Editor’s note: Trump’s LA crackdown pushes Sheinbaum into a corner

by Andrew Law.

The surreal events this week in my old hometown of Los Angeles are spiraling from a local crisis into an international fiasco. Mexico’s former Ambassador to the United States, Martha Bárcena, tells me in stark terms that the relationship is trapped, “Like a hostage, in the middle of a very, very extreme fight for power in the US.”

It all started with ICE raids targeting Home Depots across LA and the detention of people in the basement of ICE’s downtown office. Protesters gathered spontaneously outside ICE headquarters, prompting White House aide Stephen Miller to engineer an unprecedented and aggressive response: President Trump federalized California’s National Guard, a move Governor Gavin Newsom says has no legal grounds. It was, Newsom insists, designed to incite anger and provoke more demonstrations.

And provoke it did.

We’re now inundated with incendiary visuals of protesters waving Mexican flags amidst flames and debris — images eagerly pounced on by Miller and Trump’s MAGA followers as supposed proof of a “foreign insurrection.”