On a sunny September morning in Los Angeles, Elijah Chiland, Victor Maldonado and four other Harbor Peace Patrol volunteers gathered at Wilmington's waterfront park, not far from the city's harbor. “If you had told me at the beginning of the summer that three months into this we would be waking up at ungodly hours to fight fascism, I wouldn't have believed you,” Maldonado said.
At 6 AMThey piled into two cars and drove across Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island, the bulk of the reclaimed land in the center of the harbour, passing huge shipping yards and small, ramshackle buildings left over from the port's canning days. From there they turned onto Seaside Avenue, a narrow road that leads to a memorial about furusato – a Japanese American fishing village that was destroyed during Japanese internment – visiting the southern tip of the island. About a hundred yards past the monument, a manned checkpoint marks the entrance to the small peninsula of federal land that contains a U.S. Coast Guard base and prison. Seaside Avenue is the only access point. The complex's unique location makes it ideal for federal agents seeking secure staging from public view, while also allowing anyone to monitor the movements of these agents as they enter and exit the facility.
Back in June, Chiland, a Los Angeles public school teacher, heard rumors that National Guard troops had been marshaled on Terminal Island in preparation for arrest antiICE demonstrators all over the city. This inspired Chiland and his wife, Maya Suzuki Daniels, to co-found the Harbor Peace Patrol, a group of community activists who monitor immigration movements throughout Los Angeles. “I came here to check it out because we wanted to let people know,” Chiland told me. He found no National Guard members that day, but “what I saw was a convoy of eleven vehicles”—some Border Patrol, others unmarked, with tinted windows—infiltrating the federal compound and heading into the city. The next morning, another member of the newly created peace patrol returned to check if the border patrol columns had returned. They were. “We've seen them every day since then,” he said. Today was day ninety-one.
By six-thirty, peaceful patrolmen stood along the shoulder of Primorsky Avenue. Maldonado, a representative of the Los Angeles workers' comp hearing, distributed green reflective vests (“so they can't say they didn't see us”), and the group got the job. Four of the patrols whipped out their cellphones to photograph every vehicle that passed, while Chiland operated the Instagram account – a vital tool for broadcasting information and communicating with the public. Maldonado held counting clickers in each hand (one for incoming traffic into the federal complex, one for outgoing) and counted the traffic flow. “We'll get a hundred to a hundred and thirty cars a day,” he told me. An SUV and a sedan drove by. Click Click “If we get an influx of cars, it will let me know that there is a lot of activity in Los Angeles.” The busiest day since the patrol began recording was in August, when three hundred and five vehicles passed. He laughed: “We will tell our grandchildren that we defeated fascism with the help of six-year-old clickers.”
With the images they capture on Terminal Island, the Peace Patrol and Unión Del Barrio, an affiliated community activist organization, are comparing the vehicles to those that show up in immigration raids throughout the region. Some of the vehicles registered on Terminal Island by the group have been spotted as far away as Ventura and even Sacramento. Once the license plate has been verified as a federal agent, appearing on both Terminal Island and the Immigration raid, Peace Patrol will post an image of the plate and vehicle to the group's Instagram account. In several cases, “we saw the same license plate on two different vehicles,” Maldonado said. In other cases, a temporary paper license plate has been used to obscure known plates.
“Impact is not what ICE “I want to,” Tim Maxker, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, explained to me. whose company covers Terminal Island, and his wife volunteered with the group. The agents flowing through the terminal islands agree. Unmarked cars with things like “coexist” on the sticker (nickname: “Captain Coexist”) or Teddy Bears on the dashboard will be aggressive. Patrolling when the driver cursed his middle finger.
A month earlier, this intimidation had boiled over. On the morning of August 8, two masked men left the federal complex, got out of their car and targeted one of the patrolmen, Amanda Trebach, who was photographing the cars and holding a protest sign. She was pinned to the ground, handcuffed and rushed into the van. Then, Trebach says, agents took her to the complex, where she was detained for several hours. She was later moved to a second vehicle by armed Masked men (including one of the men who arrested her), where a special agent from the Department of Homeland Security interrogated her. From there, Trebach was transferred to federal custody in downtown Los Angeles, where she was held until the next day.
When reached for comment, Trisha McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, alleged that Trebach jumped in front of a Border Patrol vehicle leaving a federal compound, causing the driver to spin, and then “hit her signs and fists while yelling obscenities at the agents.” McLaughlin also alleged that Trebach blocked Customs and Border Protection agents from performing their duties, which led to her arrest. (Trebach was not charged with a crime.)
“None of this happened,” Trebach told me when he reached on the phone. DHS is “very upset and angry that we are taking them down, but we are on public property.” She also said her cellphone was confiscated while in custody and as a result it remains in the possession of DHS, leaving Trebach, an intensive care unit nurse, worried about additional personal information that agents may have accessed and could use to continue targeting her. “I'm afraid every night when I come home that they will take me,” she said.
For Suzuki Daniels, co-founder of Peace Patrol video of Trebach's arrest still hard to watch. “I have a physical reaction to it,” she said. “The only reason it's not getting national outcry is because we're inundated with so much crime right now in our communities and across the United States. I think we’re kind of stunned and the freeze-trauma response is.”
About two hours after Trebach was picked up, a group of masked agents returned to her unlocked car, loaded with her belongings, “and held three of our patrol officers at gunpoint,” recalls Maldonado, who was present that morning. In the World Patrol video of the confrontation, a police cruiser is seen passing by. Maldonado still doesn't understand why they didn't stop and intervene: “The federal agents never identified themselves. They are disguised. You don't know if they're alert. You don't know who they are. The port police were just traveling and pretending they didn't see it at all.”
I reached out to Thomas Gazzi, Chief of the Los Angeles Port Authority Police, about the incident and his department's role in enforcing the rights of peaceful patrols to the public road. Ghazsi confirmed that someone from his department was present in the morning portion of Trebach, but clarified that it was a civilian officer in port security and not a police officer. However, should the security officer have at least stopped to witness the armed incident and call the department? “She reported to her supervisors what was reported to our department,” Ghazsi responded. “By the time our officers got there, everyone was gone.”
The incident underscores the rapid pace of anti-bullying rhetoric among local politicians in Los Angeles. The city's mayor, Karen Bass, has repeatedly denounced the federal government's incursion into the city (calling it an “assault” and “un-American”), and ICERelentless immigration raids are a “reign of terror” that must end. In July, she issued an executive directive that upheld a 2017 city ordinance that prohibits city resources, including the LAPD, from being used in immigration activities “unless required by federal or state law.” However, in several videos provided to me by the Unión del Barrio, the LAPD is present in immigration activities, not interfering with federal agents, but in what appears to be an accessory role.
Videos from June 24 show immigration agents actively detaining people on the street while LAPD officers stand in front of them, hands perched above their gun corrals or wielding batons as they push back a crowd that has formed to intervene. In another video, from Aug. 13, an LAPD officer stands several yards away from an active Homeland Security investigation as a person off-camera asks, “Why is the LAPD working Homeland Security.” The employee responds that LAPD “provides security” for the agency, and that the department has worked with HSI on many occasions.
This difference between what politicians promise and what actually happens has become more pronounced recently for everyone associated with the Democratic Party. For Suzuki Daniels, the Democrats are a failure. resist rising right-wing authoritarianism 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 will be direct action and mutual aid,” she said. “I'm not begging politicians to save me or save the people I care about. There are masked men in my town trying to kidnap people.”
That spirit harkens back to another era of resistance in Los Angeles Harbor. Return to the terminal island, a little after 7 AMGina, another group member who declined to give her last name, asked if she could show me the statue in the middle of the Japanese Fishing Hall Memorial. She told me that her grandfather was a Sicilian immigrant who fished San Pedro Bay, and that he learned to fish for tuna with long poles, a technique introduced by Japanese immigrants, many of whom lived on Terminal Island. During World War II, when the US government destroyed the furusato, “there was a lot of protection” from the non-Japanese community, Jin. “There was a lot of backlash because [the government] it was so dirty. She choked up as she continued: “This white supremacy, once again, trying to gain a foothold is complete fascism. Just like what happened to the Japanese Americans.” She turned to show me a statue of two Japanese fishermen, one looking out over Los Angeles, the other looking out over the federal complex, “Watching them come and go” as if they were part of their own peace patrol
