MSNBC reporter defends illegal immigrants as the 'fabric' of Los Angeles while anti-ICE riots continue
MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff described illegal immigrants as the "fabric" of Los Angeles as anti-ICE protests and riots entered their fourth day on Monday.
Soboroff spoke outside a Home Depot store in the city, which he described as one of the locations where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested several suspects during a raid.
He called the operation "unprecedented" and claimed on "Deadline: White House" that going after the undocumented community is what inspired the protests that devolved into violent riots over the weekend.
"The big picture is Los Angeles is a so-called majority-minority city in a majority-minority state," Soboroff said. "There are more people of color that live in Los Angeles than White people at this point. And many of those people are undocumented. By some counts, 10% of the population of L.A. County, one of the largest counties, the largest county by population in the United States, is undocumented, maybe as many as a million people."
He added, "Those people are our neighbors, our coworkers, our classmates, our friends, our parishioners, fellow parishioners, and churches. They are part of the fabric of the city of Los Angeles."
Soboroff condemned the arrests as "family separation in the interior," adding that "mass deportation is family separation."
"It's taking parents away from their children, not at the border and not in detention centers, but at a Home Depot on a street corner or outside of a school, or at a workplace in the fashion district where they might be working in a factory. It's a different form of family separation, and it's exactly the intent of this administration," Soboroff said.
While he did not deny that violence has been part of the anti-ICE protests, Soboroff insisted they were "largely peaceful" demonstrations to show that ICE raids are "not acceptable" in Los Angeles.
"It has terrified so many people, which is why you saw people before the protests turned violent, and there was certainly violence associated with those protests before the protests turned violent, a largely peaceful protest, two, actually, that converged in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center, where so many of those people were picked up by ICE at locations like this, in order to say, 'This is not acceptable to the people of Los Angeles, the undocumented people, the documented people, everyone who knows how important that community is to the fabric of this one,'" Soboroff said.
The MSNBC reporter has been a long-time critic of the Trump administration for its immigration policies, going so far as to claim in 2019 that, "No one has treated migrants more inhumanely -- and take it from me who has seen it myself -- than the Trump administration."
Over the weekend, Trump sent approximately 2,000 National Guardsmen to help quell the violence against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
On Monday, Fox News learned that a battalion of 500 U.S. Marines were also being deployed to Los Angeles.
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