When Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential Election while promising to mobilize ICE and other federal agencies, he promised not only action, but safety. The promised result was not abstract, but that Americans across the country would feel safer and protected. The actual effect has been the opposite: fear, family disruption, traumatized children, workers disappearing from neighborhoods, and communities living on alert. In some communities, such as L.A.’s Highland Park, emergency sirens are being set up to warn people of incoming ICE raids. When those alarms are heard, people learn to take shelter, as if expecting a natural disaster.

This is not a niche problem that only affects a small class of outsiders. Roughly 28% of California’s population is foreign-born. Though the undocumented may be the immediate targets of ICE’s raids, the damage is not confined to them. This often-touted line between immigrants and California is a false one. Immigrants in California are not external to our state’s social fabric. Many immigrants have lived in California for years or decades. Their children are Californians. Their work is Californian work. Their neighborhoods are Californian neighborhoods. Legal vulnerability does not negate social membership. And as workers, taxpayers, and members of the community, California is materially strengthened by their involvement. California itself is under attack here, not a class of people who take without giving anything back. When the state allows these immigrants to be treated as disposable, it treats a part of itself as disposable. And a state that neglects a part of its own body cannot prosper.

To clarify, the government does reserve the right to secure its own borders. However, indiscriminate raids and community-wide terror are not just exercises of the government’s right, but abuses of it. Federal officials have stated that agents will rely on a “totality of the circumstances” that can include race or ethnicity, language, location, and occupation when deciding whom they will detain. That’s not precision. Instead, it is a framework that’s broad enough to invite profiling. The moral legitimacy that the current administration claims to have is lost when these enforcement methods become suspicion directed at entire populations, rather than a method of protecting those populations as promised.

California cannot benefit from the labor and civic participation of immigrants while tolerating policies and indiscriminate raids that repay them with fear. Solidarity means that we do not abandon one another. That includes those of us who lack secure legal status, but still work. It includes those of us who are politically convenient to scapegoat, but sustain society. And it includes those of us who are taken in raids, and then missed at the dinner table.