Trump Caught on Film as LA Rises Up and Strikes Back Hard

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1:19Ben Meiselas:prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. This is one of the most important videos I've ever done here at the Midas Touch Network, and it has deep connections to me and my family. I'll explain to you in a moment why we have Donald Trump busted on tape. We have the receipts. We have the film. We have the photos of Donald Trump sending his Gestapo, his militarized ICE agents, many in plain clothes and wearing masks, disappearing people off the streets. I show you this conduct across the country. I want to focus on what's been happening again recently in Los Angeles. It's where I'm from and my wife's family.

2:03Ben Meiselas:My wife is first generation here in the United States. Her family is Latino. They live in a vibrant Latino community here in Los Angeles, and their neighborhood is targeted on a frequent basis by ICE. I'm not going to mention the town for obvious reasons. So this has a deep connection to me. And I really want you to look at it, watch it, and share this with as many people as possible. And I want to bring in as well, Heidi Feldstein Soto. She is the city attorney of Los Angeles, and she is calling out these tactics that in her legal career she can never imagine could ever happen in the United States.

2:44Ben Meiselas:So let's take a look at this. Let's see Donald Trump being busted on film. This is what's taking place. This recently happened in Los Angeles where plainclothes ICE agents snatched a man outside Los Angeles' largest courthouse. This is what we see frequently. They're waiting in bushes. They're dressed like everyday people. Then they run, they grab you, they beat you, and they throw you into vehicles. Here, watch what happens. Here, play this clip.

3:56Ben Meiselas:Now, in this next video, I'm going to show you a 15-year-old high school student with disabilities was recently detained in Los Angeles after he was mistaken by ICE agents as a Salvadoran national with suspected ties to MS-13. Here, play this clip. We have brand new video shared by the San Fernando Valley son of a incident earlier this week, the moment a 15-year-old high school student with disabilities was briefly detained in Los Angeles after he was mistaken by ICE agents as a Salvadoran national with prior criminal convictions and suspected ties to the MS-13 gang. And here's what he and his mother told our local station in Los Angeles.

4:39Ben Meiselas:He has these moments where he breaks down and he tells me he feels harassed. He tells me he doesn't feel safe. They handcuffed me and they were just telling me who the person is and I was like no I don't know who that person is. Next up Andrea Velez a U.S. citizen detained by ICE in Los Angeles on her way to work. Play this clip. Andrea Velez has yet to physically return to work near 9th and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, where the 32-year-old works as a production coordinator for a shoe company. I take it day by day. That day, June 24th, Velez says her mom and sister had just dropped her off at work.

5:16Ben Meiselas:It was like a scene, like they were just ready to like attack and chase. Velez describes seeing unmarked cars and masked men in civilian clothing going after people. All I felt was that he grabbed and just slammed me to the floor. Villas says she tried to tell the plainclothes agent who arrested her that she's a U.S. citizen. He said that I was interfering with what he was doing so he was going to arrest me and that's when I asked him to show me his badge number, his ID identification. I asked him for like if you had a warrant and he said I didn't need to know any of that. Vlez says while officers were processing her into a detention center in downtown she again tried to tell them she was a U.S.

6:01Ben Meiselas:citizen and did nothing wrong. So they didn't believe me and then I gave them my real ID and at one point I gave them my driver's license and even my Kaiser health insurance card. Vlez says they still didn't believe her. She spent two days in the detention center where she says she had nothing to drink for 24 hours. And you have to buy utensils to eat. This lady, she was gonna get out that day and she was very kind enough to give me her cup and her, like her sport. Velez was released from custody two days after her arrest and a month ago the Department of Justice dismissed her case without prejudice, which means her case is closed temporarily.

6:45Ben Meiselas:And then back in June, the president of California's largest union, David Huerta, was targeted and kidnapped by ICE during their illegal raids. Here play this clip.

7:25Ben Meiselas:One more I want to share with you as well. Latinos from East Los Angeles confronted by ICE agents after being profiled. You're like, I'm American, you mother effer. I have my papers. What the hell are you freaking doing? And we're seeing these scenes play out across Los Angeles on a daily basis. Play this clip. I'm going to twist that shit, but I'm American, bro. What happened? Yo, these guys are literally, literally based off a skin color. My homie was born here just because of the way he looks.

8:05Ben Meiselas:Homar here took my phone, dog. He arrested me. You know, you're never fucking American and I approve it to this guy. That's crazy, yo. Hey, bro, that's not fucking fair at all, bro. That's fuck this shit. This is not fair at all, bro. This is not fair at all, bro. We're all American over here, man. Can't be doing this shit to us, bro. Fuck this shit, bro. You're not fucking wrong, bro. I'm American, motherfucker. You don't ever fucking grab me like that, bro. I'm American, motherfucker. I'm American citizen, motherfucker. Fuck you, motherfuckers, dog. Fuck you, motherfuckers, dog. I'm an American citizen.

8:37Ben Meiselas:so you don't ever fucking grab me that way, bitch. Yo, check it out, guys. Maple and Olympic, man. Be careful. I just got attacked for no reason. I'm going to come and fuck with these guys. Watch. I already know it. I already know it, man. It's not fair, guys. We shouldn't be like this, man. We shouldn't be like this, bro. But come and get us right now. I already know it. Fuck these guys, man. That's not fair, bro. So let me bring in Los Angeles City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto. So but before doing that, I do want to play this one clip as well. This is of the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, saying that if it wasn't for Donald Trump doing all of this, Los Angeles would be destroyed.

9:19Ben Meiselas:It would be burned. It wouldn't exist here. Play this clip. They're, in essence, protecting or backing up those federal agents as they conducted operations. Is that what we should expect to see in Chicago? You know, that always is a prerogative of President Trump and his decision. I won't speak to the specifics of the operations that are planned in other cities, but I do know that L.A. wouldn't be standing today if President Trump hadn't taken action. Then that city would have burned down if left to the devices of the mayor and the governor of that state. And so now I want to bring in Los Angeles City Attorney Heidi Feldstein Soto.

9:55Ben Meiselas:City Attorney Feldstein Soto, I have some questions for you. You brought a action against the Trump regime. I want to talk about the lawsuit that you filed, but I just want to get your general observations being on the ground in the city as the city attorney. You're the you're the day to day kind of main lawyer there, you know, in the city, protecting the city, the sites that you must be seeing. I just want to get your perspective on on what's going on in the streets right now with Trump's ICE and Trump's federal forces. The activity around City Hall has calmed down. So what I saw that really galled me and required me to act as city attorney for my city is my office is literally in the one square mile of downtown that was experiencing immigration protests.

10:48So I had a bird's eye view to what was going on here. And I will tell you that the level of aggression, the number of troops, think about it, our entire Los Angeles Police Department for the entire city is all of 8 ,600 officers right now. And this administration deployed 4 ,000 federalized national troops plus 800 Marines to supposedly deal with a protest that occupied at most one to two square miles in downtown LA right around my offices. At no point in time did I feel as though the protests were out of control or something our LAPD couldn't handle and in fact was handling very well. The federal government response was disproportionate, unconstitutional, militaristic, and candidly a little bit frightening, more than a little bit.

11:42It was very frightening to everyone because to deploy troops into our streets and into our communities to suppress First Amendment speech, supposedly to enforce immigration laws or to quell the kind of protests that Los Angeles has seen over the years and always handled on our own without a request from the local authorities or the state authorities is what is utterly unconstitutional.

12:11Ben Meiselas:I mean, you saw the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem over the weekend. She says that if it wasn't for Donald Trump right now and sending these troops into Los Angeles, that Los Angeles would no longer exist and that the people of Los Angeles need to say thank you because it would have been completely exterminated and eradicated and L.A. wouldn't be a thing. As the city attorney of Los Angeles, what's your response to that? That's preposterous. That is utter abject nonsense. Los Angeles has long been a place of robust civil discourse has long been a place of protesting and taking to the streets.

12:58Certainly in my time in Los Angeles, we survived the 1992 riots, which exceeded by magnitudes and exponential ratios what happened in our streets this June. We've done fine through the years, the most recent round of protests before the immigration raids included the George Floyd protests in 2020, which were far more widespread around our city. And at the end of the day, our Los Angeles Police Department, our Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, our California State Highway Patrol has risen to the occasion of constitutional policing, of being able to contain the violence or the looting or at least seek retribution and arrest folks who engage in criminal behavior without the kind of violence and suppression on citizens exercising their free speech that came in with the federal troops.

14:01Ben Meiselas:Now, Heidi, there's a temporary, I don't want people to forget this. It's an important point. A federal judge, Article 3 federal judge has issued a restraining order against the Trump regime from doing racial profiling for, you know, going to the Home Depots and rounding up people simply because of their skin color or going to, you know, down the street and seeing food vendors and then saying, oh, they have brown skin, they're food vendors. You add those up. They must be migrants. Arrest them right now. Tase them or whatever. Like there's a restraining order saying they can't do that. Yet we keep seeing it happening over and over again.

14:46Ben Meiselas:Can you talk to us about what's happening here and this violation of the restraining order? Here is the motion enjoinder for a preliminary injunction that we filed on behalf of 22 local jurisdictions. So let me break down the Perdomo case for you a little bit. I'm deeply grateful to the lawyers and to the ACLU and public counsel who started this lawsuit representing individual plaintiffs who had been arrested, detained, jeopardized, whose rights had been violated by the federal administration in the conduct of these rates and roundups. what we have done as a city is we have organized and led a coalition of cities and counties who have said not in my jurisdiction because we are separately and individually being harmed and because we have our own police powers to protect we have our residents to protect and and we have our own interest in the subject matter of this lawsuit.

15:53So initially in July, the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, and I believe it was seven other cities, filed a complaint in intervention in the ACLU and the public council lawsuit. We thought that it was something where we could all stand together, where the government could stand up for its residents, and where we could have one court where all of the violations of everybody's rights could be heard. We filed a second motion to amend our complaint and add additional cities. And at this point, there are 22 jurisdictions standing together saying to the federal administration, and I want to be clear, we are not interfering with the legitimate and constitutional enforcement of federal law, including federal immigration law.

16:46What we are saying is you can't run around with rifles and masks and militarized equipment in unmarked cars and in effect snatch people off our streets or round up residents in public or private areas and take them away in vans, lock them up, detain them, not give them access to counsel, and in effect, do performative theater to terrify the city and our residents. Businesses are empty and have shuttered. The city's law enforcement personnel has received countless 911 calls about what look like, for all intents and purposes, Ben, It looks like a kidnapping. That's what it looks like with individuals who will not identify themselves.

17:38Sometimes they have badges on their belt. Sometimes they don't. But the manner in which this is done, and as we learned from Judge Breyer's opinion this morning, it was an organized series of troops that were designed to come here and scare people into self-deporting, into doing the federal government's bidding in ways that we have never seen the federal government deploy troops domestically.

18:09Ben Meiselas:So what do you do, though, now when you've prevailed, when the other groups, ACLU, public council representing the immigrant, have prevailed in the sense of a federal judge saying, one, you've got this ruling from Breyer, you know, saying violation of posse comitatus, you can't use military on the streets this way. But in the central district, the injunction from the federal judge, you can't be, to your point, look, you want to enforce immigration law, great, you can do it. But you can't have these masked agents, kidnap people, throw them in vans, take them to places that no one knows where they're going to be, profile them.

18:51Ben Meiselas:I mean, they're picking up migrants and citizens. I mean, and then they pick people at first, ask questions later. But then the Trump regime ignores the order. Like they violate that order every single day. So how do you combat that aspect? When does it become an issue of contempt? And where do we go from here? Um, since we're in the throes of litigation, I will be a little bit cautious about what I say, but first of all, I commend Judge Frimpong for her thoughtfulness, for her care, and for establishing a briefing schedule that will allow us to get to a preliminary injunction. I will not speak for the original plaintiffs.

19:29I can only speak for ourselves. The temporary restraining order came down just as the judge was leaving town. She was gone for a while. And so going back to her courtroom proved difficult. It went up to the Ninth Circuit. It then went up on certiorari to the Supreme Court. And there it has sat in limbo for almost a month. So the Supreme Court has not acted. Of course, you know, temporary restraining orders are designed to be limited in time. So at least from the city's vantage point, what we determined to do was to consolidate our motion and intervention, make sure we were firmly plaintiffs and interveners in the lawsuit, submit our declarations in support of our preliminary injunction so as to provide the judge with the factual record necessary for a preliminary injunction, and then proceed from there to hold the federal government accountable.

20:24The problem with the TRO is it is done ex parte. It was granted before our motion to intervene had been granted. And so although the judge's order protects the seven counties in the Central District of California, we thought that it was better to wait for a more fully developed record where we clearly were in the case and we had submitted our own evidence as to what the harms were to each of our cities. It is interesting that in the 22 jurisdictions, we have the county of LA, we have both charter cities and general law cities under the California constitution. And under the California constitution, as I suspect you know, the police power devolves to the local authorities as well.

21:12And we also have cities that at this point are across four separate counties. So I commend the cities of Anaheim and Santa Ana for joining us from Orange County. the city of Carpinteria, the city of Oxnard, the city of Pasadena, my other sister cities here in Los Angeles County, we are here to say that we stand together against what is the federal government turning external troops trained for warfare into a political tool against our residents. That is utterly unacceptable. So what do we do? We develop the record. We get a preliminary injunction. And I'm a lawyer. My best hope is the courts. And I will hope that our branch of government, our judiciary, will fulfill its historical function and provide a check against this overreach and this militaristic deployment of external troops on domestic soil.

22:24Ben Meiselas:Heidi Feldstein Soto, city attorney, city of Los Angeles. Great to see you again. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Thanks for watching. Be sure to add the Midas Touch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for new updates every single day.

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