On Monday, July 7th, Carlos González Gutiérrez, the consul-general of Mexico in Los Angeles, was about to start his weekly audiencia pública when he heard a helicopter flying overhead. He began as usual, greeting some twenty or twenty-five community members, who had shown up on the third and busiest floor of the consulate to share their concerns and ask questions. These days, they almost all want to discuss immigration raids in the city and what the consulate can do to protect Mexican citizens. As the gathering went on, González Gutiérrez heard, on top of the helicopter, loud voices and a general commotion outside. He kept talking, standing in front of a Mexican flag and a bright-orange wall emblazoned with the official seal of Mexico.
When the event concluded, his deputy consul-general approached him and held up his phone, which was playing videos of beige military trucks, federal officers on horseback, protesters shouting them down, and Mayor Karen Bass saying that the officers needed to leave. González Gutiérrez realized that the melee was taking place in MacArthur Park, directly across the street from the consulate. He walked back up to the microphone he had used for the audiencia and said that an immigration raid was occurring. He didn’t want to cause a panic, but he invited everyone inside the building to stay there, and everyone outside—people waiting in line for their appointments, venders selling food and small Mexican flags—to come in. They would be safe there, he told them. The consulate is inviolable under international law, a sanctuary within the city of Los Angeles.
While federal agents were still in the park, González Gutiérrez went back up to his office on the fifth floor, where a wall of windows offered the best vantage point for watching what was happening in the streets below. News teams were on the scene, broadcasting to viewers across the country. So were activists, who’ve been trying to document every raid and have been posting videos and photos on social media.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement had apprehended hundreds of Mexicans in Los Angeles in recent weeks, but it didn’t take a single person that day in MacArthur Park, suggesting that its presence was intended as a demonstration of force. The federal agents announced that they were leaving soon after Mayor Bass arrived. González Gutiérrez found the whole episode “astonishing,” he told me. “I never expected to witness an operation such as the one everybody saw in MacArthur Park—because of what MacArthur Park represents, because of what Los Angeles represents, because of the deployment of forces by the Border Patrol.”
González Gutiérrez, who was born in Mexico City, has spent twenty-eight of his sixty-one years in the United States. After graduating from El Colegio de México with a degree in international relations, he enrolled at the Instituto Matías Romero, the foreign-service school that Mexico’s aspiring diplomats are required to attend. While he was there, he received permission from the Foreign Ministry to enter an international-relations graduate program at the University of Southern California, where he studied with an expert in U.S.–Latin American relations named Abe Lowenthal. The year was 1988. The Dodgers defeated the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. González Gutiérrez became a fan of the city and its baseball team.
Lowenthal gave him advice that shaped the rest of his professional life, González Gutiérrez told me. “If I were you,” he recalled Lowenthal saying, “I would try to focus my career on the Mexican community in the United States.” The conflicts in Central America, the strength of the peso, the severity of the drug-trafficking problem: all of these would fluctuate over time, Lowenthal predicted. But Mexican communities in the United States would always be at the top of the list of Mexico’s foreign-policy priorities. That’s pretty much how events have unfolded.
When González Gutiérrez finished at U.S.C., he returned to Mexico City to complete the program at Matías Romero, and he became a junior foreign-service officer. Not long into the job, he got a phone call from the Foreign Minister, Fernando Solana Morales, who told him that Lowenthal was interested in having him continue work on a research project about connections between California and Mexico, so he would be headed back to Los Angeles, to help his former professor and become the first consul for community affairs. González Gutiérrez also believes he was sent to Los Angeles because the United States and Mexico were negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement: the Foreign Ministry knew that Mexico needed to build up its consular network in the United States. González Gutiérrez has a memento from those years hanging on the wall in his office, alongside paintings of bullfights and photos with U.S. and Mexican dignitaries: a ticket to the no-hitter thrown by the Dodger phenom Fernando Valenzuela, the left-handed screwball pitcher from Etchohuaquila, Sonora, against the St. Louis Cardinals, on June 29, 1990. Valenzuela had signed it for him.
During this period in Los Angeles, González Gutiérrez told me, “you could see how important Mexican communities were going to be, or were already, for the social fabric of the city. But it was nothing like it would become.” In November, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which included a so-called amnesty provision that gave undocumented people, including Mexicans, a path to citizenship. Nearly two and a half million Mexicans gained legal status as a result of the I.R.C.A., including more than half a million in Los Angeles County. By the mid-nineties, the Mexican population of Greater Los Angeles stood at an estimated four million individuals, making it the largest outside of Mexico.
The new immigration law made many Mexicans feel as if they had a more stable footing in Los Angeles, allowing them to settle down. As a 2011 report by researchers at U.S.C. explained, Mexicans who arrived in the late seventies and early eighties, and applied for legalization through the provisions of the I.R.C.A., made up an increasing share of the Los Angeles labor force, graduated from high school at higher rates than earlier generations of Mexican immigrants, bought homes in increasing numbers, and had higher median incomes.
According to González Gutiérrez, it is the Mexican immigrants who, for a variety of reasons, were not able to benefit from I.R.C.A. who have been most affected by the recent ICE raids. Their U.S.-born children and grandchildren are leading the resistance against the roundups. “They are the ones protesting to protect their parents and waving the Mexican flag to honor that part of their identity,” he told me.
A few years after the signing of the I.R.C.A., González Gutiérrez witnessed the riots sparked by the beating of Rodney King. He recalled the racial tensions of this period, including between African Americans and the recently arrived Mexican and Central American immigrants who were moving to South Central. From the Mexican consulate, he said, he could see “fires everywhere, five or six columns of smoke rising into the sky at the same time.” González Gutiérrez also witnessed the campaign, in 1994, to pass Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to cut off public benefits to undocumented immigrants. (The measure was approved by a wide margin—nearly sixty per cent of voters supported it—but blocked by a federal judge.) On October 16, 1994, the Los Angeles Times ran a photograph of the protests against the ballot initiative, showing Cesar Chavez Avenue, named after the co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, jam-packed with Angelenos flying Mexican flags. Exactly thirty years after the photograph was published, González Gutiérrez held a ceremony at the consulate, in which he unveiled a large, framed reprint. He said that the anniversary was special to him because it marked California’s dramatic turnaround: “a state that was the vanguard of the anti-immigrant movement had become the vanguard of the pro-immigrant movement in the United States.”
In 1999, González Gutiérrez moved to Washington, D.C., where he served as the counselor for Latino affairs at the Mexican Embassy. Four years later, he returned to Mexico, where, within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he supervised the implementation of important policy changes, such as allowing citizens living abroad to vote in elections, and creating a government program that contributes three pesos to community- and economic-development projects for every peso Mexican migrants send back to the country. These efforts, he told me, aimed to recognize that Mexicans were part of Mexico even when they lived outside its borders.
From Mexico, González Gutiérrez watched an anti-immigrant mood sweep across the United States in the wake of 9/11. The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005—which passed in the House but was never introduced for debate in the Senate—would have required the construction of seven hundred miles of border fencing, and allowed for the deportation of undocumented immigrants convicted of minor crimes such as drunken driving. It heightened the sense among immigrants that their status in the United States was under threat; it also anticipated the slew of immigration-related executive orders that Donald Trump issued in the early days of his second term. Then, in 2009, González Gutiérrez made his way back to the United States. He was sent to Sacramento, “the capital city of the most important state for Mexico,” he said, for his first tour as a consul-general. A few years later, a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight drafted a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that passed through the U.S. Senate but didn’t come to a vote in the House, because conservative Republicans opposed the pathway-to-citizenship provision. This, González Gutiérrez noted, was the “closest Congress had come since the I.R.C.A. to providing relief to the undocumented population in this country.” Certainly, it hasn’t come closer since.
I met with González Gutiérrez three days after the incident in MacArthur Park. “I’ve lived many things during this last month that I never thought I would have to,” he told me. The weekend after the Presidential election, he said, consuls-general across the United States called him to express their concerns about what the second Trump Administration would mean for Mexican nationals. He also heard from undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles to whom he had given his number, asking him what he thought they should do. He began to see social-media posts by Mexicans in L.A. spreading rumors of raids and the presence of ICE in the community.
A week after Trump’s Inauguration, González Gutiérrez posted a video that acknowledged the migrant community’s fears but urged them to not let their worries dominate their lives. “Que tal, paisanos?” (“How’s it going, countrymen?”) he asked, looking directly at the camera. He’d read several reports that ICE had conducted mass-deportation raids in Los Angeles, he said. “I want to tell you that, after verifying it with immigration authorities, there were no such raids.” The previous weekend, ICE had detained about seventeen Mexican nationals, which, he explained, was around the number the agency apprehended on any given weekend. They all had some sort of criminal record, he said. There was no evidence of mass deportations, or ICE randomly grabbing people on the streets, or showing up at sensitive locations such as schools and churches. “Of course, the situation could change at any time,” he said. “But for the moment I don’t see any reason that you should stop going about your normal activities.”
In June, González Gutiérrez began to see enforcement tactics that seemed unprecedented during his time in Los Angeles. ICE had begun raiding workplaces, snatching people off the streets, and arresting them as they waited to enter immigration courts. The government was apprehending people without criminal records, many of whom had been members of the community for decades.
He posted more videos, now with greater urgency. On June 7th, he advised Mexicans with immigration hearings to inquire about the possibility of moving them online, and reminded them that, if they got detained, they should stay calm, not sign any documents they don’t understand, and, last of all, “remain silent and be in touch with your consulate.” Three days later, he still urged calm, and told people to protest peacefully if they protested at all. “In Mexico,” he said, “we’re deeply proud of you—of your work, your bravery, your dignity, and your identity as Mexicans. It is absolutely compatible to be a citizen or resident of this country who is both loyal and honest, and at the same time feel proud of your country of origin.”
The consul-general also told viewers that, in accordance with the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, consulate officials “have had full access at detention centers to be able to interview all detained Mexicans.” Since the ICE raids scaled up in early June, members of his staff have visited the Metropolitan Detention Center every day, sometimes twice per day. The center, a sand-colored ten-story building in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, is the main immigrant-detention center in the city, and is a short drive from the consulate. (A picture of the Metropolitan Detention Center adorns the cover of Mike Davis’s classic book, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,” published in 1990. The building was brand-new when the book came out; Davis described it as a “postmodern Bastille” that looked like a “futuristic hotel or office block.”) As of early July, staff from the Mexican consulate had interviewed three hundred and thirty Mexicans who had been detained there during the previous month. Fifty-two per cent had lived in the United States for more than ten years. Thirty-six per cent had lived here for twenty years. Several more had been in the country for thirty years, and some for forty. Sixty-four of the people they’ve interviewed have already been deported, some forcibly and some voluntarily.
Three hundred and nine of the interviewees were men; twenty-one were women. Immigration raids typically target men, but George Sanchez—a historian at U.S.C. who is perhaps the foremost scholar of L.A.’s Mexican and Mexican American communities—made the point that these latest raids have been particularly “masculinist.” “ICE has gone to Home Depots, not the transportation centers where buses pick up women every morning in East Los Angeles, taking them to the west side where they care for white people’s children,” Sanchez told me. “The Administration doesn’t want complaints from these families, whereas the day laborers at Home Depot conjure an image of the supposedly threatening foreigners they claim to be after.” González Gutiérrez told me about two men who have lived in Los Angeles for forty years but had never applied for citizenship. Now they face deportation. “The fact that so many people have established roots in this country, that they have kids here, that they are a full part of communities they’ve helped prosper, that they still have to live in the shadows as undocumented people—this is the tragedy of this community,” he said.
During interviews at the detention center, Mexican consular officials make sure that the detained migrants have enough food and water, collect the contact information of family members to let them know that their loved one has been detained, ascertain whether detainees need legal representation, and, if they do, help them get it. According to ICE’s own rules, migrants are supposed to be confined in “hold rooms” at detention facilities such as the Metropolitan Detention Center for only twelve hours, while they await further processing. But some are there for up to a week before they’re released, taken elsewhere, or deported. The cells have become overcrowded, and migrants are forced to sleep on the floor. Detainees report that the arresting agents used excessive force, and consular officials can see bruises on their bodies. The officials’ job, González Gutiérrez told me, is “to describe precisely what happened in order to inform the Mexican government, the Foreign Ministry, and the Embassy, to document facts that could later be of use for any sort of legal claim that the family or the government might make.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions when asked for comment.)
All of the detainees have a choice to make about whether to go or to stay and fight, but their considerations are different depending on their circumstances. In many cases, González Gutiérrez said, “people have a very clear idea of what they want.” If they’ve only been in the United States for a year or two, and they know that the legal-challenge process could be costly and force them to spend weeks or months in a detention center, and that their chances of success are slim, they might, according to González Gutiérrez, decide, “I cannot stand this one more day.” But for Mexicans who’ve been in the United States for a decade or more, and who have started families, it’s a different calculation entirely. “They are interested in having their day in court,” he said.
González Gutiérrez sees himself as a sympathetic advocate, who can help his constituents improve their circumstances and navigate the legal process while in detention. He told me a story about one immigrant who was picked up on the street and taken to the detention center. During his interview with a consular official, he said that he had cancer and was receiving chemotherapy. Once the consulate reported his condition, he was released within a couple of days. But González Gutiérrez cannot ultimately shape the outcome of immigrants’ cases. As a diplomat, he told me, he, too, is just a guest in this country. Like all other diplomats, he said, he abides by the rule of reciprocity: he can only do here what he would want an American diplomat to do in Mexico.
There are Mexicans in Los Angeles who want more from him. Some of his constituents have complained that the abuse of migrants by ICE is a human-rights violation, and demanded to know what he’s going to do about it. He also said that several individuals have asked him to write a “diplomatic note,” which the State Department’s website describes as “a formal written communication between countries” that can be used for everything from “announcing the arrival of a new diplomat in a host country to making a formal written request on high priority policy initiatives.”
But González Gutiérrez says that a decision to send a diplomatic note isn’t his to make; rather, it belongs to Mexico’s Foreign Ministry and the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has condemned the violence of both the raids and the protests, and is reportedly considering legal action on behalf of a Mexican man who fell from a rooftop and died during a raid in Southern California. The death was “unacceptable,” Sheinbaum said at a press conference last week.
When González Gutiérrez first moved to Los Angeles, in the late nineteen-eighties, he bought a used Ford Pinto for a thousand dollars. He enjoyed driving it through the historic Figueroa Street Tunnels, which were constructed in the nineteen-thirties and have the seal of Los Angeles etched into their façade. The image in the lower left-hand corner is similar to the one on the Mexican flag: an eagle devouring a serpent. It’s an acknowledgment that Los Angeles was, and remains, a Mexican city. Seeing the city seal helped González Gutiérrez feel at home.
“When you are here, if you are a Mexican national, you realize that you belong, that, to a great extent, this is a Mexican city. I don’t say that in a chauvinistic way,” he told me. “What I mean is that L.A. celebrates diversity.” In a ten-minute drive, he noted, you might pass through Little Armenia, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Koreatown, the Maya Corridor. “L.A. belongs to everybody,” he said, “but Mexicans are part of it in a very central, essential, structural way.”
The fact that Los Angeles is, in many ways, a Mexican city is exactly what the Trump Administration—especially Stephen Miller, who spent his time in high school in Santa Monica railing against Latinos—aims to attack. The current Administration isn’t the first to do so. White settlers in the nineteenth century tore down the city’s adobe structures and replaced them with red bricks. In 1932, the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros—one of Mexico’s “big three” muralists, along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco—painted an epic mural at La Plaza at Olvera Street. Called “América Tropical,” it offered an anti-imperialist rendition of the historical relationship between the United States and Mexico: a crucified Indigenous figure with an American eagle perched above his limp body. A Los Angeles booster and Olvera Street preservationist named Christine Sterling had helped commission the mural but didn’t like what Siqueiros produced, and within a matter of years it was whitewashed. (A restoration of the mural was completed in 2012.) When the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, the city forced out the Mexican community at Chavez Ravine to make way for a new stadium. Police violently removed the final holdouts on May 9, 1959, a day that Mexican Americans in Los Angeles called “Black Friday.” The writer Richard Rodríguez, in his book “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father,” summed up the transformation of Los Angeles. “Americans have their leveling ways: La Ciudad de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula has become, in one hundred years, L.A.”
And yet its history remains. The day before I met with González Gutiérrez, I visited the original townsite of El Pueblo de Los Angeles, where a plaque notes that Los Angeles was founded on September 4, 1781, by eleven families, all of them from Spanish, Indigenous, and African backgrounds. I also visited the museum in Rancho Dominguez, nestled between Compton, Long Beach, and Carson. It’s the site of the Spanish land grant given to Juan José Domínguez in 1784, which once covered much of what is today L.A. County. Juan José’s grandnephew, Manuel Domínguez, was mayor of Los Angeles under Mexican rule and a signer of the California state constitution.
Los Angeles, as González Gutiérrez described it to me, is still the “political capital of the Mexican diaspora.” That’s why the Trump Administration’s actions there, and the resistance against them, have been so fierce. ICE officers will soon be bolstered by the billions that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gives them. With infinitely fewer resources, the protesters are becoming more organized, too. On the morning that I met the consul-general, I had breakfast at La Chispa de Oro, in the predominantly Mexican American neighborhood of Boyle Heights, with the Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. He told me that “at first people were scared, but now they’re pissed. You get masked agents with guns pulling random people in public, that’s terrifying. Too many people in L.A. know that type of terror from our ancestral countries. You think it can’t happen here, then it does. So you feel sad about it, but then you’re, like, ‘No.’ ” When I visited the Home Depot in Cypress Park that ICE had raided two weeks before, day laborers and taco venders still hawked their services and goods. Activists ringed the parking lot, walkie-talkies in hand, ready to defend their neighbors. A day earlier, ICE officers and protesters had clashed at a cannabis farm in Camarillo, an hour to the west. The stakes are high, because if Trump and Miller can cut out the Mexican heart of Los Angeles, what can’t they do? ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Fernando Valenzuela’s performance against the St. Louis Cardinals.
