On a warm Friday morning in Los Angeles, community organizers from across the country converged on MacArthur Park with a blunt objective: figure out how to protect Latino neighborhoods faster than federal immigration agents can move. Under a hazy skyline and over mostly empty soccer fields, visitors compared notes on how to warn residents, keep families together and keep local legal services from buckling under pressure.
The gathering was part of Mijente’s Leadership Circle, a national network that connects Latinx and Chicanx organizers and holds an annual in-person convening, according to Mijente. This year, the steering committee brought members from cities including those in Florida, Georgia and Chicago to Los Angeles to trade rapid-response playbooks and legal-aid strategies. The assignment was straightforward: copy what works, tweak it for local conditions and leave with something concrete enough to deploy back home.
Participants clustered on the park’s northern side and literally walked through what officials last summer called a “show of force,” when federal agents and California National Guard troops carried out a sweep in the neighborhood, The Associated Press reported. Local leaders, including Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, argued that the operation did more to spread fear than to generate arrests, and volunteers have since built out rapid communication networks to alert residents. The day’s schedule also sent visitors to neighborhood hubs that crank out legal materials and train volunteers.
MacArthur Park Show of Force
In July, a militarized deployment at MacArthur Park, complete with Humvees, tactical vehicles and about 90 Guard members while some Border Patrol agents rode horses, rattled the neighborhood and drew condemnation from Mayor Karen Bass, according to reporting at the time. The operation lasted roughly an hour and left many residents and advocates describing it as an intimidation tactic rather than a traditional arrest sweep, The Associated Press reported. Community leaders say the images of armed agents and mounted patrols still hang over daily life in and around the park.
Funding Squeeze at CARECEN
At the Central American Resource Center’s offices, director Martha Arévalo described how the group has taken a financial hit, including a loss of federal support and congressional letters signaling investigations into grant spending. Those pressures helped trigger cuts of roughly 10 staff positions, the Los Angeles Times reported. CARECEN, a long-running legal-services and advocacy hub for Central American immigrants, lists its Los Angeles location and services on its website, underscoring how neighborhood nonprofits are absorbing more demand even as their resources shrink. Organizers noted that reductions like these make it harder to staff hotlines and maintain emergency legal coverage during raids.
Organizers Swap Tactics
Mijente’s leadership leaned into networking instead of promising any single fix, urging attendees to trade playbooks for rapid-response communications, legal intake and community safety teams rather than rely on one-size-fits-all trainings. The group also toured UCLA’s James Lawson Jr. Worker Justice Center, which develops “know your rights” materials and trains volunteers to respond to enforcement actions, according to the UCLA Labor Center. Organizers stressed that tailoring tools to local realities, including how police, state troopers or other agencies partner with federal officers, is central to making any of these systems actually work.
A National Moment
Organizers said the Los Angeles convening came amid a wider wave of protests and confrontations around the country after several high-profile enforcement actions, including a deadly shooting in Minneapolis that has intensified scrutiny of ICE tactics, as reported by The New York Times. That anger has spilled into demonstrations from Minnesota to Southern California and into coordinated days of action meant to disrupt business as usual, according to coverage of statewide protests. For local groups, the challenge is turning that flash of outrage into durable infrastructure: legal aid pipelines, staffed hotlines and communication systems that can survive past the news cycle.
By the end of the day, the takeaway was deliberately unflashy and local. Visitors were urged to haul the L.A. playbook back to their own cities, shore up legal resources and keep information flowing quickly to residents. Organizers said they were heading home with specific to-do lists, from expanded trainings and shared hotline templates to a stronger network for trading names and legal contacts, along with a shared understanding that federal enforcement has turned community resilience into a daily operational requirement for immigrant-serving organizations.
