Fuck Everything

On Sunday, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids amped up in downtown Los Angeles, I worked a dog birthday party on the westside that was Mexican themed.

On Sunday, as ICE raids amped up in downtown Los Angeles, I worked a dog birthday party on the westside that was Mexican themed.

The dog’s parents had set up some decorations that looked like they were from Disney’s “Coco.” They gave out little dog toy maracas in bags with sombreros on them.

On my phone, in the cramped break room, I watched Latinos being rounded up and disappeared. And here I was, across town in a rich area, chasing dogs around a rented out party room to the sounds of Mariachi music. Afterwards, the dog’s mom came over and gave me and my boss churro flavored Oreos for our troubles. (We don’t get bonuses for working parties.)

My boss is Mexican and Filipina. At one point, I whispered to her that I might pass out from how anxious this all made me. She laughed so hard she cried and had to crouch down behind the cash wrap. It was all too absurd. My head was split in two. These worlds do not touch each other.

It’s not even funny as the premise of a sitcom episode. If you wanted to make a Mad Men type show about the year 2025, this storyline would be considered too on the nose. Yet: A gay man and a Mexican woman were setting up wall decorations of tacos and avocados waving maracas, while ICE keeps a gay make-up artist seeking asylum from violence in Venezuela in a prison in El Salvador because his tattoos “could be” gang signs. They were not. No due process. No signs of life. Just gone.

I had a whole other essay planned for this week that was going to go behind the paywall, but fuck the paywall right now.

Fuck everything.

I’m on the highest doses allowable for all my medications. I asked my psychiatrist to go up more but she said, “Look, sometimes you can’t dull the feelings that the real world is giving you.” She said I’m not just fucked up and depressed for some unknown reason. That’s part of why you medicate, if there isn’t a clear reason.

I am just reacting to the world I’m living in, she said, and we can’t fix all of that with meds.

I try to only look for the good people. The ones helping or working hard. But there are so many useful idiots. I have Googled “why would someone want to work for ICE?” over and over and over as if that will explain it. I look at the sea of masked people with guns and think HOW?? I’ve done a lot of research on the Holocaust both because I wanted to and also because my grandmother survived it. It came up a lot in personal histories when I was a kid. As last week’s essay explained, I’ve found joy at this time only in imagining the future Nuremberg trials for these cosplaying stormtrooper-ass losers.

How could they ever think they’re on the right side? What are they telling themselves? Who are they looking up to? What poison have they been sold??

As we fall into a dictatorship, I need dopamine hits like crazy. At night after work, I drink whiskey out of a children’s plastic cup from Albertson’s that says “Explore.” I snack all day long. Mostly healthy stuff like baked chickpeas or baby carrots but still, I’m never not eating. And yet I simultaneously feel like throwing up 24/7. I’m writing this in bits on Sunday and Tuesday. I’m polishing it up right now at 10:53 pm PST Wednesday. My posts go up Thursdays and all week as I wrote this piece, I had no actual idea what Thursday was going to look like. (Still don’t. This post is scheduled.) I’m an accidental stubbed toe away from a full on crash out and I may not even need the stub.

My heart thumps. Logging off right now seems insane. I am tired of being told to breathe or relax or not worry. We have to worry. This is the time to be worrying!

I can’t stand anyone who isn’t talking about this. “Take some time off from looking at the news.” No. You take some time to start looking at the news. One of my bosses (white, male) had no idea anything was even happening. He heard about it from me. This morning.

When people tell me we can cross whatever bridge when we come to it, I’m like, “We are on the bridge, baby. We’re crossing it and it’s falling apart plank by plank like in an adventure movie.”

If I read one more lefty blog talking about “Well, you know this Democratic candidate out of New York doesn’t have all the policies I want so I don’t know if we should vote for them,” I’m going to implode sky-high and leave a crater in the parking lot of the West Hollywood Whole Foods.

They are holding hearings for five year olds without legal representation. Rows and rows of men with shaved heads on their knees on a prison floor with no trial, no due process, no help, and no hope. I can’t unsee it. Your minute politics do not matter. It is war. It is a bloodbath. It is monstrous.

—-

I turn to Reddit to see what those in the border patrol subreddit have said about why they took their jobs. The posts are very old. Turns out no one really wants to chat about working for ICE these days.

One gentleman said he joined because he “fucking dispice [sic] the cartels, the drug smuggling and human trafficking.” Another spoke Spanish and went into it with benevolent intentions, wanting to help immigrants understand their hearings and paperwork. The idea of her job, as far as she knew, was to get the immigrants to meet the requirements and stay in the country. Not to deport them.

An ICE agent’s average salary is like, 61K, according to ZipRecruiter. It’s decent for some areas, but not high enough to pull a screaming baby from someone’s arms. (For more on this topic, I highly recommend this 2025 piece in The Bulwark about the mind of an ICE agent.)

I also found an old AMA post on Reddit about being in ICE. The person who started the thread (and was verified to work for ICE) was asked about an average day for them.

The agent replied, “We routinely do paperwork, lots of required training, email etc like any other job. We also do law enforcement activities like make arrests, transport detainees, serve warrants amongst other things.”

Look at how casually this person talks about their work. How passively.

“Make arrests” instead of “we arrest people.” We “transport detainees.” To where? Who are they? Why are they detained? Where are they being held? We “serve warrants.” To who? To people? What people? Why?

He continues re: detainees, “We always give them food, shelter, respect and dignity. Even after they fight us and try to hurt us.”

This is a classic displacement of violence. They are fighting you and hurting you because you arrested them, kidnapped them, and imprisoned them. Your violence was the initial move.

Be active in your description. Why are they there fighting you? They didn’t end up there by accident. You say: Well, they broke the law. What is the punishment for breaking the specific law they broke? Do you even know? Is it what you’re doing to them right now?

I can go back and forth reading about jurisdiction and policy but it all comes down to who fucking cares?

We made these laws up, fairly recently, and we can remake them again when they start traumatizing people and breaking up families. Why am I torturing myself trying to guess an ICE agent’s motivation? I’m never going to be able to figure out what these people are thinking. Thankfully, that’s someone else’s gig.

On Tuesday, I carried Beans, my little black chihuahua, down Santa Monica Blvd past a white woman probably in her 60s who was wearing a bright red MAGA hat with gold and white tassels on it. I heard her tell someone on the phone, “Keep doing what they’re doing downtown. Real peaceful, huh?” She was walking two elderly spotted dogs. I waited at the crosswalk. Once she passed, I was surprised to hear her yell after me. “Your baby is so cute!”

I said nothing. “But I’m sure you already know that!” She smiled and waved at Beans, doing some dog baby talk in his direction and shouting: “My guy’s 18!”

No reaction from me. I just ignored her and walked away.

I should have said, “Thank you. I’m trans and he’s an immigrant.”

—

In the middle of downtown LA on Monday at 11 am, I attended a peaceful protest with a large crowd in Grand Park. I asked off work for the morning and my supervisor said yes. I just needed to. Paycheck will have to suffer.

At the park, there was a stage and signs being handed out and live music and speeches by various union leaders. People greeted each other warmly. Politicians were there. The NAACP was there. There was a stand with free donuts and coffee by the Service Employees International Union. When that protest, specifically asking for the release of SEIU president David Huerta, officially ended, I headed over to the corner of Alameda and Arcadia. I followed the lights and sounds of cop cars. There was one cop car per person. I’d say there were 50 people protesting and 50 individual cars lined up. A larger protest was happening around the corner in front of City Hall.

The police presence was so, so overblown. It occurred to me as I walked through endless FUCK ICE graffiti that it was pretty convenient how many different colors of evenly applied spray paint there were on these buildings. It was all so strategically placed and readable. All in “graffiti” handwriting you’d find on daFont.com or whatever. Just sayin’.

I ended up on the street where the clergy were holding court. Pastors, priests, rabbis, and preachers stood front of the crowd praying and singing worship songs. They held hands. They knelt in front of the officers, heads bowed. One pastor in a colorful choir stole. A man in a yellow yarmulke. A woman in Birkenstocks. They sang “We Shall Not Be Moved.” There has never been a more perfect vision of peace. It reminded me of the end of Shabbat at my summer camp when around the Havdalah candle, we’d link arms and sing Eliahu HaNavi.

You would have thought these religious beacons were carrying bombs the way the police were acting. They looked like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace. Stone-faced. They wore full tactical gear with helmets with shields and big batons. Some had green rubber bullet or bean bag guns with their literal fingers on the triggers (bad gun safety at the very least, and a show of threatened force at worst). These types of ammunition are considered “less lethal” but not… you know, not lethal.

Armored trucks and white vans started coming around the corner to move through the crowd, even though it would have been easier to come from the other way and avoid us. One man kicked the side of a van, but everyone else yelled at him not to do it and he stopped.

Vans and cars with National Guard members kept coming. Sometimes they’d stop in the middle, like bait. It seemed like barreling through the protestors was a trick to get us to react.

The most people did was scream “Shame!” until the cars and vans moved. Behind City Hall, I could see truck after truck of soldiers in beige fatigues gathering and securing their uniforms and weapons. They didn’t come over to us. They were preparing for the other side.

On our side, the cops sent for back up. The size of our group had not changed (many of them were also from the press, who labeled themselves or carried big cameras and microphones). So I’d say it was 10 clergy, 10 journalists and maybe 20 regular citizens. Slowly, twenty-five or more cop cars pulled up to block the street in front of us leading to City Hall. A group of officers walked down the street towards us to help the ones who were already there to block the street and push us back. It was a cluster of ‘em. In the videos I took, they moved like two swarms of bees coming at you.

I decided to walk around toward the front of City Hall. On the other corners I passed, four or five more cop cars sat with police milling about. Three helicopters circled. I looked out at the show of force by these officers and I kept thinking one thing: This is fucking cosplay. And this is so fucking stupid.

These people really think they’re superheroes or that they are in a cop movie. They think they’re John McClaine. They think they’re Elliot Stabler or Dirty Harry.

They’re raiding restaurants and car washes. They’re arresting pregnant women. They’re taking people who are at immigration court “doing the right thing.” As if “doing the right thing” is what gives you humanity and worth and dignity. Also hey, fuck you for making an immigrant beg and crawl for something you did not even earn yourself.

Are we supposed to sit in our homes and go to work and watch our neighbors and coworkers be taken by people in masks into unmarked cars? What exactly do they expect us to do? Like, do they think we’re just going to stand by and let them kidnap people without due process? (Listen to me, “kidnap without due process?” What the fuck? The bar is on the floor.)

I am not interested in finding out who “started it” and I’m not interested in the deportation numbers of other Presidents. I am only interested in context in this way because of the way it’s being used by fascists to justify their violence against community members.

Take it all the way back. I read on MSNBC or CNN, “Oh, the protests have turned violent.” There’s that weird passive language again. Turned violent by who? Violence started by who? Well, if graffiti and breaking a window are violence, then what is taking a mother away from her screaming child? (I tried to link to an example here, but they are ENDLESS. Take your pick.)

I understand the idea of peaceful protest, or trying to convey ourselves as peaceful so that we curry the favor of people who are too sick to be saved. But must we always bend over backwards to do things the right way even though we have to know at this point that it doesn’t really change anything? We’re still applying reason where no reason exists.

I stood in the crowd downtown in awe of these religious leaders. I wore a bandana over my face and dark sunglasses so I wouldn’t be recognized. (I’m glad I did because you can see me on the news, but you’d never know it’s me.)

I stood there and I knew that it wouldn’t matter what we did. The police and the military wanted to beat us. They wanted to shoot us. They wanted trouble. They wanted to go back to their precincts and brag about surviving the “war zone” of downtown Los Angeles as if their presence wasn’t what made it war.

What do you tell each other back at the office or in the motel room or on the floor where you now have to sleep?

Do you think, “Well, we’re soldiers. We’re basically doing a tour in a ‘foreign country’ so of course it won’t be comfortable” as you lay under tinfoil blankets streets away from the Hollywood sign? Do you ever think about the people who did not enlist to be soldiers but who are also on hard floors with metal blankets? Do you not see the invisible string between you?

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כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלוֹ גֶשֶׁר צַר מְּאֹד וְהָעִיקָר לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלַל

The whole world is a very narrow bridge and the most important part is not to be afraid. - Rabbi Nachman of Breslov