wearing their union shirts. There was a lot of clergy there as well, who do a lot of solidarity work with labor. There was a massive rally, lot of spoke from the rally. Many, many folks spoke on the stage and people were angry. And then up the street from that, there were a conference, there was the downtown federal building, which is 300 North Los Angeles.

What’s really interesting, max, I’ve been to that building as an immigrant probably two decades ago when I was a green card holder trying to adjust my status and get a work permit. I remember standing in a long line of people to get in and into my appointment. That building now covered with graffiti, California national Guardsmen, blanking it, standing there with their shields and there were angry, raucous protests, people yelling and screaming at them with loud speakers. There was a seven or 8-year-old child. I remember I took a photo of him. I didn’t want to publish it because he’s a minor, but I want to describe it to you. Seven or 8-year-old child standing in front of the national Guardsman, his back to them wearing nothing but a pair of pants and on his chest, Sharpie F ice like diff. I saw 12-year-old kid with a bandana and a face mask on the walls and on the sidewalk.

People were angry, wrapping themselves in Mexican flags. And for anybody who knows la, the Mexican flag is a symbol of protest, is a really common site. I know it’s completely being misinterpreted and misunderstood by the Trump administration. They’re using it as a way to say, look, we’re having a foreign invasion, but every time we’ve had immigration marches in LA, people pull out their Mexican flags as a way to assert their, not just dual citizenship in the symbolic sense or dual allegiance, but their immigrant identity. And it’s a way to say, this used to be Mexican land. It’s a way to say, we are not going to assimilate and bow down to white supremacy. We’re going to be our glorious, colorful, radical, powerful selves that you can’t put in a box because we’re multiple identities. We’re intersecting identities. That’s what that flag represents. And it’s very commonly seen at LA protests that have anything to do with immigration.

So that was happening. And then in front of the detention center where that was being held, people had gathered and there were are cops standing there looking, mean there was no big confrontation because all the confrontations are happening in the evening. They did ara him, they released him. And then of course what’s been happening is there was a curfew put on a one square mile, one square mile area in downtown LA after 8:00 PM but they’re tricking protesters. I have not been there past curfew, but from the reports that I’m reading of people whose work I trust and people are emailing me about their experiences, the cops, the train stops running at seven, which it shouldn’t. The curfew starts at eight, train stops running at seven. The cops around people who are protesting kettle them, which is a term that means that they prevent them from leaving, trapping them, and then have free reign to arrest them after the curfew starts at 8:00 PM saying you are violating curfew.

Now, by the way, this is all in the control of the city, which is supposed to be separate from federal ice agents. And to me, what this movement has really clarified is that there’s no difference between police and ice. Some people would like to think there is a difference. Mayor Karen Bass in LA was trying to suggest that LAPD would not be cooperating with ICE and they’re going to protect people and ice agents are coming into our town. No, the LAPD are part of the spectrum of armed state power. That ice is also part of a spectrum of, they work in tandem and they’ve been showing that they don’t need to have a curfew, they don’t need to be out there riling people up, making it easy for ice to do its job. And frankly, the protesters don’t see a distinction between them. When you’re out protesting the streets, people are saying, the Marines disappeared.

My friend, there was a woman who had been trying to get attention on social media about her friend and others are saying, well, those aren’t Marines, they’re California guardsmen. And she’s saying, I frankly dunno who they are. There are uniformed armed men, mostly men in various different forms of uniform. Some of them, some of them not. Some of them wearing fatigue, some of them wearing black who are just arresting people. And you can’t just arrest people unless you have cause and if you’re arresting them, if they’re undocumented, you need a signed warrant from a judge. But they don’t have the signed warrants. And so it’s literally, this is the definition of fascism. They are going in rounding people up without pretext. And another thing that people aren’t paying attention to is that Trump and Christine Nome have basically explicitly said that they’re sending an ice raid into blue cities, into cities run by democratic mayors.

They’re doing this as a political action. Like, wow, think about that. Right? They’re sending in armed federal agents funded by tax dollars to undermine the leadership of their political opposition, not to suggest that Democrats are doing anything. And then on Saturday we had that, there was the no Kings rally that attracted about 30,000 people. That was the official count. I think it was bigger. I was there and I really couldn’t see the beginning or the end of the march. And that was part of the 2200 plus actions happening around the country that were organized and set up before the ice raids to coincide with Trump’s military parade. But they were just a very nice, convenient outlet for people who were upset about ICE raids. And in LA you saw people wearing kafis to show their support for Palestinian rights while holding up a sign saying F Ice.

And many other very colorful language, lots of Los Angeles centric language involving, I don’t like Isen Ice only belongs in my orta. And very just very unique to LA signage, very glorious, raucous, friendly, angry, big crowds of people who were outraged, angry, tired. And what I’m noticing is different is that no one is, very few people are suggesting that the Democrats are the answer, which I think they’ve realized what a disaster the Biden presidency was, and now there’s such a hunger for something different. So it’s a really important moment for organizing, which I don’t know if we’ll get to that, but just want to put that out there because it’s a ripe moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s definitely make sure that we end on that point, what you’re hearing from folks about where that energy is going and where it’s decidedly not going. And I want to by way of getting there, just like while we have you just maybe take a couple minutes to ask some follow up questions to get some clarity for folks outside of LA who again, are maybe just hearing the latest on the news or maybe they’re hearing Trump posting his insanity on truth social. So I want to just ask them some basic questions here. One is, in your sense have was the National Guard and the Marines sent in because things were so unruly on the ground? Or did those additional troops instigate the upsurge in clashes with police, with violence? I mean, that’s obviously been one question over the week. Is Trump responding to a crisis that needs to be quelled or tamped down or whatever language they’re using? Or is he inflaming it by sending in the goddamn National Guard and the Marines to squash civilian protests?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Yeah, it’s very much a manufactured crisis. It started with the ice raids. And the ice raids were initially, depending upon the time of day, Trump spoke predicated on the fact that immigrants are supposedly destroying our cities and causing violence and mayhem and invading, et cetera, et cetera. When of course in Los Angeles, our communities are so deeply intertwined. Frankly, most of us don’t know or care who among us is undocumented or not. Many live in mixed status. Families live quite happily together with one another. The one common struggle we have is violence of poverty, of inequality. And so immigrants are after the eaten fires. Almost every single person that I encountered to help me fix up my home due to wind damage was an immigrant of some sort, not originally from the us. I was making note of that in my head, like how immigrant LA is.

And so we have not had any, the problem was created by Trump. The problem of immigrant violence in cities is as real as rampant voter fraud in elections fermented by immigrants. So he started the problem, and then when people fought back, when people refused to take it lying down and protested, that was the opening he was waiting for to get the National Guard involved and to claim to send Marines in. And yeah, a couple of cars were set on fire. There’s a ton of graffiti downtown la, almost all of it as far as I could see on federal buildings. And that’s rage, right? It’s a property destruction. It’s not hurting individuals. The cars that were burned down were way more cars. They were AI powered cars. And it should be noted that these are cars that are basically gathering surveillance and sharing it with police.

They’re known to be sharing surveillance with police because they’re outfitted with dozens of cameras. So those were burned, which I think was a very symbolic protest. And so yes, this is a complete and utter fabrication that LA is so out of control and burning that they need to send in outside help. Absolutely. It’s not, I’ve been on the streets of la. I did not for a second feel threatened by anyone other than armed cops. The only threat I felt was from the armed agents of power. And they are going after journalists, by the way. So I was a little scared, not from a single protestor. And that really needs to be clarified. So this is just a manufactured crisis. It’s a way for Trump to lash out, to distract from the fact that his presidency has been an utter failure. His economic turnaround has been an utter failure, and it’s an opening for fascism. He’s trying to see how far he can push. LA is a test case. The last administration, four years ago, Portland was a test case, if you remember where they were sending in the National Guard troops into Portland. In this scenario, LA is the test case much bigger, much, much bigger city. And he doesn’t know what the can of worms that he has opened in LA because people aren’t backing down. He is going to lose in la.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And another follow up question on that front, I think I’ve learned over the past year that in fact, a lot of people don’t know much about la, right? I mean, I was getting into some very heated arguments with people, people on the left during the fires who were sort of celebrating them as if these were all just mansions of the rich in Malibu. And I had to explain to them, I was like, look, bro, I mean, there are houses in Compton for millions of dollars. That doesn’t mean the people there are millionaires. That’s just very, the property values have gone up. Just think a little more about the people you’re talking about. And right now, people are not doing that. And I think they’re not even wrapping their heads around the fact that LA is a massive city. We’re talking nearly 500 square miles in the city proper. We’re talking nearly 4 million people in the city proper to say nothing of the greater LA area. So we’re talking about a big chunk of city here. And right now, again, people outside of California are being told and even regurgitating the notion that LA is a war zone, that it’s just bedlam over there. So I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that. What does LA look like right now to you?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

It’s mostly business as usual, except in some parts of downtown la, right? I live about 25 minutes from downtown LA in Pasadena. We’re seeing regular protests in front of City Hall. They’re all extremely orderly, almost to a fault, but they’re there, which is kind of nice. We’re not seeing, we don’t normally see regular protests in Pasadena where I live, but the people are showing up in front of City Hall. They’re showing up in front of hotels where they think ice agents are staying. But in downtown LA, there is an area right around the city hall area, bridging square, and in between where all the federal buildings are located, where the detention center is. And that is an area that has been kind of closed off. Freeway exists have been shut down. So it’s harder to make it in there, and people are still making it in there.

There are some people who are showing up deliberately showing up in the evenings because they really see this as them holding the line. They’re showing up, they’re protesting. They’re protesting because there’s a curfew and their right to be angry. Why is there a curfew in our city who decided there should be a curfew in our city? Why? Because you want the right and the freedom to just openly tear apart our communities, and you want us to just take it and lay down. So yeah, people are showing up. There are clashes with cops. Nobody is being violent. The cops are not being hurt. And frankly, if the cops are being hurt, they could just leave and then they wouldn’t be hurt. So yeah, it’s not like the whole city is burning at all. The violence of poverty impacts our city much more than anything that Trump can imagine.

We’ve had the violence of climate change from the Eaton fires. We are seeing the violence of policing and of immigration enforcement. Those are the sources of violence. And we should be very, very, very clear on that. And LA may be, LA is a city of contradictions. Even I don’t fully know la, I only know the pieces that I traverse regularly. It’s a city of contradictions. It’s a city of millionaires and immigrants. It’s a city of white liberal Hollywood and radical Antifa union folks and artists and theater people. I mean, it’s everything. It’s such a slice of humanity. And also, we have some of the largest immigrant groups that are living outside native country in, I think most cities in the United States, for example, the biggest Armenian population outside Armenia lives in la, huge populations of Vietnamese, Koreans, massive Korean population, Indians and Pakistanis. It’s so a huge Arab population.

Persians, it is such an incredible sort of multi-layered city that I don’t know, it’s hard to, if you’ve never been to LA, for those people who’ve never been to LA, just come and get a sense of the beauty here. It’s a beautiful city. It’s gritty and it’s also beautiful. It’s slick and it’s gritty at the same time. I can’t describe it. You’ll never know LA unless you’ve spent a lifetime exploring every corner of it, as you said, it’s just huge. It’s massive. And everyone can unite on the one thing they all hate about la, and that is traffic, because we’re so spread out and we have to drive so much, and there’s just too much traffic. So

Maximillian Alvarez:

There you go. Well, I didn’t want to interrupt because you were making a serious point, but when you said that the thing that binds Angelinos is like class struggle, and I was like, and hatred of traffic. Those are the two things. Yeah, that’s what the banners of the proletariat in la. And I can’t keep you for too much longer. And I know you’ve been busting your butt doing interviews all day. So I promise I just got a couple more questions for you. But on that last note though, I wanted to ask the no kings protests, like you mentioned happened on Saturday. And I was here covering the protests in Baltimore. Thousands of folks showed out admittedly as a more white crowd that I think you saw a lot of folks from Baltimore County coming in. But there’s still thousands of folks that I talked to, veterans, young folks, old folks, people like you were saying, kind of a chorus of righteous grievances that were emerging from this crowd, from standing up against the attacks on immigrants to the attacks on democracy and the rule of law to the billionaire takeover of everything, but very much kind of all singing together in this chorus of righteous rage.

And it was a very peaceful endeavor. Some would criticize, it was almost too peaceful, right? There were food trucks there. And it’s just like, I think what people are seeing in LA has gotten everyone maybe a little on Tenter hooks, because it either becomes a litmus test of like, if we’re not as radical as LA, then we’re not doing anything worthwhile. But I caution people out there to just put judgment to the side at this moment in history as we descend into fascism, and just look at the people who are showing up and encourage action where you can and don’t judge people who are taking that first step to speak out. There’s a lot going on right now, and people are meeting this moment coming from a lot of different paths. Right?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

Agreed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and on that note, I wanted to just ask, like you mentioned the no Kings protests. I know that there were some violent tactics used by police to try to disperse some crowds. I think there were maybe about 35 arrests as I read. So I wanted to ask, is the police presence, is the curfew, is it slowing down the protest momentum in LA that you’re seeing? And are the attacks on journalists that you mentioned, is that slowing down or making you and your colleagues think twice about going out there and covering?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

I do wonder if the turnout in LA would’ve been bigger had there not been all of this warning ahead of time that the Marines are going to be sent to LA for the No Kings protest. I had a friend who was visiting from out of town, and I said to her, listen, I’m a journalist. I’m afraid you’re visiting, but come with me to the protest. We’ll do a few interviews and go get lunch afterwards. And she was like, oh. But I read and I said, oh, look, this is la. Trust me, it’s going to be fine. And we’ll know as soon as we get on the train. If there’s crowds of people on the train to go into downtown la, it’s all going to be good. If there’s not that many people, then it’s going to be a little bit iffy. And there were a few people.

And then as we sat on the train, more and more came in. And when we got out of the train, there was a sea of people. But I’ve been to a bigger protest in la, huge protest, the first women’s march in 2017, and then 2006, because I’ve been doing this a long time, the massive 2006 immigration rallies when a million people showed up on the streets of LA wearing white and waving US flags and Mexican flags, the subway trains were so, the metro trains were so, so crowded. And the more crowded it is, the more big and glorious it is, and the less fear there is about police violence. And so I would say that there was a little fear of police violence. It was huge in la, but it could have been huger. And I suspect that if people had, I suspect people also remember there were LA is so spread out.

Pasadena had its own protests. Sierra Madre had its own protests. South Pasadena had its own protests. So a lot of smaller rallies were happening in cities in LA County that people were like, well, instead of going to the one big one in la, we’ll go to the one here that’s smaller that we know there aren’t going to be cops freaking us out. So that might’ve been another thing that happened. And I think it’s really, and when it comes to the journalists, I don’t know. I mean, yes, I’ve stayed away from covering the evening protests in part because of practicality, because I’ve kids and I take care of my parents, but also in part because, yeah, I have no wish to be having a flashback grenade hurdle at my head, which is a sorry thing to say. It indicates the sorry state of our democracy when a journalist are slightly afraid to go out and cover these huge protests. So yeah, I think that that’s definitely an important thing to consider.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, it’s pretty damn wild when you can see on camera the police targeting journalists, even foreign journalists and just shooting them with rubber bullets, shooting our colleagues in the head with rubber bullets and tear gas canisters. And I don’t want to do the thing where it’s like fellow journalists get, we clutch our pearls and we get really upset when other journalists are hurt, but we don’t speak out when citizens are being brutalized. No, we’re pissed off at all of it. And all of it is an atrocity and an attack on democracy as such, and on the people as such. See, it’s not that hard to walk and chew gum at the same time. But these are very dangerous times that we are living in. And I kind of wanted, as we round this final corner here, again, I just wanted to thank you and everyone who is going out there and continuing to do the important work of reporting so that folks like the listeners of this show can actually know what the hell is going on and not be led astray, not be led to support this authoritarian repression because they are being fed misinformation about what’s actually happening on the ground.

And in that vein, in the final turn, I wanted to circle back to the point that you raised in the beginning. I wanted to ask if we could maybe just survey a bit, the folks that you’ve been talking to, the attitudes that you’ve been picking up on, the things that people have been telling you, like I guess, where are folks right now? Where do you see this going? And where is this grassroots energy headed right now?

Sonali Kolhatkar:

So some of the people that I’ve been talking to are a lot of young folks, people who are showing up in their graduation sashes who are from mixed status families. I talked to high school kids whose families are impacted. And one kid said, I’m here because my grandfather can’t be here because he’s too scared, because he is undocumented, but I’m a citizen, so I’m here on his behalf. I’ve talked to a lot of what’s really interesting, a lot of black folks coming out in support of their immigrant neighbors. So I spoke with Jasmine Abula Richards, who is the leader of the Black Lives Matter Pasadena chapter, who said Babies are being ripped out of the arms of their families. I don’t care what race they are. I’m standing here in solidarity with them, and she is calling on her community to show up for immigrant rights, which I just love.

That’s a lot of lots. So LA’s No Kings Rally, hugely multiracial and diverse, in contrast to the women’s March that took place this year as opposed to the one that took place in 2017. So I went to the Women’s March this year, largely white, although it was still multiracial just because it’s la. But on Saturday, incredibly multiracial. I’ve also interviewed Pasadena City Councilman Rick Cole, whose daughters were arrested in downtown LA protesting the National Day labor organizing networks, Pablo Alvarado, who has been on the front lines of all of defending dayers at Home Depot. Yeah, it’s been, people are really ready to take this on. They are basically drawing the line in the sand saying, no, you cannot do this to la. We’re not going to let you, it’s just not happening because we’re immigrants are too integrated into our society. They aren’t just a part of our community.

They are our community. So I’ve talked to pastors and clergy who are doing solidarity work, union leaders. Oh my gosh, I can’t keep track of the interviews. There’ve been so many interviews, but it’s a great cross section. People who’ve been active for many, many years and who’ve come out for many protests and people just become activated. And yeah, I think I’m hoping that the people who are rising up are also seeing, because what happened the last time people rose up against Trump was it was this feeder into if only we could elect more Democrats than we could get rid of Trump. Well, that was tried and failed. And now what? And I think I am seeing from, at least in la, a sense that we need to expand beyond the two party system. We need more radical leadership in government, and if we want to change the dynamics of power, we need to elect people regardless of which party, and ideally, not really establishment Democrats, independence or whatever democratic socialists who are going to do our bidding as opposed to Wall Streets and the brown shirts. So Yeah’s been incredible. It’s a great time to be a journalist in spite of the dangers. It’s a great time to be a journalist in America. It’s also the worst time to be a journalist because nobody’s newsrooms are being decimated, and our jobs are being outsourced to ai, and we’re trying to survive on Patreon and Substack subscriptions. So yeah, contradictions, and you well know what that means.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s as good of a occasion as any to remind y’all before we let her go to please follow Sonali and support her show, check out her work. It’s invaluable in these times. So Sonali, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for all the work you’re doing. Si, I really appreciate it.

Sonali Kolhatkar:

I appreciate your work as well. Thank you so much, max, for having me on.

Javier Cabral:

What’s up, man? My name’s Javier Cabral. I’m the editor in chief for LA Taco.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Javier, thank you so much for joining us today, man. I know you’ve been running your ass off, you and your colleagues over there at La Taco covering the mayhem, the protests, the lifting up, the voices on the front lines of struggle back home. And I just wanted to say up top that the work y’all have been doing has been incredible, vital, and just so, so necessary in this moment when there’s so much bad information, misinformation floating around. I really can’t emphasize enough for folks listening that if you haven’t already, you need to follow La Taco, follow their Instagram, follow their accounts where they’re really posting real time updates on what’s happening back in la. And we’re going to link to those accounts in the show notes for this episode. And Javier, I wanted to toss it to you there before we really dig into what the past week has looked like through your eyes and the eyes of your colleagues and the coverage that you’re doing. I wanted to ask you if you could just tell our listeners a bit more about La Taco, what it is, and the kind of coverage that you guys have been doing, and then I guess tie that into the past week. When did this all really start kicking up for you, and how did y’all respond to the protests to the National Guard to Ice raids? How did you guys respond to that with the coverage that you’re doing?

Javier Cabral:

Sure, man. So LA Tacos started in 2005 as a blog that celebrated tacos, cannabis and graffiti. We thought ourselves as a baby vice, I would say we were, were alternative. This is a time when tacos were illegal in la. There was a big movement called ADA because taco trucks were illegal to park all over the city and pretty much what street vendors are dealing with right now and their battle for legalization and for permits. And in 2017, Dan Danez took over. He was a former vice reporter badass who was in the chapels tunnels and worked for Vice Mexico. He spearheaded our news first approach to fill the void that after LA Weekly got slashed, they fired everyone. And then LA was left without an alternative style publication for a county of 10 million people, which it was crazy. So LA Taco decided to just put our resources and hope for the best. Daniel was the editor for two years before he moved on to LA Times Food, where he is at now. I took over right before the pandemic in 2019, and no one was reading. There was the pivot.

The pivot to that Creator Media was starting to happen and vlogging with a V. And my contract was like, if you can get our traffic up in six months, you can keep the job as long as you have. And it’s been almost six years now. So we’ve really risen to meet whatever crisis or whatever big news story is happening out there because of alternative style approach. And when I say alternative, it just means that we’re, we’re not the opposite of corporate media. We’re not a nonprofit. We don’t have any nonprofit safety net. We are 100% independent. A lot of brands don’t want to work with us because we publish whatever the hell we want to publish. And some of these stuff that we do is pretty damning to corporations or to the police or to any person in power are investigative investigative journalist, Alexis Oli Ray.

He is our ace. He’s always out there keeping police accountable, has been involved of several lawsuits, and we back him up, we back everything because I famously said one time I interviewed by LA Times a little profile on me, and I’m from the hood, right? So literally I said, we have to be prepared to defend whatever we publish in a dark alley if need be. So that philosophy, it’s on my heart and in everything I publish, I’m like, I can, we can’t be ashamed kiss as we can’t be fluffy. I see these people that we’re writing about when I go to backyard punk shows, when I go eat tacos and I speak to ’em in Spanish, whatever I publish, it has to be truthful and it has to just be just 100% something that I can stand behind. So that’s been our approach and this kind of fearless approach to a term, I call this street level journalism.

And that’s been our formula in 2021, we won a James Beard Award for our unique approach to food based, to food based stories. We do more food culture, more food intersections, gentrification, all the stuff that other publications are too scared to publish or too scared to touch because they don’t want a sacrifice their whatever ad sponsor or whatever. But we don’t care. Our tagline, literally for the longest time was we had bumper stickers that it was like, we don’t give a fuck. So with that same kind of punk rock ethos, we’re in 2025 now in this recent ice raids and massive civil unrest because of the fascist regime, because of Trump, because of him terrorizing our communities through these federal forces. So we’ve been covering it all, been covering it, and we’ve been documenting our little team of six reporters has really hit the streets and just trying to do our best to just show exactly what is happening out there and provide context as best as we can. It’s nothing crazy, but in this age of people talking to their phone and not asking any hard questions, I guess that’s crazy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, I’m seeing this in real time. I mean, you’ve been posting videos from the ground in demonstrations showing when just rows and rows of police cars are descending on peaceful protesters and launching tear gas into the center of the crowds you guys have gotten police brutalizing, senior citizens. You’ve gotten those senior citizens on camera talking about it. You’ve done videos on social media reporting on ice raids, on Eros and other street vendors. So I want to kind of talk a bit about that, the kinds of stories that you’ve been reporting on, especially over the past week, right? All the focus has obviously been on the protests themselves, the National Guard, the Marines, this big debate over who’s causing the violence, who’s responding to the violence, yada, yada, yada. And I do want to make time to talk about that, but I wanted to ask what the past week has looked like for you and your colleagues reporting on the stories that you’ve been reporting on. What do you want folks out there, especially outside of LA, to know about what you’ve been seeing happen in your home over the past seven days?

Javier Cabral:

Well, these are the darkest days that I’ve lived in la. I’m 36 years old, so I don’t remember much about the LA riots in early nineties, but as far as I’m concerned, as long as I’ve been doing this, if you’re someone who’s looking from afar into what’s happening, it’s bad. It’s enough to just make everything like your life stop. It’s really hard to not fall in a downward spiral of depression, anxiety, paranoia. If you know anyone who is an immigrant and lives in la, especially if you’re a Latino, brown skinned person, definitely check in on them. Or don’t try to pretend like life is going on as normal because it’s not. It’s what we’re seeing is unprecedented and how LA Taco has been responding is also unprecedented as a leader, as the editor in chief, it’s been crazy. I’ve been very overwhelmed sometimes. I’m not going to lie.

I don’t know. I’m really grateful for my team that trust me. But there came a point where we were getting dozens of tips in our emails and our dms about all these ice raids happening around us just a few miles away. And what people, everyone was just scared. And then there were some stories that we were getting to before our competition, I guess other broadcasts or print publications, because we’re a lot more nimble. But even then, we couldn’t get to it fast enough. So as editor in chief, as a diehard writer, I was like, man, I think we need to get out of ourselves and get out of our business model even. Because as you know, the way that journalism and websites work is we get paid by either impression, but that’s dried up this Google AdSense. It’s not much money or if it’s syndicated on any of these apps, but that’s also a lot of it is very, Penn is on a dollar.

So what we’ve been doing is having a membership approach. People you join our members, and before all these protests, we were at 3,500, no, we were maybe like 3,300 members, and now we just checked it in and we’re over 4,000. So that, for me, it was very risky. So I decided that we needed to go on a social media first approach and employ these tactics that these creators or influencers are doing, but just apply a layer of integrity and ethics to everything and be able to verify everything. So we’ve been doing that, and it was a very risky approach. And my team luckily trusted me, and people have been, they’ve been heating our call, they’ve been responding to us. I frankly just from the bottom of my heart, just a little video, and I was like, look at everyone. Shit’s crazy right now. We can’t keep up with tips.

We’re only a team of six, so we’re going to start doing more videos and we hope that you back us up. We hope that you just don’t enjoy our content for free and you throw us a bone, whatever you can, anything helps. So we’ve actually raised more than $25,000 from just donations too in the last seven days. And it’s, how have we been covering this? It’s all hands on deck people. Sometimes my team doesn’t even ask me. They just go and cover it because that’s how newsworthy everything is right now. It’s just, it’s crazy times. And we’ll think about it after, just go first document and then we’ll think about, we’ll unpack it later. That’s how insane LA is right now with what’s happening with these ice raids and all these protests. I think I went, there was a straight protest for nine days. Nine days of hundreds of people protesting, and then obviously the police escalation that we have all been just seeing on our phones and on tv.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you say more about the raids themselves, just for folks listening? I mean, where are the raids happening? Who’s getting taken the manner in which people are being hunted down and detained again? I want to bring people down to that street level where you guys are, just to give them a sense of the terror that’s being waged against our community right now and what that looks like in the tips you’re getting, the stories that you’re reporting, the people you’re talking to. I want people listening to hear that and know that.

Javier Cabral:

Yeah, so undocumented street vendors, undocumented workers of any kind, even if you’ve been working here for 30 years and you have a home, you own a home, even if you are a functioning member of American society who pays your taxes, who has a complete family, who has made is probably more American than Mexican at this point. And what I mean by that is has adopted more American values. They’re good consumers. They watch a lot of American football. There are people like you and I, and they just haven’t had their legal processing. As some of us know, it takes a long time.

It depends on whatever kind of visa you want to apply for, but it’s very unrealistic for a lot of working people. And the way that these federal agencies are abducting people is very violent, very traumatic. When I say violent, traumatic, there was a video that we shared yesterday where we got some more details on about, it was in the Walmart parking lot in Pico Rivera here in la, which is Pico Rivera is a small suburban Latino community, maybe about 25 minutes from downtown. I call it east of East la. It’s even more east of East la. And it was in the Walmart parking lot. And this I got to interview the daughter of a tortilla delivery driver who worked for Mission Foods. And if you work those jobs, that’s a lot of of seniority to have your route and do it. And he was delivering his tortillas in a stack of ’em in a dolly.

And straight up, I abducted them, left the dolly, his daughter informed me that it was very peaceful, but they left the dolly filled tortillas on the sun. His car there opened with the doors open, completely no description. You know what I tell people, if anyone here has ever seen that satire movie called A Day Without a Mexican, when all of a sudden you just wake up and there’s the street vendor, shoes are just there, but not the human. It is like imagine if people are getting vaporized by the federal government. That’s what it feels like right now, and it’s very violent. That video actually really messed me up. Actually, that video actually was that tipping point for me. And finally getting therapy, because I just felt so many things. It was like a 20-year-old kid who he had stood, he was documenting, and there’s two different sides of this, but I just found out that he’s getting federal charges for obstruction of justice and for assaulting a federal officer was just announced a couple of minutes ago, and this is a 20-year-old kid who was out picking up carts at Walmart and was documenting, and I think probably got in the face of a federal agent.

And they didn’t like that they got him. They violently took him down, put his face to the floor, took away his phone, they took him, no one knew where he was at. And then another federal agent came cocked his gun really loud. I mean, I’m not a gun person, so I don’t know if that’s the right word, cock, but he kind of almost like if you’re playing a video game or something. And I just seeing that on all these unarmed civilians who were just concerned and crying, and then seeing this young 20-year-old kid who looked a lot like me when I was younger, I’m like, damn, that just hit home to me. I was, oh man. So it’s that kind of deep where it’s starting to affect journalists too. I’m trying to look for therapy myself too, because it’s just constant barrage of violence, guns, physical violence in real life at these protests by police, and also that we’re being bombarded with on TV and our phones every day.

And it’s hard to look away because there’s also a sense of fear too, because what if it happens to me tomorrow? I’m going to go on a ride along with a community agency who has formed community. They formed a community coalition that look out for each other whenever there’s ice protests. And this guy just got subpoenaed, I can tell you right now, lemme look it up. He got subpoenaed by the federal courts to hand over his, to hand over his everything, his information, his campaigns, his phone. Otherwise it’s going to be a full, I dunno, I’m sorry. Otherwise it’ll be a federal criminal investigation. And it was like the counter-terrorism unit because they’re trying to say that he’s fueling these protests and that he’s feeling all this, all this, no, but no one’s feeling anything. It’s everyone’s feeling ourselves because everyone is just so just upset at a very deep level because they’re coming here and they’re destroying families and destroying lives, and we’re all just seeing it. So yeah, that’s what I’ll say. And if you’re watching from afar, definitely support independent media support La Taco LA Public Press. They’ve been also been stepping it up, Kalo News, CALO News. They’ve been stepping it up. So there are independent sources that, I mean, they’re also nonprofits, but it’s still good. It’s all for the same goal. But definitely if you know anyone in LA who is from Guatemala, Mexico or El Salvador, definitely reach out to them and see how they’re doing, because I guarantee you that they’re not. Okay.

Michael Nigro:

Hey, I’m Michael Nigro I’m a Brooklyn, New York based photojournalist. I’ve been covering stories in the United States and around the world for roughly 15 years, mainly independent, but I will go and pitch stories of conflict politics and protests.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Michael, it is such an honor to have you on the show, man. I really appreciate you in all the work that you do. And to everyone listening, you no doubt know Mike’s work, even if you don’t know his name yet. But you should. And for those who listened to this show, you have very likely heard Michael’s name because of the reporting he was doing at the protests in LA and what happened to him while he was doing his job and doing his job to inform us the people about what was happening on the ground. And we’re going to get to that in a second. But just to give you guys some context, I actually want to read from a piece from NPR that was published earlier this week by David Folkenflick. And David writes in this piece on Monday, the Los Angeles Press Club and the investigative reporting site status coup filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in federal court alleging that officers at the demonstrations were routinely violating journalists’ rights.

Being a journalist in Los Angeles is now a dangerous profession states. The complaint filed in the Western division of the Central District of California, LAPD, unlawfully used force and the threat of force against plaintiffs, their members and other journalists to intimidate them and interfere with their constitutional right to document public events. As the press consider a selection of the episodes that the press Club has compiled, including some that were captured live in the moment by the journalists themselves, an Australian television correspondent was shot by a law enforcement officer with a rubber bullet during a live shot. As she stood to the side of protests in downtown Los Angeles, the officer taking aim could be seen in the background as it happened. Another instance, a photographer for the New York Post was struck in the forehead by another rubber bullet, his stunning image capturing its path immediately before impact.

A veteran Los Angeles Times reporter by his account says he was shoved by a Los Angeles Police Department officer after reminding him that journalists were exempt under state law from the city’s recently imposed curfew. Several of his colleagues reported being struck by police projectiles. A student journalist says, LAPD officers shot him twice with rubber bullets. One nearly severed the tip of his pinky, which required surgical reattachment. A freelance journalist says he believes he was shot by a deputy from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. A CT scan showed what appears to be a 40 millimeter less lethal munition embedded in a two inch hole in the reporter’s leg. Now, those are just some of the stories that have been coming out of la, and the one that this article in NPR starts with is what happened to Michael. And so Michael, I want to turn it over to you, man, and ask if you could just walk us through your reporting in LA and walk us through what happened when the police made you a target.

Michael Nigro:

So as a photojournalist, you are there to document what is happening, what is occurring. Often, historical moments, not often do I ever want to be part of the story or become the story. However, doing some of the work that I do, sometimes it becomes that. And in the case of First Amendment and police trying to quash or censor what we are doing, then I think it’s really important to step up. So when David Folkenflik called me, I first wondered how he got my number, but what it turned out is that the Los Angeles Press Club is compiling a list of all the journalists who were either shot at or injured or targeted by the police. And the list is long. So that he contacted me out of all those people, I felt that it was a duty for me to actually kind of say, this is what I saw is what I experienced.

Now I am based in New York and I’ve been covering the ice raids inside courtrooms in downtown Manhattan. And there are very few people out in the street, very few inside the hallways trying to stop these kidnappings from happening kidnappings in quotes, but I don’t know what else to call them. They’re disappearing people. And one day at lunch, I walked outside and this French journalist approached me and said, where is everybody? Why aren’t people in the street? And I thought the same thing. I don’t know. Well, as it turned out, it was in la. And so when they called up the military and the National Guard and the win against Gavin Newsom wins against the mayor, win against everybody in Los Angeles, and they sent them there, I’m like, this is where I need to go.

I arrived on Monday the ninth, so I missed the first day. But when I arrived, I had already talked to a number of colleagues of mine, many of whom already been shot with rubber bullets or 40 millimeter sponge grenades or pepper balls, and just said, they’re, look out, they’re targeting us. And if not targeting us, it’s indiscriminate. So I have covered these things for years, protests from in Paris, France, and Hong Kong in the United States. Black Lives Matter, and I was geared up and it’s best thing I could have done is to have a very good helmet, a gas mask with protective eyewear and a flack jacket, all with press, front and back, side and side on my helmets, and that did not deter them from targeting the press. Early on in the evening on Monday, I was over on this bridge right across from the detention center all by myself, trying to get a wide shot.

Flashbacks had already been going off and some pepper, some rubber bullets, and I’m just sitting there with my long lens and all of a sudden I just heard this bing, bing, bing. And they shot right at my head, didn’t hit me, but that was definitely sending a message. I had no idea where it came from, but it was close. So I moved away and the day kind of played on some arrests and I need to be very clear here. What I witnessed is primarily a peaceful protest, primarily a peaceful protest. It never got violent until the police in riot gear and batons and started firing munitions at protestors. At this moment, there was no curfew that called, so they were just exercising their first amendment rights. They were protesting. This is American protest. It was not an insurrection. I covered January 6th, I know exactly what that looks like.

They were not storming buildings, they were not smearing feces on the wall. They were not hitting police with hockey clubs and crutches. This was a standard protest, a real display of anger galvanizing communities. So we were walking through Koreatown at one point and there was a standoff, this kind of cat and mouse standoff, and they decided to target one protestor and shot him with a bunch of pepper balls. I went over to try to grab the angle and document that, and all of a sudden there was a ding that just kind of took me in the side of the helmet. And what has come to light since then is that a lot of these police have red, not infrared, they’re called red dot sensors so they know exactly what they’re pointing. These officers, every officer with a less lethal munition, a weapon is supposed to be trained not to aim for the head, not to aim for the neck, some to aim at the ground and have a ricochet.

These are called less lethal, but they’re not non-lethal. People have been killed by these people have lost eyesights and even one photojournalist in Minnesota ended up losing her eye and then eventually lost her life a few years later from those very injuries. So it was very, very dangerous to be shot with these things, especially a close range. And that’s essentially what happened, which was I feel they’re trying to have a chilling effect on the press and the press that I know that’s out there. They’re tenacious. They were hit once, twice, three times. Not going to stop. This is wrong. We need to be able to document the public has a right to know what is happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You mentioned that you’ve been doing this for years, you’ve been covering protests all over the world, and I wonder how you would compare this to what you’ve seen elsewhere Taking our audience into account. Right, because admit, as a American kid who grew up not knowing shit about the world, like most American kids, it was embarrassingly late in my life when I learned that like other countries didn’t shoot tear gas at their own citizens the way that we do. In fact, tear gas is a weapon of war, that there’s a reason that it’s not shot at civilians the way that we do here in America. But I had no idea at that time in my twenties that this was just something we had been conditioned to accept even though it was so manifestly unacceptable. So I wonder, just in that vein, if you could, using your experience, help put this in context for our audience. We’ve been trained to see this as normal. Is this normal?

Michael Nigro:

Is this normal? I don’t think weapons of war used against American citizens exercising their first amendment. It is anyway normal. However, we’ve militarized the police to such a degree that there are Humvees in the street, there are militarized vehicles in the street. They are practicing and trained in this kind of quashing of protests. New York City has something called the SRG, the Strategic Response Group. They’re supposed to be a crowd control group, but what they’ve mainly become is a protest control group, and they are violent. When you see them come in with the riot gear, you know that violence is about to happen and I’ve covered protests long enough to recognize when I’m up against the front line, what police officers have that kind of look in their eye and that their training or lack of training, they are out to make a point. And that is, I am not in the mind of a police officer, but I certainly see the behavior which is far different from perhaps that officer who maybe is better trained or just doesn’t have that blood lust within them.

But there were a number of officers in my videos that I’ve just squared up with and you could just see it. They’re ready to kick some ass. And it’s troubling to see, especially when you have the majority of the people majority. This was a peaceful march. They are able to do this. I will say that when I think it was Wednesday night when they went back out, there was a contingent of clergy that came probably five or 600 that had a vigil. Then they marched to the detention center where the National Guard was stationed and they prayed. They prayed, they laid flowers, they told the soldiers there that they were praying for them and their safety and the curfew was coming up at eight o’clock. Most of the clergy dispersed, but there were other people there that did not want to disperse. And then even before the curfew happened, they started firing on the crowd, which I don’t know how you piece that together.

And not only on the crowd, but also at the press, which I know this is kind of what we’re talking about, that the targeting of the press seems to be happening more and more in New York. We had to fight tooth and nail to get inside these courtrooms. And what I mean by that is there was a contingent of us that said, we need to go see what’s happening inside these public spaces. Security said no. We said for some amendment violation, they said, we’ll talk to my boss. Boss came down, then another boss came down, another boss came. Finally, I called my lawyer and my lawyer, oddly enough, I called him. I said, look, I’m having this problem in this public space. He goes, I’m oddly right around the corner.

He comes around probably one minute later. I’m like, what are you doing here? He is like, we’re going to get you in. He got us in. From then on, we were able to document all the snatching grabs and deportations or disappearing of these mainly young black men, but also women, some kids that are no one under 18 I saw. But they’re disappearing. These people, some of these people, they’re just, they’re doing what they were told to do, which was come to your mandatory court meeting because your next step is we’re going to get you citizenship. We’re going to get you the green card with you doing law doesn’t matter anymore. And when the law doesn’t matter anymore, it is up to the press to say public, this is what’s happening. And that’s what I think happened in la. The groundswell there became such that people came out and said, we need to protect our community. These are barbers. These are people working at a carwash. These are people who’ve been here for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and that they’ve been paying their taxes, they’ve been paying into social security, which they will never draw from, and they’re part of these communities. And the response to that was so disproportional, but also part and parcel to what the Trump administration wants to inflict across the country. So if you’re in a big city and there’s immigrants, I mean I would fully expect it to be coming to a city near you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I think powerfully and chillingly put, and I am going to toss a broad question at you, but please just take it in whatever direction you feel comfortable. But as journalists at this moment in the year of our Lord 2025, we’re not just documenting the political mayhem that’s happening outside of our windows, but we’re whether we knowingly enlisted or not, we are all in effect kind of soldiers in this battle, this war over reality as such. And so much of what the Trump administration is doing depends on blasting a warped version of reality. Like LA is chaos, LA is bedlam. We got to send in the National Guard and the Marines when folks on the ground are like, it’s not bedlam. It’s a massive city and we’re exercising our first amendment rights. But once that sort of unreality gets a critical mass of people believing in it, it justifies the worst excesses of these authoritarian policies.

And it brings out the worst in people who say, well, yeah, I’m all for sending the Marines in to LA because I’m being told that it’s the protesters who are rioting and yada, yada, yada. So that all is to say that what we do and what you are doing every day is so goddamn important. Your lens is showing people what is actually happening in this country right now to our people. I wanted to kind of end on that broad note and ask if you could communicate to folks out there who are maybe only checking their social media feeds, maybe they haven’t been following your work, maybe they’ve just been hearing this stuff secondhand. What do you most want people to know about what you are seeing and documenting happening in this country right now? From LA to the courtrooms in New York?

Michael Nigro:

It’s those two different narratives that you have coming from a propaganda based White House that is taken essentially what happened on January 6th and lifted it up and plopped it right into LA into a very tiny footprint of Los Angeles. Wasn’t all of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a sprawling, sprawling place. This is downtown la relegated to very few blocks, but Trump basically said what happened on January 6th and he just transplanted into Los Angeles. Why I do what I do is because I hear all the time, well, this is what I’ve heard. This is what I read. A lot of that is just theoretical. I go out and take photos and videos and create multimedia pieces so it’s not theoretical. So you can see what is happening on the ground with the people actually doing, whether they’re protesting or doing hard work of trying to keep immigrants safe.

And that’s very particular to this, but that’s why I do what I do. So it’s an airtight documentation of reality and without it, I feel far too often people are just not realizing that that immigrant that I just shot as being taken away from his loved ones to a very dangerous country, could be their brother, their friend, their coworker, their sister, their brother. That makes it less theoretical to people and I hope that it sits with them. Now of course, I’ll get FLA online and social media with all these kind of talking points of like, this is what I voted for and there’s nothing I can really do to refute that, but except go out and do it again and shoot it and continue to document as a lot of my colleagues are going to continue to do, no matter how much they’re going to try to suppress us.

I think there’s more of us out there trying to show what’s really, really happening and that the city wasn’t burning down. Look, a few Waymo cars, if that’s what they’re called, we burned and no one was hurt. Yeah, it’s illegal, but these are very small instances. May be part of the protest. Perhaps not. I wasn’t there to view it, but what I witnessed there was communities coming together and what happens so very rarely with journalists nowadays is that I had people thanking me, people thanking me, saying, thank you for doing this work. Thank you for coming out here and showing that we’re fighting for our communities, we’re fighting for our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Sonali Kolhatkar, Javier Cabal and Michael Nigro for their vital work and for taking the time to speak with us for this episode. And I want to thank you all for listening and want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.