LOS ANGELES — A year ago this Saturday, I was enjoying a beautiful day in Pacific Palisades when President Donald Trump unleashed his deportation deluge in Los Angeles, setting off a chain reaction that would roil cities across the United States.

I was at the reopening of the Thomas Mann House, shut down for months of cleaning after it had miraculously survived the Palisades fire. As speaker after speaker hailed the author's prescient warnings about the slow burn of totalitarianism in his native Germany, text messages overtook my phone with news of immigration raids near downtown on a scale and number not seen in decades.

Masked federal agents soon spread across Southern California. Protests followed.

Many of the people arrested had no criminal record, but that didn't stop the White House from depicting the sweeps as a vacuuming of hardcore criminals. Some protesters were charged with federal crimes on scant evidence. Masked agents asked U.S. citizens of Latino heritage to produce ID to prove they were in this country legally.

Janitors, veterans, students. Workplaces, residential streets, courthouses. MacArthur Park, Home Depots, Dodger Stadium's parking lot. No one and nowhere was safe from a toxic alphabet soup of federal agencies tasked with ridding the country of people without papers, damn the cost. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even deployed the National Guard and Marinesto quell dissent in a show of imperial might better suited to a "Star Wars" Sith lord.

The raids rendered large swaths of L.A. as quiet as the coronavirus shutdown days; some areas still haven't rebounded and might never. That's why commemorations will happen this weekend across the Southland to remember the people and tranquility we've lost over the past 12 months to Trump's immigration war. Although the official caravan of cruelty — led by former Border Patrol commander at large Gregory Bovino — departed L.A. after a few weeks for other U.S. cities, including Chicago and Minneapolis, deportations and detentions here have never completely stopped.

In fact, border czar Tom Homan recently vowed that much more is just over the horizon.

"You ain't seen s— yet," he bragged last month in opening remarks for the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. "This year will be a good year. Mass deportations are coming."

An orange whistle hangs from my rearview mirror to make sure I never forget the horrors of those first few weeks of raids. Tear gas canisters and pepper balls tossed at activists. Businesses shut down out of fear. My social media timeline transformed into a newsreel of sobbing men and women chased down by anonymous agents. Telephone poles covered in fundraising pleas for families whose breadwinners either rotted in faraway detention center or were sent back to their home countries.

No one in my immediate circle of family or friends has been detained, thank God — the people in my life who were once undocumented legalized their status long before Trump poisoned our country. And yet even I've had nightmares about ICE taking away loved ones — and myself. My passport has never left my side since last summer. It probably never will again.

I picked up the orange whistle last fall while visiting Chicago. At the time Bovino — who has since become an apostle for deporting 100 million people, as if anything remotely close to that many undocumented people lived in the U.S. — was overseeing operations there. Windy City residents adopted the whistles as a cheap, accessible warning in case la migra was rolling in. They also represented a call to action.

That's why I can't only think sad thoughts on the one-year anniversary of the raids.

I'm sure the Trump administration, bolstered by a historic 2024 win that saw even Latinos embrace his mass deportation plans, banked on public apathy or tacit approval when his Leviathan landed in L.A. That was our track record, after all.

Many Angelenos either applauded or stayed quiet when the U.S. government rounded up Japanese Americans during World War II and when the Eisenhower administration deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals in the 1950s during the caustically named Operation Wetback. Only Latinos and progressive allies seemed to care when ICE's predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Service, launched its own raids throughout the 1980s, or when politicians passed or proposed anti-immigrant resolutions and propositions in the 1990s. Even the immigration marches of 2006, among the largest rallies the United States had seen up to that time, attracted people from just some parts of the city.

This time, it seemed as if all good Angelenos rose up. That couldn't literally be true, of course — but at least, at long last, it kind of felt so.

From the Westside to Boyle Heights, Wilmington up to Sylmar, people who had never engaged in street-level resistance bought out street vendors so they wouldn't be exposed to possible detainment and set up mutual aid societies and neighborhood patrols. People accompanied immigrants to court hearings or took them into their homes or handed out know-your-rights cards at businesses, like my wife does at her restaurant. No one bought Trump's lies that he only wanted to go after the worst of the worst because we saw beloved neighbors, favorite street vendors and even high schoolers nabbed.

That's why ICE's reputation, never particularly positive around here, is now somewhere between hantavirus and rush hour on the Sepulveda Pass.

More importantly, Angelenos created a template that others followed nationwide. Chicago activists got the idea for whistles after speaking to Angelenos who told them how they communicated when cellphone service went down around the Metropolitan Detention Center that first weekend of raids. Local organizers also did something thought impossible: They largely set aside the egos that far too often torpedo the left and relied on collective action instead of singular heroes to lead the way — because, like the finale of "Spartacus," it's far harder to cut down a movement when everyone's a leader.

This weekend, people will say "Never again." I also urge people to say, "Bring it on." We can't think the worst is behind us and we can't be inured to what happened and will happen again. Just yesterday, the U.S. Senate approved $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol over the remainder of Trump's term. As Thomas Mann so memorably put it, "Tolerance becomes crime, if extended to evil."

L.A. is more ready than before to face off, once again, against the dark thugocracy of Trump and his confederacy of goons.

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