One of the great things about the Fourth of July is the cornucopia of local fireworks displays and parades. The celebration falls under the category of national/neighborhood—a category that doesn’t really apply to any other distinctly American holiday.
I’ve celebrated one July 4th on the banks of a small New Jersey lake, where the fireworks from the town on my side of the lake appeared to duel with the fireworks from the town on the other side, giving the appearance of a small-scale civil war. I’ve celebrated another as the Pacific Palisades Independence Day Parade wended its way past the local American Legion post in 1968, under the Safeway sign that featured an anti-war slogan my high school buddies and I had soldered to that sign in the hours before dawn.
July 4th is local. It’s national. It’s political.
And this year, where ICE roams, it’s curtailed.
In Los Angeles, where just under half of the county’s ten million residents are Latino, those residents—most of them U.S. citizens—are too frightened to appear in public. Parents have shunned their children’s graduations. Devout Catholics have stopped going to mass. Bus riding has dwindled to about half of its usual level. Restaurant kitchens are chronically understaffed. Supermarket aisles on L.A.’s Eastside are empty.
If ICE were merely arresting undocumented immigrants who’d been convicted of violent crimes, as ICE insists it’s been doing, this mass disappearance wouldn’t be happening. But ICE is simply swarming any place where Latinos gather, sending 50 agents, for instance, into a neighborhood swap meet. From June 1 through June 10, the Los Angeles Times reported, ICE detained 722 people around Los Angeles, some of them almost instantaneously deported. Sixty-nine percent of them hadn’t been convicted of any crime. Nor had the great majority of them crossed the border during the Biden years; immigration to Los Angeles peaked in the 1980s and ’90s. Most deportees were longtime residents of the L.A. community.
And today, Trump’s deportation policies have caused the cancellation of scores of America’s birthday celebrations.
The city of Los Angeles’s signature celebration—the annual Fourth of July Block Party in Gloria Molina Park, abutting City Hall—has been canceled because downtown’s disproportionately Latino residents fear that celebrating in the civic center’s public park could lead to them being seized, or their relatives or neighbors or friends or co-workers being seized. In the historic heart of Latino L.A., the venerable neighborhood celebrations in Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights have also been canceled.
All the small cities that line the Long Beach Freeway, from the near Eastside down to the harbor, 20 miles south, have canceled their own celebrations. El Sereno has been holding its Independence Day parade for the past 66 years, but this year it’s been compelled to forgo it. Bell Gardens, Cudahy, Huntington Park, and Whittier (the birthplace of Richard Nixon, where the yearly “Freedom Walk” isn’t happening this year) have called off their own festivities.
In their announcements of the cancellations, some of these cities and neighborhoods also announced the cancellation of other public events that are normally part of their summertime fare. A massive bike ride event known as CicLAvia, where Los Angeles shuts down city streets and allows bikers and walkers to use them for one day free of auto interference, was canceled in South L.A., for example.
There still will be fireworks displays in L.A. on the Fourth, but only in places where a nighttime ICE sweep would seize so many Anglos (Hey, it was dark; they coulda been Latinos) that, horror of horrors, the agency might even have to admit error. So, there will be fireworks at the beaches, at Dodger Stadium, at the Rose Bowl. But throughout the towns and communities where Latinos have been celebrating their American-ness for decades, as our nations’ immigrants have been celebrating theirs for centuries, there will be no celebrations at all this year. Donald Trump has driven them all indoors.
That, of course, isn’t Donald Trump’s only contribution to this year’s national birthday. His presidency mocks the foundational credo propounded on the first July 4th, that all men are created equal. That is clearly not the credo of a president who has halted all immigration to our nation save that of Afrikaners; whose own credo is that only white racists need apply. His budget bill that he’s about to sign will massively increase inequality in this country. His presidency mocks a revolution that repudiated monarchial government in favor of a republic. His is not a government but an Atlantic City version of Versailles; his guiding star isn’t the Constitution but the profane right of kings.
July 4th is our original No Kings Day; this July 4th must also be a No Tinpots Day as well.
But give credit where credit is due. Until Trump, no president, with the possible exception of the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis, ever sought to keep Americans from celebrating the Fourth of July. By that metric, Trump’s in a league by himself.
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