Just a few days after our July 4th national independence day holiday, a disturbing and surrealistic scene occurred in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Over 100 federal law enforcement officers representing several agencies including ICE swept through the park which is in an area with a large Mexican and Central American immigrant population. A local news report described MacArthur Park as follows:
Sprawling MacArthur Park has a murky lake ringed by palm trees, an amphitheater that hosts summer concerts and sports fields where immigrant families line up to play soccer in the evenings and on weekends. A thoroughfare on the east side is often crammed with food stands selling tacos and other delicacies, along with vendors speaking multiple languages and hawking T-shirts, toys, knickknacks and household items. (Fox 10 News Los Angeles)
The officers carried automatic weapons and were in full miliary gear.Looking like a military assualt, they went through the park on foot, on horseback, and in military vehicles. What they encoutered was an empty soccer field after children in a day camp were quickly sent inside to avoid the traumatic scene. No detentions or arrests were made. The main point seemed to be sowing fear and intimidation among the local residents. Los Angeles officials called a press conference to denounce this unwanted federal interference in their city. The video posted below comes from that press conference and features the mayor, city council president, and a city council member. Please take time to watch the video that includes footage of the bizzare and frightening scene in the park.
The part of the press conference that was especially powerful to me was a warning from the city council member. After condemning the assault on the park, she addressed her words to people in other cities throughout the country:
Please understand that what’s happening in the city of Los Angeles – we are the canary in the coal mine. What you see happening in MacArthur Park is coming to you. $140 billion new budget for ICE, what do you think that’s going to do? That’s going to transport what’s happening in our neighborhood to your front doorstep, so wake up. It’s not happening by accident.
This urgent call to wake up must be heard by the Church in general and the white church in particular. The assault in MacArthur Park and the ongoing abductions and arrests of immigrants without criminal records should shake us out of either support of these policies or silent complacency in the face of them. The following words of Frederick Douglass from his famous speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” originally addressed to the American Church in 1852 about enslaved people still speak to the Church in America in 2025 about our immigrant sisters and brothers:
But a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, stay there; and to the oppressor, oppress on; it is a religion which may be professed and enjoyed by all the robbers and enslavers of mankind; it makes God a respecter of persons, denies his fatherhood of the race, and tramples in the dust the great truth of the brotherhood of man. All this we affirm to be true of the popular church, and the popular worship of our land and nation—a religion, a church, and a worship which, on the authority of inspired wisdom, we pronounce to be an abomination in the sight of God…In speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are.
Will you and I align with the “popular church” that supports or ignores injustice or with the “exceptions” that commit to racial justice as an essential aspect of following the way of Jesus?