MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
At the moment, the front line of the battle over immigration is Los Angeles. President Trump has warned his administration will not allow an American city to be, quote, "invaded." The state of California has sued the Trump administration for what it sees as a breach of state sovereignty. Well, for insight into the conservative strategy around immigration, we have called Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation. Welcome.
SIMON HANKINSON: Thank you.
KELLY: Your top-line assessment of the situation as it stands in LA? - and I'll ask that more colloquially. If I bumped into you tonight at a dinner party and asked - hey, I've been away, what's going on in LA? - how would you answer?
HANKINSON: Well, business as usual. I think it was predictable that increased enforcement or any enforcement of immigration law in the interior after four years of basically ignoring the law would have an impact on major cities, and sooner or later, there were going to be demonstrations. There was going to be, you know, something like the May 2020, you know, riots, demonstrations - whatever you want to call them - public displays of unhappiness. And Los Angeles...
KELLY: You're talking about people in the streets after the George Floyd situation.
HANKINSON: Yes, exactly.
KELLY: Then I guess my question, just to jump in, if I were, again, asking you, what's happening in LA right now, is it going - in your view, is it going well? Is it going poorly? Anything surprising you?
HANKINSON: Unfortunately, I'm not surprised. I think the enforcement is going well on the whole. But in California, obviously, it's hit a bit of a political obstacle. What we're seeing is the city of Los Angeles and the state of California resisting federal efforts to enforce immigration law. And we're not talking about presidential directives here, executive orders. We're talking about immigration law passed by Congress, a bipartisan law signed by presidents, Democrat as well as Republican.
KELLY: So you've started to answer this, but I'll just put it to you directly. To those who argue, look, this is the Trump administration who is now claiming credit for averting a crisis, for tamping down violence, but this was perhaps a crisis of the administration's own making - there weren't any protests in LA until ICE agents went in - what do you say?
HANKINSON: Well, I guess if you take that line of reasoning, then what you're saying is the federal government cannot enforce immigration law, and if they do, the price is there'll be violence in the street. You know, that's sort of an extortion, really, by a state, a nullification of federal law. And I do understand the president is - he's making a stand here because he can probably see that this will happen in other cities and other states.
KELLY: The president has taken some unusual steps in LA, and I want to ask you specifically about sending active-duty military over the objections of state and local leaders. In your view, is that justified?
HANKINSON: I think it's justified when you have a threat to federal property and when you have local authorities that are unwilling to keep the peace and to protect lives. We saw in Portland in 2020, a federal building was taken over. We saw federal property damaged. We saw a lot of people injured and a couple billion dollars' worth of property damage. There's already been some looting and some property damage in Los Angeles, and I think that's something that the administration really wants to avoid this time.
KELLY: And I'll note that we're seeing reports of fewer clashes Tuesday night. A curfew has kicked in. Two-hundred-plus people were arrested. That's LAPD statistics. Local law enforcement says, we've got this, we can handle it.
HANKINSON: Well, maybe they say that now, but what would they have said had there been no federal response whatsoever? We saw in 2020, and we've seen at other periods, local officials essentially letting these things burn out. You know, let's just let them burn some cars and trash some buildings, and then we'll go in afterwards. And this time, it died down much quicker. And I think the threat, the real threat, that there would be an active federal presence was what caused local authorities to crack down earlier than they would, for example, with the curfew that Mayor Bass put on.
KELLY: I mean, I guess, if the goal is law and order, if the goal is avoiding ending chaos, I suppose we should note that protests have spread to cities across the country. We're seeing reports from Seattle, from Dallas, from Chicago, from Boston. So what counts as victory here?
HANKINSON: I think tactically, victory is that the riots - or the demonstrations, rather - don't get out of control, that people are allowed to demonstrate peacefully, they're allowed to express their opinions, but that we don't have wide-scale looting, property damage and, you know, the ruining of lives in generally poor and underprivileged or, you know, business parts of our major cities. That would be a tactical victory. The strategic victory would be that we once again go back to enforcing our immigration law and not ignoring it.
KELLY: Simon Hankinson of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, thanks so much for your time.
HANKINSON: Thank you, Mary Louise. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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