Former late-night host and comedian Conan O’Brien rebuked the Trump administration’s recent mass immigration raids in Los Angeles, reminding people that people from Central and South America “are the community” in the West Coast city.
On his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, O’Brien spoke briefly about politics with his guest, actor Diego Luna, defedning immigrants and criticizing the administration for trying to deport anyone undocumented.
“I have empathy,” O’Brien said on Monday. “Because if you’re paying attention, you understand that it feels like 80 percent of what’s getting done here to sustain our lives and our culture and our community is coming from south of the border.”
“They’re doing all the work,” he added.
O’Brien’s observation is one that many critics of President Donald Trump’s immigration raids in L.A. have made.
Indeed, Trump did at one stage pause raids on undocumented migrants working in the agricultural, hotel and restaurant industries, saying many of the roles they filled were “almost impossible to replace.”
However, he soon reversed that pledge.
The president ordered his administration to detain and deport undocumented immigrants, most without criminal records, to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations.
But many believe the raids unfairly target innocent immigrants.
O’Brien emphasized the importance of immigrants by using examples from his own life.
“Everybody I work with, everybody who works with me, everybody who helps me in any way or helps my family in any way with everything that needs to be done – in every way, every day, I am working with people who are from Mexico or Central America or South America,” O’Brien said.
“They are the community in Los Angeles,” he added.
Luna, an actor and director from Mexico, said the administration’s recent crackdown was “quite scary.”
“You dedicate your life, work to build something, and then suddenly they tell you they’re going to take that away from you instantly, just because. It’s quite scary,” Luna said.
The two men bleakly recalled their 2017 interview on Conan when the late-night host went to Mexico City to conduct a show, just two months into Trump’s first term. While there, O’Brien mocked Trump’s desire for a border wall paid by Mexico.
While Trump attempted to crack down on immigration during his first term, the effort was nowhere near the scale and force at which he’s approaching it now.
The mass deportation raids have become so aggressive that anti-immigration protests have sprung up across the country – ones that have been met with resistance by Trump.
The president invoked a rarely-used power to federalize the California National Guard, in addition to deploying Marines, to protect federal land and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents while thousands of citizens protested.
