Donald Trump’s immigration raids pick a fight that he won’t win | Opinion
Job Garcia is a brother and son. A brilliant photographer and a budding philosopher. He’s a Los Angeles Clippers fan and the world’s preeminent LeBron James hater — but don’t hold that against him. And most of all, he’s my friend.
Last Thursday, none of who Job is mattered to the ICE officers who pounded his body into the parking lot pavement, his reward for filming an immigration raid at a Los Angeles Home Depot. Bonus points for sprinkling spicy language at the agents as they rounded up day laborers like cattle and smashed a van window with a baton.
“You wanted it, you got it,” one agent said to Job as he was cuffed. “You want to go to jail? Fine.” Job said he asked an officer to reach into his wallet so he could provide his ID. The agent grabbed it instead but apparently ignored it, then left Job in cuffs so tight his hands began swelling.
An American citizen, running errands, spent a night in jail for using his voice and his lens to challenge authority.
Job and I have never lived in the same city, but I’ve come to know him well through our hangs and texts over the years. What I didn’t understand about my friend was the depth of his resilience. (I should have known a Clippers fan would refuse to give up.) Completely undeterred by a brutal encounter with a body targeting men like him, with brown skin and big mouths, Job gave a searing interview with the Los Angeles Times, detailing everything he witnessed. He discussed watching agents high-five each other after arrests, comparing body counts up like kids at an arcade trying to outdo each other in a game of Whack-a-Mole.
He said that he overheard one agent joke that “Trump is really working us,” said in apparent sadistic glee over hitting the high quotas the president demanded from his immigration cops.
Bullying immigrants is, on some level, a bipartisan effort. A 2021 study found that in 2015 and 2016, the final years of the Obama administration, ICE arrested more than 200 potential U.S. citizens and people with unknown citizenship status and even removed four confirmed Americans from the country. While Democrats share in culpability for ICE’s human rights and constitutional abuses, though, the Trump administration’s deportation mandate amplifies and intensifies its institutional cruelty.
We see the consequence in cases like of Ward Sakeik, the stateless Palestinian refugee whose husband told me was arrested on her honeymoon, detained indefinitely, and nearly deported to the Israeli border despite never once stepping in the country. (Reporting an unjust arrest while your friend gets locked up at the same time is surreal.) Or Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian, a legal Iranian immigrant by marriage to a U.S. citizen whom ICE arrested while she was in her New Orleans front lawn. By complying with her order of supervision, Kashanian was permitted to stay until, suddenly, she wasn’t.
And of course, there’s Job, an American who had his papers. But papers mean nothing without due process. And Job’s vigorous exercise of a First Amendment the administration hardly respects made him a target, a chance to send a message to onlookers who would ever dare to hold ICE accountable. Like Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest in New York City — a direct consequence for the Columbia University student’s Palestinian rights activism — arresting Job was supposed to shut him up, and scare everybody else.
Instead, Khalil spent his first weekend out of jail and back in Harlem in total defiance. “Even if they would kill me, I would still speak up for Palestine,” Khalil told a crowd of hundreds gathered to celebrate his release, asserting his return to his activism.
Job may be 3,000 miles away, but the energy is the same. Undeterred from his ICE arrest, he shares Instagram posts of the cuts along his legs and promotes his photography of LA’s Chicano communities. He’s selling prints of his work to raise money for three families directly impacted by ICE raids. Using his academic training, Job’s working on a scholarly essay about his arrest — he called it a “kidnapping” — while examining “this mass deportation effort within the broader history of mass deportations of Mexicans and Latinos in America in the past century.”
Arresting people for exercising their speech is meant to instill fear and submission, but Donald Trump just created a few more loudmouths. Fear tactics don’t work when you’re not afraid.
This story was originally published June 27, 2025 at 9:47 AM with the headline "Donald Trump’s immigration raids pick a fight that he won’t win | Opinion."
