LA Weekly: Day Laborers Have Become an Easy Target for Anti-Immigrant Vigilantes

MANY THINGS precede the actual beginning of a presidency; in the case of the looming dawn of the Trump administration, that’s meant the dawn of a raw ugliness deliberately targeting the most vulnerable of those who walk among us.

In the current LA Weekly, Jason McGahan has this week’s cover story, a smart, compelling, compassionate, informative piece on the plight of Los Angeles’ day laborers, increasingly being singled out by vigilantes, this part of a backlash against the immigrants in the most precarious situations, a backlash that marks its timeline from the presidential election.

McGahan’s well-researched story explores the lives of some of these immigrants, from Guatemala and Mexico, and examines the role of Los Angeles police and the federal government, and the corrosive ways the advent of the Trump White House has damaged their already precarious lives before the administration is even a fact of life.

“President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to deport from the United States as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants. And the president-elect's inciting rhetoric — calling Mexicans drug dealers, murderers and rapists — is emboldening vigilantism against day laborers across the country. Though not all day laborers are undocumented, many are, and the visibility that comes from the act of seeking work in public places makes them the subject of policy disagreements about the enforcement of federal immigration law.”

Read the rest at LA Weekly

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Image credit: Day laborer Ubaldo Hernández: Ted Soqui.