Journalists are not machines.
Today I'm sitting in my Long Beach home office typing on a computer. Yesterday, I nearly got hit with a rubber bullet that screamed past my head, then hit a photographer next to me and a protester on the other side. As they were both running away.
I was wearing my L.A. TACO shirt, which we made just for protests. They feature giant letters spelling "PRESS" on the back. But the officers didn’t seem to care.
Fortunately, a respirator I had purchased right before heading to this protest came in handy, as I used it to breathe through the pungent smell of pepper balls exploding on impact.
L.A. TACO has been covering the protests since Friday, when we first heard that community organizations were taking over L.A.'s streets to defend themselves and L.A.’s immigrant community from federal agencies working against local and state powers to hunt down and abduct fathers, mothers, sons, and brothers.
When the news first broke, I witnessed KTLA’s air coverage of the first raid at Ambiance Apparel, as a brave demonstrator who stood in front of the federal SUV got knocked down by the vehicle, which refused to stop. Their daytime anchors said that the man “tripped and fell.”
One of the biggest challenges of being a journalist is being able to operate and perform our duties without letting our emotions get in the way. At the same time, one of our biggest strengths as writers is our ability to utilize any kind of emotion, whether rage or sadness, to fuel our writing.
To this day, L.A. TACO is the only platform that brought attention to that injustice, broadcast to hundreds of thousands of viewers. Otherwise, what happened to this man would have been swept under the rug, ignored and unseen.
We take our obligation to bring you news from the street seriously, so we will always take a deep breath and head out with our cameras and phones ready to be there for our readers.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t taken its toll on us. My nightmares are more vivid than ever, a night of real rest out of reach. It’s been hard to focus or function, and at times, it's even been difficult to eat. But I wouldn’t change a single thing about this. I wouldn't trade this secondary traumatic stress in a heartbeat to provide any kind of comfort to the afflicted … and afflict the comfortable. We will continue covering ICE raids to the best of our ability, even if that means getting doxxed on X, being bombarded with inflammatory anti-human rights comments from private accounts, and narrowly getting hit by a less-lethal projectile.
We have even created a new category on L.A. TACO that bundles all the resources we put out related to ICE.
Thank you to every single person who has stepped up over the last four days to sign up and become a member. Your support means the world to our small team of six journalists, who care deeply about our city, friends, family, loved ones, and neighbors and do it regardless of the low pay, constant threats, and instability in an increasingly AI world.
If you’ve enriched your perspective on the current ICE crisis going on in Los Angeles, from our stories or coverage on Instagram, please consider joining us as a member now, sharing our stories, and following us on all our platforms. We need your help more than ever to support our work out there.
See you all in the streets, and please continue enjoying our website beyond just reading the headlines on Instagram. That helps a lot more than you think.
Stay safe and abrazos,
Javier Cabral
Editor-In-Chief
L.A. TACO
