Annell: In The Face of Fear, We Must Stand Together
By Annell*
*Please note that in order to preserve this author’s safety and privacy, she will be writing under a pseudonym.
It was Saturday morning when the news of ICE raids in my neighborhood reached my front door. ICE raided a factory just across our local Home Depot in Paramount, California, targeting workers trying to make an earnest living and rounding up dozens of them in a parking lot to be detained and separated from our community indefinitely.
I have grown up in Los Angeles for over 30 years. For most of my life before becoming a permanent resident, I was a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects nearly half a million young immigrants from the violence of family separation and deportation. LA has always been my home. It’s where I got married, started a family – now with two beautiful children – and even bought my first house. I am part of this city as much as it’s a part of me.
For weeks, my community has been on alert. ICE has been lurking outside of courthouses, waiting for students outside of graduations, ambushing people on their way to work or to pick up their kids from school.
My husband and I have made it a point to go on walks and take drives around our neighborhood to check in on our neighbors, the abuelos and vendors who we see every day, as well as the other moms and dads who we know from our children’s schools. There is understandable fear that my community is holding right now; the type of fear I know intimately as an immigrant myself who, for years as a DACA recipient, survived attack after attack by politicians trying to end the DACA program.
In the wake of the Home Depot raid in Paramount, I knew I had to be with my community. I got in my car with my daughter and my husband and drove just blocks over to where residents of all backgrounds were gathering in peaceful and courageous support of LA families. When we made it onto the streets, I remember seeing other parents with their kids, elders, and hundreds of brave young Angelenos.
LA is a proud city. We love our home, and more than anything, we love the people who make it what it is. We were taking to the streets to make that known to the world: that here in LA, we protect and care for each other.
I felt that LA pride while standing next to my neighbors. Despite all the fear and anxiety that had been building for weeks and months with news of mass deportations without due process and unlawful detentions of people in prisons like the one in El Salvador, here we were. Standing together as a city united and as Americans from all different backgrounds who reject the blatant attempts to stoke violence against our people and strip our constitutional rights to peacefully gather and use the power of our voices.
It was being there in unity with countless other courageous LA residents that also made me feel safer in spite of the threats we were up against.
Almost instantaneously, we were met with rubber bullets and tear gas grenades. My husband was struck in the ear. There I was, standing in my pajamas and next to my daughter, while in front of us stood dozens of armed agents, dressed head to toe in combat gear. Elderly residents and kids were also being struck by the tear gas, and I remember hearing my daughter call out to me: “Mommy, mommy, I can’t breathe! It burns!”
It is our constitutional right to peacefully protest and to use our voices to speak out about the cruelty and state-led violence our communities are enduring. As a mom, I wanted to show my daughter that in this world, her voice matters. That even in the face of fear, she has been raised to step into courage, to show up for her community, and to do what is right.
What is happening in my city is a glimpse of what is likely to come nationally, as reports that the administration is setting its sights on other cities like San Antonio and Chicago continue. The federal government’s overreach of calling in thousands of National Guard soldiers and Marines to LA is proof that this is just the tip of the spear. They want to do this in other cities too.
But make no mistake: Americans from all backgrounds have made it clear, we reject the cruelty we are witnessing. We know that our cities, workplaces, and neighborhoods are all made stronger because of the working people who power it – and that includes immigrants.
Our nation depends on the power of all of us – mothers, fathers, young people and students, elders and more – coming together to care for and protect one another. Now more than ever, they will try to divide and break us. They will try to get us to turn on each other, to chip away at our constitutional rights, and silence us. No matter the fear we feel in our bodies, we have to know that our love for our neighbors and the place we call home is stronger.
Young parents, elders, families, and people like me are also on the frontlines because we know what is at stake. We cannot survive this moment alone. Community and showing up for each other are the antidote to hate and authoritarianism.
Annell is a mom, an immigrant, and an LA resident.
