Antifa's violence in LA is not helping immigrants

The Hill

19-06-2025

Once more, the streets of Los Angeles are filled with chaos, burned buildings, looted businesses, law enforcement under siege, and ideological flags flying high in American air. We've been here before. And if we do not course-correct, we will be here again. And again.
Let's start with the uncomfortable truth: The root of the current riots lies in the previous administration's failure. A failure that permitted millions to enter our country without any real verification process. No accountability. No enforcement. No border management that reflects both compassion and security.
That porous approach to immigration, driven by virtue-signaling rather than vision, has produced what we're now witnessing: unrest tied directly to policies that abandoned common sense for political optics.
Second, let's name the perpetrators. The majority of these riots are being led, organized, and amplified by Antifa factions and ultra-left progressive groups whose mission is not reform but total revolution.
These are modern-day anarchists. Their goal is not justice but chaos. They want to tear down capitalism, dismantle law enforcement, and erase every institutions that hold Western society together. Their agenda is disorder, and their strategy is infiltration — hijacking moments of genuine civil concern and setting fire to the very cities they claim to protect.
Third, we must be honest about the optics and outcomes. Some individuals are peacefully protesting. The constitutional right to assembly and civil disobedience must be protected at all costs. But the images we are seeing of foreign flags waving amid anti-American rhetoric, rocks thrown at police officers, and masked agitators shouting for the abolition of ICE and capitalism, undermine any moral high ground.
The presence of Mexican, Salvadorian, and Palestinian flags during riots does not help the cause of immigration reform, either. It alienates the public and further mobilizes opposition even to the most rational and compassionate immigration policies.
If you genuinely believe in legal immigration and you care about the millions who have been here for 20, 25, or 30 years, raising families, working hard, living peacefully, then you must agree that these riots hurt and did not help their cause. This lawlessness is antithetical to everything the immigrant rights movement hopes to achieve.
The riots in downtown Los Angeles serve as a stark and unmistakable reminder that we are only inches away from the breakdown of law and order at any given moment. The same spirit of lawlessness that engulfed our nation after the murder of George Floyd has returned. And this time, it has been weaponized with even more ideological fervor and less spiritual clarity.
A segment of our population, especially among younger generations, has been captivated by a narrative that rejects the rule of law and lacks any foundational understanding of our constitutional republic. Worse still, there is a spiritual void and a lack of prophetic bandwidth to discern the difference between justice and vengeance, between righteous indignation and reckless rage.
At the end of the day, no one should ever be protesting the deportation of individuals who are violent criminals, rapists, murderers, or pedophiles. That is indefensible.
There is a legitimate space for expressing concern over the deportation of longstanding immigrants who have lived here peacefully and, despite having overstayed their visas decades ago, have contributed to society and never engaged in criminal behavior.
To conflate those two narratives — criminal and non-criminal — destroys our credibility and sabotages efforts at reform.
The Los Angeles riots should wake us up not only to what is happening in our streets, but also to what's happening in our hearts. If we do not recover respect for truth, wisdom, discernment and law and order tempered by grace, we will lose our nation not to conquest but to chaos.
Pastor Samuel Rodriguez is the lead pastor of New Season, one of America's most influential megachurches, and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which represents millions of Christians worldwide.