There is a reason I left Los Angeles.

As long as I can recall living in LA, every time you would drive past a Home Depot or a similar store, there would be a crowd of illegal immigrants who were waiting for work.

You do feel bad for these people. Many of them have crossed the border in an attempt to seek work and send remittances back home, and many of them are also on welfare. It turns out that an enormous number of people who come across the border end up engaging in things that leech off of the taxpayer dime; they end up as a net cost to the taxpayer. They take part in the public education system if they have kids who they bring across the border; they end up using medical services.

But the issue is this: It’s not about whether these people are nice or mean, whether they are good or bad.

They have broken the law. They crossed the border illegally. And that is just the ones who otherwise are law-abiding.

And then there are a bunch of people who are not otherwise law-abiding. There are many people in Southern California or occupying jails in Southern California who committed crimes in addition to illegal immigration. 

Federal law says you are not allowed to cross the American border without your papers, and that if you overstay your visa, even if you come across the border legally with a visa, then you are also here illegally and you ought to be deported.

Enforcing that law should not be controversial. There is a reason countries have borders, but the United States, for as long as I can recall, simply did not enforce the law properly. That was particularly true under Joe Biden.

WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show

When Donald Trump came into office in 2016, he pledged to do something about illegal immigration. And he did. The rate of border crossing plummeted dramatically during Donald Trump’s first term.

Then Joe Biden came in and opened the border wide to the tune of at least 10 million people crossing the border, either by claiming asylum falsely or by simply crossing illegally between ports of entry or by overstaying visas.

Donald Trump has now come into office for the second time, pledging to stop illegal immigration. He has already successfully closed the southern border. And now he is activating Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to implement the law; to find people who are in the interior of the country illegally and to remove them.

This should not be controversial. Just because elected officials haven’t enforced the law properly for decades, it does not mean that enforcing the law now should be controversial.

Late last week, there were some immigration enforcement operations that happened in Southern California. According to The Wall Street Journal:

The first demonstrations began Friday in Los Angeles, when residents reacted to federal agents engaged in what appeared to be an immigration enforcement operation. Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said that some 800 protesters surrounded and breached a federal law-enforcement building in Los Angeles. 

Protests continued throughout the weekend, with a particularly tense standoff occurring Sunday evening in downtown Los Angeles. California Highway Patrol officers used flash-bang stun grenades and tactical positioning to push protesters off Highway 101. Demonstrators threw tree branches, scooters and fireworks from a freeway overpass onto police vehicles, and some protesters set fire to at least five Waymo driverless taxis.  

The Journal added:

Protesters also gathered outside a federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles Saturday night and were pushed back by law enforcement using tear gas and flash bangs, according to local news footage. Los Angeles police declared an unlawful assembly in the area and detained multiple people.

Things got incredibly fraught. That is not a giant shock. What is amazing, however, is that people believe the United States is so lawless that when federal agents show up to arrest people for being in the country illegally, we end up with hundreds of protesters, many of whom end up assaulting police officers, ICE agents, participating in acts of criminality, rioting, and burning things.

L.A. has become an incredibly lawless place. It’s one of the reasons my family and I moved during the BLM riots, in which the city of Los Angeles essentially told the cops to stand down and allow people to riot and destroy whatever they could, burning cop cars along the way.

We lived in a fairly decent area of L.A., and I could hear the helicopters above our home and gunshots. I can promise you, in the aftermath of what’s going on right now, there will be many people who look at California and say, “Why in the hell am I paying exorbitant taxes in order to live in a place that allowed every area around L.A. to burn just a few months ago, and now is allowing parts of L.A. to burn in order to protect people who came to the country illegally in the first place?”

It’s total insanity. This is essentially what my new book, “Lions and Scavengers,” is about. There are two groups of people in the United States and across the West: people who wish to build institutions and create successful operating systems, and then people who wish to tear them down.

You look at the protesters and you see many of them flying Mexican flags as well as Palestinian flags (and it’s a good indicator that you’re on the wrong side of any protests if you’re the one flying a Palestinian flag). These protesters were roaming around suggesting they need to be in the United States while flying the Mexican flag.

That’s an amazing thing because they’re not saying Mexico and the United States are in solidarity. Precisely the opposite. They are saying they came to the United States as a quasi-invading force and they’ve come here as refugees from Mexico, and therefore left Mexico for a reason.

This would be the equivalent of Cuban migrants attempting to escape Cuba, who then fly the Cuban flag while attempting to stop ICE officers. It would be bizarre. 

Cubans coming to the United States from Cuba generally don’t fly the flag of the country that oppressed them and forced them to leave. If they are flying that flag it’s to overthrow the government of Cuba.

But in LA, you have a bunch of people flying Mexican flags, not because they wish to change the government of Mexico, or because they believe in the solidarity between the United States and Mexico, but because many of them believe that this entire area is Aztalan: It doesn’t belong to the American people or the American government.

The Left thinks all of this is okay. When you have the government of Los Angeles not doing enough to shut all of this down, it demonstrates the Democrats’ priorities.

Gift Dad an All Access Membership. Use code DAD40 at checkout to save 40%!

There’s a long heritage for all of this in the Democratic Party, going back to Barack Obama winking and nodding at the Ferguson riots of 2014. We’ve had a dozen years of this kind of garbage and yet Democrats still don’t seem to get it. They are defending the rioters and the protesters and the people who are engaging in violence.

If anyone actually wonders why President Trump is president — this is why.

Continue reading this exclusive article and join the conversation, plus watch free videos on DW+

Already a member?