Rioting, looting and wanton destruction of property isn’t an effective method for adequately opposing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown — even if that crackdown seems almost deliberately cruel and arbitrary. 

However, it’s not unexpected. 

What started as peaceful protests against the Trump administration’s recent immigration enforcement efforts quickly turned riotous on the streets of Los Angeles as masked protestors clashed with police in riot gear. As Reason’s Nancy Rommelmann reported, the devolution of peaceful protests into violent rioting is an all too familiar pattern. As looters, anarchists and other miscreants take advantage of large-scale political protests, it’s easy for things to turn chaotic. 

However, the original reason for the protests — prior to the vandals and rioters stealing the spotlight — is easy to understand considering the White House’s recent immigration enforcement tactics. 

Far from using a mass deportation effort to round up the “most vicious and bloodthirsty criminals” as promised on the campaign trail, the Trump administration is casting a far wider net to ensnare even the most peaceful of immigrants who lack proper paperwork. For agencies enforcing immigration laws, the focus isn’t merely on making the streets safer for local communities — it’s instead about meeting arrest quotas and making sure certain metrics impress the fervently anti-immigrant zealots currently calling the shots in the White House. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made it abundantly clear to federal agents that the sheer volume of deportations was the only thing that truly mattered to him — even going so far as to suggest agents start visiting 7-Elevens and Home Depot parking lots to round up suspected undocumented immigrants. 

Such an inhumane obsession over the raw number of arrests — rather than a calculated push to deport “the worst of the worst” — is the sort of directive one would expect from Joseph Stalin’s NKVD during the Great Purge rather than American law enforcement agencies in the 21st century. 

As grotesque as Miller’s cruel drive to expand deportations might be, the real-world implications of his Soviet-style expulsion of “undesirables” from American cities is even worse. In an effort to boost the agency’s numbers, immigration agents have now been given authority to conduct impromptu raids virtually anywhere they see fit, often without warrants — including locations such as hospitals, churches, schools and even immigration centers where individuals are attempting to comply with the law.  

It has been reported that agents from the Department of Homeland Security have attempted to gain “access” to children of suspected immigrants in Los Angeles schools. A Cuban father in San Antonio was recently arrested in his driveway as he and his wife prepared to drive their children to school. One Kansas City woman was even arrested when she arrived at an immigration center to finish filling out the paperwork required to remain in the country with her American-citizen husband. 

Among all the chaos of plain clothes agents showing up anywhere and everywhere to disappear individuals without warning, the entire concept of due process has also been flatly ignored by authorities. Indeed, Miller has publicly toyed with the idea of suspending habeas corpus in an effort to streamline the process for agents to meet his quota of 3,000 arrests per day. 

No wonder support for President Donald Trump’s positively Stalinist approach to immigration enforcement has generated backlash — even among some Americans who voted for him. 

After all, is this really what people voted for? Removing criminals is one thing; but with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents finding it difficult to meet Miller’s fervent anti-immigrant expectations, the practice of literally showing up at random Home Depots and throwing foreign-looking day laborers into federal custody is something else. And while the nativists running things in Trump’s White House are quite clearly unconcerned with the human cost of such brutal tactics, it’s not exactly the “law and order” approach to rooting out human smugglers and drug traffickers that was promised to voters. 

“This is not what we voted for,” declared Republican Florida State Sen. Ileana Garcia, the founder of the group Latinas for Trump, in a recent statement posted on X. “I have always supported Trump, through thick and thin. However, this is unacceptable and inhumane.”

Unfortunately, such criticism is rare among self-described conservatives nowadays. While prominent conservatives used to consider immigrants among “the most important sources of America's greatness,” much of today’s Trumpian GOP considers such individuals to be little more than foreign threats that should be purged from local communities — and Trump himself has long hinted that his plans for immigration weren’t going to end with merely having Mexico pay for a wall. 

Of course, none of this should be construed as justification for the recent looting, rioting and rampant vandalism occurring alongside the protests in Los Angeles and elsewhere — unrest that has, predictably, resulted in the Trump administration further testing the limits of executive authority. Federal troops have been deployed to the area without coordination from local authorities and Trump has even threatened California’s governor with possible arrest — actions that are unlikely to assuage the concerns of those protesting what they see as an authoritarian executive branch in the first place. 

Certainly, burning Waymos and stealing iPhones is no way to advocate for change — but it should be hard to disagree with the grievances of those who have tried to keep the protests peaceful. After all, it’s difficult to see how arrest quotas, warrantless raids and the suspension of basic human rights would ever be the methods needed to “Make America Great Again.”

 Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him on Twitter @schausmichael or on Substack @creativediscourse.