Karen Bass in hot seat as Trump targets Los Angeles – but it's not her first crisis

The Guardian

19-06-2025

In the mid-1990s, Karen Bass was in the streets of Los Angeles, protesting alongside Latino activists against new laws that targeted undocumented immigrants and were expected to land more young men of color in prison.
These days, Bass is monitoring the status of protests against US immigration agents from a helicopter, as the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles.
Bass, a 71-year-old former community organizer, is leading the city's response to an extraordinary confrontation staged by the federal government, as federal agents have raided workplaces and parking lots, arresting immigrant workers in ways family members have compared to 'kidnappings', and Donald Trump sent in the national guard and hundreds of US marines in response to local demonstrations.
As Trump and other Republicans have tried to paint Bass as the negligent guardian of a city full of wild criminal behavior, Bass has pushed back hard. The political career of Los Angeles' first Black female mayor was forged during the chaos and violence of the 1992 LA uprising, which left more than 50 people dead, and in the long struggle afterwards to rebuild a more equal city.
When the Trump administration tried to depict a few protests in downtown Los Angeles as rioting equivalent to the aftermath of the Rodney King trial in 1992, Bass scoffed: 'There is zero comparison,' noting that, as a Black community leader in South Central Los Angeles, 'I was at the epicenter when it was occurring.'
Bass has earned widespread praise within California for her forceful denunciation of Trump's immigration raids, and her focus on the safety of LA's immigrant residents, and the terror the raids have caused. She has repeatedly described immigrants as central to the city's identity.
'We are a city of immigrants, and we have always embraced that,' Bass said.
She has also made clear that what's happening in Los Angeles has wider importance, and that the tactics the administration is testing out in one Democratic-majority city are likely to be used elsewhere. 'I don't think our city should be used as an experiment,' she said last week.
Bass, a force in California state politics before she spent a decade in Congress, built her reputation on consensus-building and pragmatism, not political grandstanding. Once a favorite of congressional Republicans for her willingness to work across the aisle, she is now denouncing Trump administration officials for the 'outright lie' of their characterization of Los Angeles as a war zone, and saying bluntly that 'this is chaos that was started in Washington DC.'
'As city leadership, she's been holding it down,' said Eunisses Hernandez, a progressive Los Angeles city council member who represents a majority-Latino district north of downtown. 'All of our leaders are navigating unprecedented waters.'
In the short time Bass has been mayor – she was inaugurated in December 2022 – she has been faced with a series of escalating post-Covid crises, starting with the city's long-running struggle with homelessness and rising housing costs, then a historic double Hollywood strike in 2023, followed by ongoing economic problems in the city's crucial film and TV business.
As multiple wildfires raged across the city this January, she was slammed for having left the city for Ghana during a time of high wildfire risk and dodging questions about her absence. Her leadership during the wildfires left her political future in question, with half the city's voters viewing her unfavorably, according to a May poll.
The challenges Bass faces in leading Los Angeles through this new crisis are also only beginning, even as the first wave of Los Angeles' anti-immigration raid protests have quieted in the wake of Saturday's large nationwide demonstrations against the Trump administration.
'Our city is under siege,' said Roland Palencia, an organizational consultant and longtime local activist. 'The plan here is basically, strangle the city: economically, politically, every which way.'
At least 2,000 members of the national guard and hundreds of US marines are still staged in downtown Los Angeles. A legal battle over whether Trump illegally deployed the national guard over the protests of California's governor is still playing out: after a Tuesday hearing, a federal appeals court seemed likely to keep the national guard under Trump's control as the litigation continues.
While denouncing the Trump administration for causing chaos in Los Angeles, Bass has also had to confront some of those taking to the streets, demanding that protests be 'peaceful' and responding sharply to anti-Ice graffiti on downtown buildings and businesses, noting that the city was supposed to host the Fifa World Cup in 2026.
'I do not believe that individuals that commit vandalism and violence in our city really are in support of immigrants, they have another agenda,' she said on 10 June. 'The violence and the damage is unacceptable, it is not going to be tolerated, and individuals will be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.'
Meanwhile, federal agents are still conducting unpredictable immigration raids across the Los Angeles area, detaining people at work, in parking lots, and even at a weekend swap meet. Family members have been left without any information about their loved ones' whereabouts for days: lawyers and elected officials have described horrific conditions in the facilities where suddenly detained immigrants are being held.
On Tuesday, Bass lifted the evening curfew that she had set for a swath of downtown Los Angeles a week before, one that major Los Angeles restaurants had complained had cost them tens of thousands of dollars. But the economic shock waves of the immigration raids are still rippling through the city, with many immigrants, even those with legal status to work in the US, afraid of going to work, or even leaving the house.
The message Angelenos have taken from the federal raids so far, Hernandez said, was 'It doesn't matter whether you're documented or not: if you look brown, if you look Latino, if you look like an immigrant, we're going to stop you.'
A third of Los Angeles county's roughly 10 million residents were born outside the United States. Half are Latino. An estimated 1 million people here are undocumented.
Since the federal government stepped up the raids, swaths of the city once bustling with immigrant businesses and immigrant customers are unusually quiet, community members and local politicians say.
'It is pretty profound to walk up and down the streets and to see the empty streets, it reminded me of Covid,' Bass told the Los Angeles Times during a Father's Day visit to Boyle Heights, a historic Latino neighborhood.
Bass has urged Angelenos to help local businesses harmed by the Trump administration's targeting.
'Now is the time to support your local small business and show that LA stands strong and united,' she posted on X on Tuesday.
But Hernandez, the city council member, warned that the economic pain of the raids could escalate even further, particularly as immigrant families afraid to send breadwinners to work over the past two weeks faced the threat of being evicted from their homes.
'We cannot afford to have more people fall into the eviction to homelessness pipeline,' she said.
When small businesses lost money, Hernandez added, the city's revenue was hurt, as well: 'Our budget – a significant portion of it is made from locally generated tax dollars,' she said. 'That revenue is drying up.'
And the city government, already struggling with a huge budget deficit after the wildfires this January, also faced new crisis-related costs, Hernandez said: 'We're spending millions upon millions in police overtime.' She noted that the police department had estimated Ice-raid-related overtime costs at $12m within the first two weeks.
Many journalists and activists have criticized the Los Angeles police department's own response to the protests of the past two weeks as violent and heavy-handed. The city of Los Angeles is currently facing a lawsuit from press freedom organizations over the police department's use of force against journalists.
Palencia, the longtime activist and organizational consultant, said Bass's commitment to Los Angeles' immigrant community, and to Latinos in particular, was not in doubt.
Bass's connection to the Latino community is deep, Palencia said, forged both through her early political activism as the founder of the Community Coalition, a non-profit which built ties between Black and Latino communities in order to jointly confront the challenges of the crack epidemic in the 1990s, and through her own family. Bass's ex-husband was Latino, and she remains very close to her four Mexican American stepchildren and their children.
But, Palencia argued, leaders like Bass and the California governor, Gavin Newsom, will need a long-term leadership plan, one that gives more guidance to all the state's residents on how to respond to a new and dangerous situation.
Even though Los Angeles had had a quieter week, the feeling that the city was 'under siege' continued, Palencia said.
'It's kind of like a cat-and-mouse situation,' he said. 'It's very fluid – and it can blow up any time.'