Five years ago last Tuesday, The New York Times, after considerable internal turmoil, published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) advocating that the federal government unilaterally send military troops to quell the riots ripping through the country in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
The piece led directly to the firing of multiple Times editors, the resignation and eventual relaunch of Times controversialist Bari Weiss, and an appended 317-word editor's note lamenting that "the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published," among other derangements. It also, crucially, did not deliver its intended result: Cities continued to burn, some for months on end, and President Donald Trump never did impose military troops on any unwilling governor.
On the five-year anniversary of Cotton's unrequited exhortation to power, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles began snatching illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who had arrived for previously scheduled check-ins, and detaining them in a makeshift detention facility in the basement, some with their whole families (including U.S. citizen children). Such process bait-and-switches, including of at least one married father of four who thought he was going to his final naturalization interview, have been conducted across the country during Trump's second term as part of a White House pledge to increase immigration arrests tenfold from the 2024 average of 300 per day to 3,000. Last Tuesday's nationwide haul, assisted by text messages urging asylum seekers to check in early for appointments, reached a record 2,200.
