New Orleans Is Watching You, Fuckers.
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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History of New Orleans
15 min read
The article emphasizes New Orleans' unique multicultural heritage built over centuries from European, Caribbean, Central American, African, and Vietnamese immigrants. Understanding the city's historical development as a cultural melting pot provides essential context for why immigration raids there are particularly significant.
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Sanctuary city
11 min read
The article describes grassroots resistance to federal immigration enforcement through citizen watch networks. Understanding the legal and political framework of sanctuary policies, and the tensions between local and federal authorities on immigration, provides crucial context for these community organizing efforts.
Even stipulating that America is a nation of immigrants, and that the persecution of immigrants is an insult to our history wherever it occurs in this land, it must still be said that launching a violent government purge of immigrants is even more ludicrously monstrous when it happens in New Orleans. In New Orleans! A city that for centuries has collected drifters from Europe and dreamers from the Caribbean and schemers from Central America and prisoners from Africa, and has molded all of their descendants into a culture unmatched anywhere else in this plastic country. A city with its own city-sized Vietnamese population. A city that built a statue in Crescent Park to honor the Latino workers who rebuilt it after Hurricane Katrina. You want to bring a bunch of white racist clods in clownish tactical gear to run the immigrants out of New Orleans? The city of gumbo metaphors?
You villains. You dirty dogs.
The entire concept makes the skin prickle in reprehension. Yet here we are. ICE and CBP goons, balaclavas emphasizing the penis-like nature of their heads, have descended on New Orleans. Led by unapologetic Border Patrol boss Gregory Bovino, whose fascist high top haircut and affinity for black double-breasted trenchcoats cross the line from “unintentionally Nazi-esque” into “Nazi on purpose,” they are all over the streets of America’s Friendliest City, vowing to deport five thousand(!) people in the name of Purifying America’s Blood or some more publicly acceptable synonym of that purpose. This is Operation “Catahoula Crunch,” which sounds like an AI-generated name for a Louisiana breakfast cereal. In the first three days of raids, they arrested 38 people, fewer than a third of which had criminal records. Clearly, the motherfuckers are going to be here for a while. I went to take a look.
Friday night, hundreds of drunk kids staggered down Tulane’s fraternity row, celebrating their football team’s conference championship. Inside a church a few blocks away was more serious business. Fifty or so people filled the pews. Projected on the wall was a slide that read “Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.” Only the people can save the people. Only we can save us.
This was a training for Ojos, an ICE-watching project aligned with an immigrant support group called Union Migrante. (Though ICE is only one of the agencies carrying out the raids, their
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