Tom McClintock Adds ‘Fuel to the Fire’ Over ICE Raids
Tom McClintock’s latest speech condemning the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests (no doubt a distraction from the thumbs up vote he’ll give on Trumps disastrous “Big Beautiful Bill” when it returns to the House) continues his long history of twisting reality to score cheap political points while ignoring the deeper truths about injustice and the failures of government he claims to defend.
McClintock attempts to paint the entire protest movement as violent mobs, ignoring the thousands of peaceful demonstrators who took to the streets in Los Angeles to demand that our government stop using brutal tactics against immigrant families and Black and Brown communities. He fails to acknowledge that the spark for these protests was the heavy-handed, often cruel enforcement actions by ICE and federal agents — actions that tear families apart and traumatize entire neighborhoods.
He claims to stand for law and order while defending an immigration system rife with abuse, dehumanization, and a lack of accountability. The real question McClintock refuses to answer is why so many communities have lost faith in federal law enforcement in the first place. His speech, which lumps everyone together under the label “mob,” dismisses the legitimate grievances of people who are tired of seeing families ripped apart in their communities and tired of seeing government power used to sow fear rather than build trust and safety.
He also mischaracterizes local officials, twisting their words and motives. When leaders in Los Angeles said the violence would stop when ICE stopped their raids, they were pointing to the fact that the cause of unrest was unjust, heavy-handed deportation raids, not some imaginary left-wing conspiracy to undermine federal law. What McClintock ignores is the bigger truth: leadership means de-escalating tensions, listening to the community, and creating solutions that keep people safe rather than provoking more unrest.
McClintock invokes Lincoln, yet Lincoln himself recognized that our nation cannot endure when government refuses to listen to the cries of the oppressed. Today, those cries come from immigrant families, from children terrified their parents will be dragged away, and from Americans who believe our nation is better than fear, division, and raw displays of federal power. Cries are also coming from farmers who trust the government to stand by the grants they’ve approved to support immigrant labor help to run their farms to feed America yet can’t because Trump froze the grant money.
We do not condone violence. But we do demand that our leaders understand the difference between standing up for basic human rights and dismissing entire communities as criminals.
We invite Congressman McClintock to spend less time defending ICE raids and more time listening to the families in our district and across California who want a country that lives up to its promise of justice for all.