The Volunteers Tracking ICE in Los Angeles

When reached for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, the D.H.S. Assistant Secretary for public affairs, alleged that Trebach jumped in front of a Border Patrol vehicle leaving the federal complex, causing the driver to swerve, then “hit the car with her signs and fists while yelling obscenities at agents.” McLaughlin further alleged that Trebach blocked agents of Customs and Border Protection from carrying out their duties, and that led to her arrest. (Trebach has not been charged with a crime.)

“None of that happened,” Trebach told me, when reached by phone. D.H.S. is “very frustrated and angry that we’re out there filming them, but we’re standing on public property.” She also said that her cellphone was confiscated while in detention, and it remains in the possession of D.H.S. As a result, Trebach, an I.C.U. nurse, worries about the additional personal information that agents may have accessed and could use to continue targeting her. “I’m scared every night when I come home that they’re going to take me away,” she said.

For Suzuki Daniels, the Peace Patrol co-founder, video of Trebach’s arrest is still challenging to watch. “I have a physical reaction to it,” she said. “The only reason that it’s not getting national outcry is that, right now, we’re being inundated with so many crimes in our communities and across the United States. I think we’re kind of stunned, and in a freeze-trauma response.”

Roughly two hours after Trebach was taken away, a group of masked agents returned to her unlocked car, rummaged through her belongings, “and held three of our Patrollers at gunpoint,” Maldonado, who was present that morning, recalled. In the Peace Patrol’s video of the confrontation, a Port Police cruiser is visible passing by, twice. Maldonado still doesn’t understand why they didn’t stop and intervene: “The federal agents never identified themselves. They’re masked. You don’t know if they’re vigilantes. You don’t know who they are. Port Police just cruised by and pretended they didn’t see it at all.”

I reached out to Thomas Gazsi, the chief of the Los Angeles Port Police, about the incident, and about the role of his department in upholding the rights of the Peace Patrollers to assemble on a public road. Gazsi confirmed that someone from his department was present the morning Trebach was detained, but clarified that it was a port-security civilian officer, not a police officer. Still, should the security officer have, at the very least, stopped to witness the incident with the gunmen, and called it in to the department? “She reported to her supervisors, which was reported to our department,” Gazsi responded. “By the time our police officers arrived out there, everybody was gone.”

The incident highlights the hollowness of the anti-Trump rhetoric of local politicians in Los Angeles. The city’s mayor, Karen Bass, has repeatedly decried the federal government’s incursion into the city (calling it an “assault” and “un-American”), and saying ICE’s relentless immigration raids are a “reign of terror” that must end. In July, she issued an executive directive that bolstered a 2src17 city ordinance prohibiting city resources, including the L.A.P.D., from being used in immigration-enforcement activities, “unless required by federal or state law.” Yet, in multiple videos supplied to me by Unión del Barrio, the L.A.P.D. is present at immigration-enforcement activities, not impeding the federal agents but in what appears to be an accessory role.

In a video from June 24th, immigration agents are seen actively detaining individuals on the street, while L.A.P.D. officers stand in front of them, hands perched over their gun holsters or wielding batons, as they push back a crowd that has formed to intervene. In another video, from August 13th, an L.A.P.D. officer stands a few yards from an active Homeland Security Investigations operation as a person off camera asks “why L.A.P.D. is working with Homeland Security.” The officer responds that L.A.P.D. “provides security” for the agency, and that the department has worked with H.S.I. on “many occasions.”

This difference between what politicians promise and what actually happens has become more pronounced, of late, for anyone aligned with the Democratic Party. For Suzuki Daniels, the failure of Democrats to stand up against rising right-wing authoritarianism has left her feeling jaded about the entire political system. “No politician is going to save us,” she said. After years of canvassing for political candidates, signing petitions, and making phone calls for campaigns, “everything I do for the next four years is going to be direct action and mutual aid,” she said. “I am not pleading with politicians to save me or save the people I care about. There are masked men riding around my town trying to kidnap people.”

This ethos harks back to another era of resistance in the Los Angeles harbor. Back on Terminal Island, a little after 7 A.M., Gina, another member of the group, who declined to give her last name, asked if she could show me the statue in the middle of the Japanese fishing-village memorial. She told me that her grandfather had been a Sicilian immigrant who fished in San Pedro Bay, and that he had learned how to catch tuna with longline poles—a technique introduced by Japanese immigrants, many of whom had lived on Terminal Island. During the Second World War, as the U.S. government razed Furusato, “there was a lot of protection” from the non-Japanese community, Gina, said. “There was a lot of backlash, because what [the government] did was such a dirty thing.” She choked up as she continued, “This is white supremacy, once again, trying to take a foothold—it’s full fascism. Just like what happened to the Japanese Americans.” She turned to show me the statue of two Japanese fishermen, one looking out at Los Angeles, the other staring back at the federal complex, “watching them come and go,” as if they were part of their own peace patrol. ♦