Donald Trump Comes For the Swap Meet
When they write the story of Donald Trump’s campaign of deportation, I am sure that the June 6 ICE raid on a Los Angeles Home Depot will deserve the historians’ spotlight. That’s what sparked the protests that became the excuse to bring in the National Guard, and who knows what comes next.
But in Las Vegas, we might make a notation on the historical timeline for Saturday, June 21. That is the day when Broadacres Marketplace closed.
Broadacres is often referred to as a swap meet, of which there are several others that are still open across the Las Vegas Valley. For now at least. Apple Maps claims that are at least four other swap meets just on the eastside of town.
Broadacres stands apart from them all. I don’t say that as an expert, though I do live here. I say that as an outsider. I can tell you that 20,000 people or more visit Broadacres on a typical weekend, and that it employed more than 1000 people. I can tell you that it is crowded on Saturdays and hot in the summer. I can tell you that it hosts concerns, and is a place to buy heaping plates of fruit sprinkled with tajín while shopping for inexpensive children’s clothes. Objectively, anyone who has been there can tell you that.
But there are things I can’t tell you first hand. My mom didn’t buy me a paleta at Broadacres when I was a whining that her shopping was taking too long. My sister didn't perform there in a folkloric dance group. I’ve never visited a friend who decided to open a booth on Sundays to make a little extra money, just to ask how it was going. What I can report is what I’ve been told. That this is one of those American places that combines running errands, old friends, live music, school fundraisers, making the month’s rent, and childhood memories.
It was one of those places.
ICE raids never caused Broadacres to close during Trump’s first term. And ICE didn’t actually raid Broadacres this time, either, though they did descend on a swap meet in L.A. the prior weekend. As one local news report described it: “several dozen heavily armed, masked ICE agents dressed in military tactical gear raided one of the most popular swap meets in Southern California, which caters to a predominantly Latino crowd.” A fear spread from there.
The fact that Broadacres closed without an actual raid is indicative of this particular moment. The real mass deportation campaign is yet to come. Did you hear about how protestors targeted hotels in Pasadena where ICE agents were thought to be staying? Well, that’s because right now ICE is flying agents in from around the country in order to stage larger scale operations. Meaning: They didn’t actually have enough manpower stationed in the L.A. area. Now think about what this might be like if Congress throws in $100 Billion more for immigration enforcement. That’s still in the pipeline. We might look back on these days as the time when ICE was relatively small.
Yet, already this month ICE set a record for the most people detained on any single day, more than 56,000 across the country. A CATO Institute study found that 65 percent of people arrested by ICE this fiscal year had no criminal convictions. 93 percent have no record of violence.
As CATO wrote:
ICE’s deportation agenda is not what is being advertised to the American public. ICE is not interested in prioritizing public safety, yet it constantly pretends that anyone who objects to its tactics and priorities is defending violent criminals. But violent criminals are not ICE’s primary focus. Indeed, it now has no focus altogether. That’s the essence of mass deportation: it is indiscriminate, unfocused, and chaotic.
When ICE targets people with criminal records, its deportations are a whole lot more popular. But that is only partly because people don’t like immigrants with criminal records. The idea that ICE operations are targetted allows most people to assure themselves, “they won’t be coming after me. I am not a target.”
In a targeted deportation, swap meets don’t close.
The same CATO analysis estimated that ICE is arresting about 14 times more people per day in June than it did in January. They are still way off from Stephen Miller’s dream of 3000 arrests per day. But give them some $Billions and they may get there. And what they are doing now, they are doing indiscriminately. Which means fear spreads through the hearts of communities.
And so now, Broadacres has closed until further notice. No reopening date set.
And we are still at the beginning.