This column originally appeared on author Hamilton Nolan’s site How Things Work, which you can subscribe or donate to here.
Even stipulating that America is a nation of immigrants, and that the persecution of immigrants is an insult to our history wherever it occurs in this land, it must still be said that launching a violent government purge of immigrants is even more ludicrously monstrous when it happens in New Orleans. In New Orleans! A city that for centuries has collected drifters from Europe and dreamers from the Caribbean and schemers from Central America and prisoners from Africa, and has molded all of their descendants into a culture unmatched anywhere else in this plastic country. A city with its own city-sized Vietnamese population. A city that built a statue in Crescent Park to honor the Latino workers who rebuilt it after Hurricane Katrina. You want to bring a bunch of white racist clods in clownish tactical gear to run the immigrants out of New Orleans? The city of gumbo metaphors?
You villains. You dirty dogs.
The entire concept makes the skin prickle in reprehension. Yet here we are. ICE and CBP goons, balaclavas emphasizing the penis-like nature of their heads, have descended on New Orleans. Led by unapologetic Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino, whose fascist high top haircut and affinity for black double-breasted trenchcoats cross the line from “unintentionally Nazi-esque” into “Nazi on purpose,” they are all over the streets of America’s Friendliest City, vowing to deport five thousand(!) people in the name of Purifying America’s Blood or some more publicly acceptable synonym of that purpose. This is Operation “Catahoula Crunch,” which sounds like an AI-generated name for a Louisiana breakfast cereal. In the first three days of raids, they arrested 38 people, fewer than a third of which had criminal records. Clearly, the motherfuckers are going to be here for a while.
I went to take a look.
You could park your car outside the entrance of the Naval Station in Belle Chasse that the agents are using as their headquarters and try to track them when they emerge each morning. But they can be hard to identify, and even harder to follow. They have the assistance of local and state police as well—one Ojos activist was pulled over twice in one day by a Louisiana State Police officer demanding that he stop driving in the vicinity of a convoy of CBP vehicles.
Alternately, you could make an educated guess about where la migra might show up and go there in advance and drive around hoping to catch them, becoming a fun house mirror version of a cop patrolling a high crime area. I tried this myself one day. I spent hours driving around Kenner, a working class New Orleans suburb out by the airport that has so far been the target of more immigration raids than anywhere else. For hours on a rainy Saturday, I circled down Veterans Boulevard and up Williams, stopping at the obvious places where ICE tends to pop up. I went to all three Walmarts in the Kenner area. I went to Lowe’s. I went to Home Depot. I did not see any immigration officers, but I did see Spanish-speaking families out shopping in stores that had translated their signs into Spanish, but had conspicuously not taken any actions to indicate that they disapproved of their customers being kidnapped on their property. Contrast this with small businesses across New Orleans that have posted fliers on their doors declaring that ICE is not welcome there. It makes you think about corporate responsibility, and cowardice, and things of that nature.
Without two-person teams—one to drive and one to navigate and monitor the chat and alerts and social media in real time—constantly on patrol in each neighborhood hot spot, it takes luck to catch officers in the act. Nor is it easy to know if you are parked right next to one. They tend to roll around in big American-made SUVs. Now go look at a Home Depot parking lot. See any big SUVs there, maybe with a burly guy wearing a baseball cap inside? Yeah. Everywhere!
I found myself peering hard at anyone who fit the profile. I hovered, camera ready, by an oversized white SUV with tinted windows and crash bars parked in front of Walmart, until the doors opened and an elderly Latino couple emerged. In downtown New Orleans, I crept up on a group of a half-dozen brawny white guys with beards, until it became clear that it was a group of gay tourists. Add to this the flood of well-intentioned people sharing rumors online—my friend saw a suspicious car parked outside this hotel, I wonder if they’re staying there?—and it becomes clear that ICE watching is a long game, and an imperfect science. It will require grace from all of us. As a white guy who looks a little bit like I could be a cop, I accept any future sideways looks I get as my tiny sacrifice for the cause.
Considering the challenges, Union Migranted and Ojos are shockingly effective. Every day they blast out multiple sightings, photos, and videos, all verified and confirmed. Over time, it is likely that this kind of community intelligence will save lives and prevent some families from being torn apart. And, on a much shallower level, it is just satisfying to watch a video of an activist filming agents desperately trying to be inconspicuous in a parked SUV, walking by them and drawling, “I’m with Neighborhood Watch. You guys good? You guys need any help?”
The people of New Orleans are also registering their pissed-off-ness by holding protests against the immigration action on a near-daily basis. I went to one on Saturday night, on the steps of Hale Boggs federal courthouse on Poydras Street. There were many “CBP OUT OF NEW ORLEANS!” signs and fliers for a teach-in about general strikes and constant honks of support from passing cars. A billboard for Zatarains loomed picturesquely across the street. A couple of right wing Youtube trolls also attended, prancing around in front of speakers and shouting pro-deportation slogans and aggressively shoving cameras in unwilling people’s faces and generally acting like dickheads. One of these people, a weak-chinned MAGA darling named Nick Sortor, harassed a woman so insistently that a scuffle broke out. In any other setting, he would have gotten his ass kicked, but the security volunteers went out of their way not to do so, just trying to steer him away from people over and over as he cried about being assaulted. All of this while people who were immigrants and who faced very real risks of life-changing government oppression were giving brave and heartfelt speeches just steps away. It really drove home how rude Nazis are. Their own repulsive, racist glee indicts them more effectively than any outside critics ever could.
Before the spotlight descended on New Orleans this month, many had been toiling quietly for years trying to insulate immigrants from the predations of America’s deportation system. One of those people is Angela Davis, an attorney who has spent the past decade running Project Ishmael, a nonprofit that gives legal support to immigrant children. In an office above a church off Canal Street, Davis told me that today’s outrages are different only in degree from what has come before.
She has done this work during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Though the work has changed, she said, “Under every single one of those presidents, many, many families are being separated, torn apart, and detained. That has not changed. The immense cruelty of the US immigration system has been consistent.”
Under Biden, at least, her clients with Special Immigrant Juvenile status were able to get “deferred action,” a temporary protection that made it easier for them to work and live here while their applications for lawful permanent residency were processed. In April, the Trump administration ended deferred action and began arresting people, including some of Davis’s clients. Though Project Ishmael’s services are in high demand, it is harder for them to take on new cases now, because every single case requires so much more work than it did when the government was somewhat less hostile.
To have militarized raids layered on top of the bureaucratic hurdles adds an almost surreal level of hardship to New Orleans immigrants’ lives. “People are scared to leave their home,” she says. “We’ve all read Anne Frank, and have very clear images of what it looks like to be in an attic afraid of forces of terror out in your streets. And that is what it is like. Something not too dissimilar.”
Davis carries on with her work, though she admits that she has doubts about how faithfully the government will adhere to the rule of law. “There are still wins in courts, and some of them are still enforceable. There are also many things the government just doesn’t follow.”
On my way out, she gave me a copy of the organization’s summer newsletter. In it was a story that a client from Honduras had written in her own words about her experience as an immigrant. She entered the country in 2018, and was imprisoned and separated from her five-year-old daughter for a month and a half. After being released and reunited, her son joined them here, and she has been dutifully going to all of her immigration appointments for the past seven years. Then, in May of this year, ICE put an ankle monitor on her to track her movements, and began demanding she go to more appointments, making it hard for her to earn enough money to survive. She began living in fear that ICE would track her down and arrest her on the street if she went out.
“If they did that, they could send you away without your children, so it was better for me to leave the United States. I feared for my life returning to Honduras, but I feared being separated from my children again more. I know the United States is about opportunity and I am grateful for my time here, but life is also too stressful and exhausting,” she wrote. She made the decision to risk her life and leave America, rather than risking losing her family. “On our flight back to Honduras, there were five families with me who had deported themselves.”
This, from our current government’s perspective, is a success story. To harass and persecute and terrorize a mother so fiercely that she chooses to bring her children back to an impoverished country where they may be killed is the best possible outcome that Stephen Miller and Gregory Bovino and their nationwide army of masked raiders could hope for. This is what they are about. This is what they accomplish. This is what their legacy will be. This is what they will have to declare at the gates of heaven, or hell.
The most memorable video from the New Orleans immigration sweeps is one taken last week in a residential neighborhood in Kenner, that instantly became famous. It shows federal agents with rifles surrounding a house where men are repairing a roof. As the cops hop out of their cars and approach, one of the roofers snatches the ladder and yanks it up, setting up an hours-long standoff between the agents on the ground and the men working above, unwilling to come down. The men on the roof reportedly got away in the end.
The symbolism in that clip is almost too perfect: Hardworking immigrants escaping deportation by pulling up the ladder behind themselves. But I’m pretty sure that the ICE and CBP agents, all children of people who were immigrants at one time or another, are too dumb to see it.
