Tactical alert

Just about every Los Angeles official I've written about here at Torched was at the opening of the new LAX/Metro Transit Center last Friday. They entered the station together, arriving via special VIP train cars wrapped in LA's 2026 World Cup sherbet-shaded graphics. At the ribbon-cutting just beneath the station's soaring roofline, remarks were delivered against a dazzling tableau of multimodal travel synergy: planes landing in the distance, trains buzzing through the platform, the people mover to LAX — still in testing mode for six more months — gliding above, eliciting an ooooh! from the crowd each time it went by. LA had finally leveled up, the press materials proclaimed: "Metro is now ready to welcome global fans headed to Los Angeles for major events."

The press conference even featured a surprise megaevent announcement: Metro is now the official public transit provider for LA's 2026 World Cup. (Hence the station's wall-to-wall World Cup branding.) Officials draped FIFA-branded scarves over their shoulders like liturgical garments as they posed for photos, a striking visual reminder that LA always kneels at the altar of our megaevent organizers.

Right as Friday's ribbon-cutting began, a series of alarming messages started lighting up my phone's home screen. Around noon, our school sent out alerts about federal raids in our neighborhood. Families messaged that they were leaving graduation ceremonies to check in on loved ones. Statements condemning ICE activity were quickly dispatched by council offices. And after the ribbon-cutting, instead of attending the reception held in the station's shiny new bus plaza, elected officials rushed out the door to attend to the crisis unfolding in their communities. As I rode the train home, I was joined by angry Angelenos headed downtown; by evening, crowds had gathered around LA's federal building to protest the raids. As of this morning, at least 118 people have been detained in paramilitary operations across LA County, as Trump federalized the National Guard and deployed 700 Marines. In other words, the exact scenario immigrant advocates warned about for months had finally come to pass.

Metro's triumphant new airport station should have been the biggest LA news of the weekend. There were free rides across the system to celebrate! Instead, LA is making international headlines because the Trump administration decided to stage kidnappings outside Home Depots.

Our unlawful occupation has triggered protests across the LA region, which is not necessarily an unusual occurrence. If you don't live here, most of what you're seeing on the news is happening in a small area around LA’s City Hall and the cluster of federal properties downtown. For perspective, I'd say the collateral damage ranks right above a typical Dodgers World Series win; I'd consider the loss of five Waymos to be roughly the equivalent of one Metro bus. On Monday morning, thousands gathered in Grand Park downtown to demand the release of SEIU president David Huerta, who's facing federal charges for documenting one of the raids. (He was released yesterday afternoon on a $50,000 bond.) The park's distinctive hot pink benches might have been repurposed as a barricade Sunday night, but yesterday the lawn was filled with union members, their kids, high school students who had walked out of class, dogs, mariachis, street vendors, 95-year-old labor icon Dolores Huerta (no relation), and many furious elected officials. Tonight there's a prayer vigil.

Protests do not make LA dangerous. What makes LA dangerous is the Trump-ordered invasion of our city. We're talking about abducting people, not dismembering a few electric scooters. Over the weekend, LA Mayor Karen Bass was spot-on in calling the situation a "chaotic escalation" — everything was fine, she said, until federal agents got here. Even Rick Caruso agreed!

But then, as if she suddenly remembered the FIFA scarf around her shoulders, Bass invoked LA's upcoming megaevents as the reason to unite against Trump's tyranny. "We need to stick together," she told ABC7 Sunday night. "In a little bit less than a year, we're going to have the World Cup here. The world is going to be here." She repeated the message to Angelenos the following night, but this time it was phrased as more of a question: "We are one year away from the World Cup, how could this be happening?"

In my LAX/Metro Transit Center assessment that I promise I'll publish when we're not actively under attack by the federal government, I was planning to mention how unnerving it was to report on airport improvements intended to "welcome the world" right after the Trump administration issued a travel ban on 12 countries. Even more unnerving: LA28 and FIFA officials did not condemn the bans. In fact, they praised the Trump administration for exempting their athletes. (Although, as it turns out, it's a bit more complicated than that.) The 11 U.S. World Cup host cities held a meeting in New York yesterday where committee members expressed concern about what's happening in LA — but none of them would go so far as to criticize Trump's actions. In fact, this is what Philadelphia host committee CEO Meg Kane said: "What we can say is that the current administration — while there are certain situations that we are watching, that we are certainly monitoring closely — has been extremely supportive of the World Cup."

This? Is supportive? To demonize a host city until parents are so terrified of being disappeared by the administration that the second-largest school district in the country has to set up anti-ICE safety perimeters around its campuses for the last day of school?

Meanwhile, the evidence for the counter-argument is accumulating: the Trump administration appears to be actively hurting the World Cup. The Club World Cup, a smaller U.S.-based FIFA tournament that's being hosted by six of the 11 World Cup cities, begins here this weekend with a match at the Rose Bowl on Sunday at noon. The New York Times reported that fans are opting to stay away due to deportation fears, resulting in much lower ticket sales than anticipated. On the morning that the travel ban was announced, FIFA dramatically slashed prices to fill seats; now tickets to the Rose Bowl's Club World Cup matches are going for as low as $33. And we don't yet know the full impact of the chilling effect on tourist spending that I wrote about last month. If Trump legitimately wanted the U.S.'s upcoming megaevents to be successful, as he claims he does, he would not be terrorizing the city that's hosting the majority of them.

Will another World Cup host city be next? At a press conference yesterday, Bass said she believes LA is serving as a test case for more Trump takeovers: "what happens when the federal government moves in and takes the authority away." But LA's megaevent-forward stance means we have already relinquished some of our own local authority to the feds. Remember that the Secret Service is LA's lead public safety agency under a special security designation that was granted last summer, four years out from the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Federal officials say the current deployment will last 60 days. But, at this point, who's stopping them from sticking around for the next three years? 🔥