Highland Park activists in Los Angeles are installing air-raid style sirens across their neighborhood.
Not to warn residents about earthquakes. Not to warn about wildfires. But to warn illegal immigrants that ICE agents are nearby.According to The California Post, activists have placed roughly 20 bright red sirens across the Highland Park neighborhood. When someone spots federal immigration agents, they can activate the devices through a mobile phone app.
The sirens can reportedly be heard up to half a mile away.Flyers posted around the neighborhood explain the purpose clearly enough. When the siren goes off, residents are told to get off the streets, go indoors, and lock down.
In other words, it is a coordinated warning system designed to help illegal immigrants evade federal immigration enforcement.
And the activists involved appear proud of it. They say it helps “keep the community safe.”Let’s be clear about what is actually happening here.
Students walk out to protest immigration crackdown, holding signs like “Education NOT Deportation” and “Let Our Rage Melt ICE.” Los Angeles Times via Getty Images People are deliberately interfering with federal officers who are enforcing federal law.
That should not be celebrated. It should be investigated. Illegal entry into the United States is a federal offense.
And people who remain in the country unlawfully — whether by entering illegally or overstaying a visa — are subject to federal immigration enforcement and removal.
The people these sirens are meant to warn are illegal immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization.
The scale of the problem is enormous. Roughly 11 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States as of 2022, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
That doesn’t even count massive illegal immigration during the final years of Joe Biden’s “open borders” presidency.
Some more recent estimates put the number closer to 14 million.
In any functioning legal system, enforcement becomes unavoidable when violations occur on that scale.
Interior enforcement — locating and removing people who are in the country illegally — is essential to maintaining the rule of law. Yet activists in Highland Park have decided they know better.
Instead of respecting the law, they are building a neighborhood-wide system designed to undermine it. And they are doing so in secret.
Organizers have refused to identify participants. They will not disclose which homes and businesses are hosting the devices. They are hiding the sirens so federal agents do not discover them.That is not community activism. That is organized obstruction.
Federal immigration agents are law enforcement officers. They are not policymakers.
They do not write immigration laws. They enforce them.
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Encouraging illegal immigrants to evade federal officers — or triggering neighborhood alarm systems that cause panic and crowd movement — creates volatile situations for everyone involved. Officers. Residents. And bystanders.
Law enforcement operations are already tense and unpredictable. Injecting organized interference into those operations only increases the risk of confrontation.It is reckless.
The activists promoting these sirens claim they are protecting the community. But what message does this send?
It tells illegal immigrants that local activists will help them evade federal law enforcement. It tells communities that immigration law is optional. And it tells federal officers that enforcing the law will be met with organized resistance.
Here’s a piece of choice irony. In Minneapolis, activists opposed to immigration enforcement set up their own neighborhood “checkpoints, stopping cars and checking license plates to see if federal agents were present.
Apparently, patrolling a community and monitoring who comes and goes is only objectionable when the government does it.
No country can function if entire communities decide which laws they will respect and which ones they will sabotage.
Imagine activists installing sirens to warn drug dealers that police are approaching. Or building an app-based alarm system to alert burglars when patrol cars enter a neighborhood.
Everyone would immediately recognize that behavior as wrong.
But when the target is immigration enforcement, some activists pretend it is civic virtue.
At best, this is a public nuisance. At worst, it may amount to active interference with federal immigration enforcement.
Federal law contains provisions dealing with harboring or shielding illegal immigrants from detection, and those statutes may deserve a serious look if organized systems are being created to help people evade lawful arrest.
Because if the rule of law means anything, it means that enforcement cannot be sabotaged by neighborhood alarm systems.
Otherwise, we are no longer a nation governed by laws. We are a nation governed by whoever installs the loudest siren.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.
