Lori Falce: Los Angeles confrontations are becoming less about immigration than First Amendment

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14 hours ago

Jun. 13—The United States of America had barely taken its first breath as a nation governed by the Constitution when it was realized that changes were needed.
While we will celebrate Independence Day on July 4 as the country's 249th birthday, that's a bit wrong. That was the day we declared ourselves separate from the British crown. It was 1789 when we became a functioning nation.
That same year, James Madison began spelling out the finer points that had been missed in the broad strokes of the Constitution. It took two years to work through the process of making the changes.
But finally, in 1791, the Bill of Rights became law. And while nine of them are truly rights, the First Amendment is a list of freedoms.
In America, people have the right to religion, press, assembly, petition — all of which can be boiled down to an overarching banner of speech.
It is obvious why this was so important to Madison and the other leaders of the fledgling nation. They used speech and assembly, petition and the press to conceive an idea of America, to give it life and to nurture it in its infancy.
How would those founding fathers feel today?
The National Guard has been sent into Los Angeles to quell protests over President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement. U.S. Marines have been mobilized. It comes over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom and local leaders. When U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., tried to ask questions at a news conference Thursday with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, he was forcibly removed and handcuffed.
"We declare that due process and human dignity and respect are nonnegotiables, and we will not allow this administration to normalize cruelty or silence our resistance," the Rev. Jaime Edwards-Acton of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Hollywood told the National Catholic Reporter.
Journalists covering the protests and response have been injured in a way more in keeping with covering a war overseas.
"A number of reports suggest the federal officers have indiscriminately used force or deployed munitions such as tear gas or pepper balls that caused significant injuries to journalists. In some cases, federal officers appear to have deliberately targeted journalists who were doing nothing more than their job covering the news," the Los Angeles Press Club wrote in a letter to Noem.
The federal actions do the very first thing our leaders worried would happen if guidelines were not firmly established. They run roughshod over not only rights enshrined in the Constitution but every single freedom established in the First Amendment.
It is important to remember that there is no protection for committing crime. Exercising a right to peaceable assembly is not the same as rioting. One cannot petition for redress of grievances by setting fire to a car.
But by the same token, the federal government cannot protect the nation from its people by setting fire to the First Amendment.
Lori Falce is the Tribune-Review community engagement editor and an opinion columnist. For more than 30 years, she has covered Pennsylvania politics, Penn State, crime and communities. She joined the Trib in 2018. She can be reached at [e-mail].