Amid budget shortfalls, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is spending up to $250,000 on posting signs to try to warn federal immigration officers away from public property. At the same time, federal authorities are exposing the massive and deadly cartel drug trafficking problem in L.A.
The anti-ICE signs are not important to immigration enforcement in the sense that they have absolutely no binding legal authority on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told Fox 11. But they are important as demonstrating Bass’s determination to defy and potentially violate federal law, her complete irresponsibility with taxpayer funds, and the reason she should lose her next election big time, hopefully to Republican candidate and campaign ad whiz Spencer Pratt. And to emphasize just how disgusting L.A.'s sanctuary policies are, take a look at how much fentanyl the feds just seized in a single L.A. park’s environs.
RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar relayed the press statement of Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent in Charge Anthony Chrysanthis, who said, “MacArthur Park belongs to the people of LA again. Earlier today we took 19 kilos of fentanyl out of a house associated with the [Sinaloa] cartel… That is enough poison to kill 190,000 Americans that reside here, profit of over $10 million when sold. This is a major operation that's been going on here for too long, and it ends today.”
Notably, earlier this year, federal authorities revealed that the 18th Street Gang had been controlling the area near MacArthur Park and running what was essentially an “open-air drug marketplace”, sometimes pretending to be homeless people who sold their drugs out of tents. The gang also operated illicit gambling rings. The Trump administration has designated the 18th Street Gang, or Barrio 18, and the Sinaloa cartel as foreign terrorist organizations. In 2024, Los Angeles County had 2,438 accidental drug overdose deaths, according to the county Department of Public Health.
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But Los Angeles Democrat officials were quite happy to let the homeless and the terrorist gang members between them control a significant portion of downtown L.A. In fact, Mayor Bass is trying to thwart just such federal operations as resulted in the seizure of the 190,000 lethal doses of fentanyl. Fox11 reported:
Los Angeles city leaders have installed more than 450 signs declaring public property off-limits for federal immigration enforcement, citing Executive Directive 17…City officials have not disclosed the cost of producing and installing the signs. However, based on industry estimates of roughly $500 per sign for production and installation, the total could reach around $250,000.
Let’s put that in the context of the budget shortfall Los Angeles faces. As of last April, ABC7 reported that Los Angeles had a budget shortfall of nearly $1 billion, spurring Bass to propose firing some 1,600 city workers. Amazing how last year the city was so broke that Bass was all in on firing over a thousand employees, but this year she is willing to spend up to $500 per sign in a completely ineffective and preposterous virtue-signaling display against ICE.
As a side note, it is against federal law to try to interfere with (18 U.S. Code § 111) immigration enforcement or protect illegal aliens (8 U.S. Code § 1324) from arrest, so Bass has actually potentially violated U.S. law yet again with the initiative. She is absolutely complicit in the crime that plagues her grossly mismanaged city.
