ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- Well, this Fourth of July weekend will be awkward.

As we mark the end of the first month of the Trump administration's occupation of Los Angeles -- which is centered around an un-American crackdown on Latino immigrants, and anyone who looks like them, by masked men who won't identify themselves, don't act like police and get scared off when someone records them -- many Americans aren't feeling very patriotic.

In fact, judging from social media, many fair-minded Americans of all colors are not in the mood to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and salute the "land of the free and the home of the brave." Or recite the pledge of allegiance to a Republic "with liberty and justice for all."

The "fair-minded" includes those who believe in due process and accountability, as well as the idea that police should treat the public with dignity and follow rules of conduct. It also includes those who believe federal agents -- and those who impersonate them -- should not engage in ethnic profiling, use quotas to juice arrest figures or wear masks to skirt liability.

Today, many Americans have access to phones with built-in video cameras and social media sites such as TikTok where they can share videos. People don't have to be in Los Angeles, or Phoenix or Dallas or Denver, to see for themselves what is going on there.

What is going on is the stuff of nightmares. A gardener thrown to the ground and punched repeatedly by several masked men. Parents manhandled and forced into vehicles without being read their Miranda rights while their children scream in horror.

This isn't law and order. These are assembly-line kidnappings intended to please the Mad King so that bureaucrats such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons can keep his job.

No matter how Americans feel about immigrants, these videos should make them sick to their stomachs.

And Mexican Americans are sicker than most. For that tribe of about 30 million living predominantly in the Southwest, the immigrant experience isn't confined neatly to history books. Rather, it's woven into the fabric of the institution we value most: our families.

On my father's side, I'm a third-generation Mexican American. My grandfather came to the United States legally as boy during the Mexican Revolution which lasted from 1910 to 1920.

On my mother's side, which is full of tejanos dating back to the 1800s, the concept of "generations" doesn't apply. No one crossed the U.S.-Mexico border; the border crossed them.

Today, in Los Angeles, and in communities throughout the Southwest, Mexican immigrants -- even those with green cards and U.S. citizenship -- are living in fear. Afraid to leave their homes except to go to work, they thirst for normalcy and calm and peace of mind.

Meanwhile, Mexican Americans -- born in this country to parents, grandparents and great-parents who were born in this country -- are consumed with rage. Hurt and furious at how our people are being treated, we are hungry for accountability and justice and respect.

We're not mere spectators in this crackdown. We're being harassed, singled out and threatened. We're asked to show proof of U.S. citizenship only to be told that the documents we produce are phony.

So the masked men who don't even appear to have been trained as cops now think they're lawyers?

Mexican Americans are having our rights violated. Chief among them is a right that the Founding Fathers took quite seriously: the right to be left alone if you're not breaking the law or harming anyone.

And all this is happening to us solely because our brown skin, the very thing that many white people try to replicate at tanning booths.

So I get it. I understand why some people -- including some of my people -- aren't feeling very patriotic this Fourth of July.

The United States isn't perfect. It has committed plenty of sins. The list includes enslaving Black people as early as 1619, stealing the American Southwest from Mexico, killing scores of Native Americans and forcibly relocating to reservations those who survived, exploiting Chinese immigrants to build the railroads, interning Japanese Americans during World War II, turning away Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, creating Jim Crow, etc.

And yet, the United States is greater than the worst things that it has ever done -- or has been done to it.

Immigrants and other Americans of all types -- including Mexican Americans -- helped write our nation's story. We have all earned the privilege of celebrating it. And not just on the Fourth of July.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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