Los Angeles City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian

Community immigration Politics

A Letter from Los Angeles

June 12, 2025

by

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

250

By Adrin Nazarian

Special to the Mirror-Spectator

The events now unfolding in Los Angeles have awakened painful memories for me and for many members of this city’s large and varied Armenian community.

My grandparents on my father’s side escaped the Genocide in Shushi in 1920 as the Ottoman Turks burned the city. My grandmother Raya was imprisoned by Stalin in a work camp in Siberia. They eventually made their way to Iran to escape persecution in the Soviet Union. I came to this country as a child when my family fled war and revolution in Iran.

My experience is hardly unique. How many of us would be living in the United States now if not for violent upheavals in Iran, in Lebanon, in the collapsing Soviet Union, or the massacres in Baku, to name a few. In most cases, the crisis was preceded by a change of government, and the onset of a hostile regime that threatened our families.

Countless immigrant families in Los Angeles are now experiencing that fear. Many fled violence in Central America in hopes of finding refuge in the United States. Now, a change in government here is forcing them to choose between life in hiding or a return to the dangers they hoped to escape.

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When I see families separated by force, I can imagine what it’s like for parents and children to be told they may never see each other again, because it speaks to my own family’s experience of dispossession, flight and exile. These are memories that many of us share. We came to this country to escape oppression. Can we deny that refuge to others without stopping to see them as human beings?

We have all heard that America is a country of immigrants. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Los Angeles, where street signs in Spanish, Korean and Armenian are as much a part of the scene as the Hollywood sign or the Walk of Fame. The energy of L.A.’s immigrant entrepreneurs is one of the strengths that made California the world’s fourth largest economy.

Every country has the right to regulate immigration and enforce its laws, but its laws should recognize the realities of its marketplace. As long as there is work to be done, people will come to do it. Large sectors of the American economy are powered by the labor of undocumented immigrants, not just in Los Angeles, but in every part of the country. Contrary to the nativist propaganda, undocumented workers pay billions of dollars in taxes. Although they will never receive the benefits they pay for, their contributions help to keep our Social Security fund liquid — a fact never brought to light.

For decades, cynical politicians have sold a false narrative that immigrants are responsible for every problem imaginable. President Trump campaigned on a promise to carry out the largest deportation in our history. We are now seeing the removal of people who have lived constructive lives in our country for decades.

In Los Angeles, ICE agents are not hauling in gangsters or violent criminals. They’re seizing seamstresses from their benches and families from government offices where they waited patiently for scheduled appointments with authorities they hoped could help them. Many of these migrants entered the United States legally and have worked for years to establish their legal status.

The spectacle of masked agents piling handcuffed men and women into vans, in full view of their families, is heartrending. Many of these detainees are parents who now face summary deportation and permanent separation from their families.

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

Topics: immigration, Politics

People: Adrin Nazarian, Donald J. Trump

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People are outraged and tempers are running high. This is understandable. We should all be outraged at the administration’s abuse of its immigration authority. Peaceful protest is justified and necessary. Large protests have been focused and orderly.

Unfortunately, a small number of misguided individuals have taken the excesses of ICE as an excuse to destroy property, vandalize public buildings and pursue violent confrontations with the police. This helps no one but President Trump.

He is now selling the false narrative that Los Angeles is a city overrun by violent rioters. In fact, in a city of 469 square miles, the disorder replayed endlessly on television has been limited to a few city blocks. I have called on the outraged residents of our city to restrain themselves and demonstrate peacefully for the release of the unjustly detained. Our local law enforcement is more than up to the job of maintaining order. We don’t need armed troops to keep the peace in our city.

Unfortunately, the President is more interested in promoting his narrative of a city out of control than he is in actually restoring peace to our streets. Our city was at peace on Thursday, June 5. Since then, the Trump administration has carried out its policy in the most provocative and divisive way possible. Sending in the National Guard without a request from the Governor is both illegal and inflammatory. Ordering unneeded Guard units and Marines into the city has only served to escalate the conflict.

Even those of us who imagine we will not be directly affected by ICE’s actions in Los Angeles need to stand up and speak out. We should remember that leaders who flout the law to scapegoat vulnerable minorities never stop with the first targeted group. When the civil rights of one group are violated, the rights of all are degraded, and we all become less safe.

Advocates of legal immigration have long proposed legislation to match immigration policy to the realities of our labor market, but so far their efforts have been thwarted by politicians who prefer to score cheap political points by scapegoating immigrants. We can adopt peaceful democratic solutions to our country’s broken immigration system. It’s time to discuss those instead of tearing families apart and provoking senseless violence.

(Adrin Nazarian is a member of the Los Angeles City Council for District 2.)

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