LA Taco Covered Street Food For Years. When ICE Raids Began, They Were Ready.
HuffPost
"It's very personal to me," Memo Torres told HuffPost. "L.A. is home. So you attack my home, you’re attacking my people."
On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had made more than 5,000 arrests in Los Angeles since June, when federal agents arrived to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The agency claimed, without evidence, that it had arrested the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” when in fact most of the people arrested had no criminal history. Even U.S. citizens and people with legal authorization to be in the country have been detained in the sweeps.
A federal judge ruled last month that ICE agents were unconstitutionally arresting people based on their race, accent or line of work, and ordered government officials to stop arresting people without reasonable suspicion. Nonetheless, the indiscriminate immigration raids have continued.
Some of the most comprehensive coverage of these arrests comes from L.A. Taco, a local, independent media outlet that began as a food-centric publication. As other local media outlets in L.A. shut down, L.A. Taco continued its food coverage (including its annual TACO MADNESS competition) and expanded into city news and politics, covering everything from police brutality to racial disparities in weed arrest data to the aftermath of January’s devastating wildfires. Since June, L.A. Taco reporter Memo Torres has tirelessly documented immigration raids and related news in daily roundups published on the website, as well as YouTube and Instagram.
Torres spoke with HuffPost about the community effort behind documenting the ICE raids and how his years of covering the city’s food scene make him a better immigration reporter.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
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