The immigration raids in California.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today’s read: 13 minutes.

Correction. 

In the Numbers section of Wednesday’s edition on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, we wrote that Epstein had died in August 2018. In reality, Epstein died in August 2019. While making edits to the sentence’s structure, we inadvertently changed the year and missed the error before publishing. It has since been corrected in the online edition. 

This is our 139th correction in Tangle's 309-week history and our first correction since June 26. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

Quick hits.

1. The State Department moved to lay off over 1,300 employees as part of a plan to eliminate duplicative agencies and streamline departmental operations. (The layoffs) Separately, Attorney General Pam Bondi fired at least 20 prosecutors and support staffers linked to former Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigations into President Donald Trump. (The firings)
2. Former President Joe Biden refuted claims by President Trump and other Republicans that he did not authorize the pardons and commutations signed with an autopen at the end of his term. The comments follow investigations launched by the Justice Department and Congress into Biden’s mental state at the time the clemency actions were issued. (The comments)
3. Two people were killed and two others injured in a shooting at a church in Lexington, Kentucky, on Sunday. The suspect also shot a state trooper and was killed by law enforcement responding to the shooting. (The shooting)
4. Emergency service officials in Gaza said an Israeli airstrike killed 10 people and injured 16 others waiting to fill water containers. Israel said it was targeting a “terrorist” but missed due to a technical error. (The strike)
5. President Trump announced a new 30% tariff on imported goods and services from Mexico and the European Union starting August 1. (The announcement)

Today’s topic.

The ICE raids in California. On Thursday, federal immigration authorities said they arrested 319 people suspected of being in the country illegally in raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection at two licensed cannabis farms in California. Law enforcement officers also found 10 children in the country illegally during the raids and arrested four United States citizens for allegedly assaulting or resisting officers, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Separately, a farmworker reportedly died after falling off the roof of a greenhouse at one of the farms. The immigration sweeps are believed to be the second-largest single-state ICE worksite operation in history. 

Protesters clashed with federal agents during the raids, attempting to block ICE vehicles while agents deployed tear gas and crowd-control munitions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation for Los Angeles is also offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of a suspect who appeared to fire a handgun at law enforcement during the protests. Furthermore, eight people were injured during the protests at one farm and transported to local hospitals, according to a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department. 

President Donald Trump sharply criticized the protesters on Truth Social, writing that he had directed White House officials to “instruct all ICE, Homeland Security, or any other Law Enforcement Officer who is on the receiving end of thrown rocks, bricks, or any other form of assault, to stop their car, and arrest these SLIMEBALLS, using whatever means is necessary to do so. I am giving Total Authorization for ICE to protect itself, just like they protect the Public.”

The United Farm Workers (UFW) union criticized the raids in a statement on X, writing, “Many workers — including US citizens, were held by federal authorities at the farm for 8 hours or more.” The statement continued, “These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families. There is no city, state or federal district where it is legal to terrorize and detain people for being brown and working in agriculture.”

Separately, on Friday, a federal judge ruled in favor of challengers suing the Trump administration for ICE’s operational tactics in the Los Angeles area. U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong banned ICE from detaining suspects based on their appearance, spoken language or apparent occupation, finding that taking such actions without reasonable suspicion violated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The case was brought by five plaintiffs who claimed they were stopped because of their ethnicity, accents, and occupations during three separate raids in Los Angeles since June 6. 

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, criticized the ruling, saying that the judge was “undermining the will of the American people.”

Today, we’ll break down the arguments on ICE’s deportation efforts in Southern California, with views from the left, right, and writers in California. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left is critical of the raids, and many suggest they will be politically damaging to Trump.
• Some say the administration is justifying the raids on false pretenses.

In The Hill, Max Burns said “Trump’s immigration raids have gone too far.”

“Trump’s draconian immigration crackdowns may play well with his MAGA base, but they’re alienating nearly everyone else — including the mainstream conservatives Republicans will depend on to protect their fragile congressional majorities next year,” Burns wrote. “A growing number of people — including Republican voters — are noticing that while Trump’s immigration raids have swelled in size, aggression and taxpayer cost, they haven’t generated many actual deportations. Meanwhile, they recoil at the regular drumbeat of news stories showcasing masked ICE agents urinating in school parking lots or illegally detaining U.S. citizens.

“Prior to May, most Americans viewed ICE positively. Now the agency evokes images of masked men huddled around blacked-out vans and Alligator Alcatraz. Agents’ refusal to identify themselves, and MAGA’s celebration of their unaccountability, has led millions of Americans to see the agency as little more than Trump’s personal skullcrushers,” Burns said. “ICE is now the best-funded law enforcement agency in the nation, boasting a budget on par with the entire Canadian military. Millions of Americans have watched ICE grow into an unaccountable entity that sees no problem deploying military-grade hardware to raid a children’s summer camp. People are coming to the conclusion that the ends do not justify such brutal means.”

In USA Today, Larry Strauss wrote “ICE has terrorized many into an ominous silence.”

“Apparently, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump, ‘California is burning.’ Here in Los Angeles, however, we know too well the smell of a serious conflagration — and also the stench of political gas when politicians try to justify corrupt assertions of authoritarian power,” Strauss said. “We are protesting now not because we are lawless, but because what is happening is a racially selective application of immigration laws that should have been reformed years ago. We are protesting because we still believe in decency, human dignity and respect for hard work and family.”

“California is not burning. LA is not burning. Some cars and other objects have been set ablaze by a few individuals who are willing to go to jail for their outrage, nihilism, pyromania or whatever. Their conduct doesn’t represent me or most of the rest of us,” Strauss wrote. “They certainly do not represent my students now living with terror and dread, watching masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in armored vehicles occupying the parking lots of their supermarkets, scrolling the rumors that scream across social media about the next ICE raid at another Home Depot or factory or a school graduation.”

What the right is saying.

• Many on the right criticize Democrats for downplaying the violent protesters and the discovery of children at the cannabis farms.
• Others call for stricter employment verification standards at farms. 

The Washington Examiner editorial board said “Democrats defend child labor at California marijuana farms.”

“Waving and wearing Mexican flags, Democratic Party activists threw rocks and water bottles at federal agents as they executed a warrant to find illegal immigrants working at a marijuana farm 90 miles north of Los Angeles last week. When the tear gas had cleared, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that 10 children had been found working there, eight of them unaccompanied by an adult,” the board wrote. “Despite this, Democratic leaders were unrepentant for opposing the enforcement of federal immigration law.”

“[Cannabis farm] Glass House Farms is growing so fast it doesn’t have time to pay its workers, at least that was what a class action lawsuit alleged last year. It is easy not to pay workers when they are in the country illegally, and even easier when they are children. Newsom and the Democratic Party are fine with all of this,” the board said. “Local television helicopters captured one activist firing what appears to be a pistol at federal law officers. The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California has offered a $50,000 reward for any information that leads to the conviction of the man with the gun. No elected Democrat has come forward to criticize the attempted murder of federal officials.”

In National Review, Caroline Downey argued “ICE’s California weed-farm raid shows why we need mandatory E-Verify.”

“The episode is yet more evidence that the so-called humanitarians of this story — Democrats and progressives opposing ICE deportations — are causing harm to the population they’re claiming to support. More importantly, it shows that some agricultural companies are still supplying a major incentive for illegal immigration: employing illegal labor,” Downey said. “Illegal farm workers make up approximately 50% of the farm labor workforce in the U.S. These employers’ complicity has been historically hard to combat, but nationally mandating E-Verify could change the game.”

“E-Verify is not foolproof. Some of the documents that the program allows, such as a voter-registration card, birth certificate, and driver’s license can be easily counterfeited or borrowed,” Downey wrote. “Still, E-Verify remains one of the best tools at the administration’s disposal. Businesses should be required to use this system, which stands the best chance of shutting down the market for illegal labor and therefore stemming the flood of illegal aliens to our border, hopefully for decades to come.”

What writers in California are saying.

• Some California writers argue the federal government’s immigration raids amount to political theater. 
• Others say the raids underscore the unsustainability of an economy built on unauthorized immigrant labor. 

In CalMatters, Jim Newton said “the federal government is staging political theater in Los Angeles.”

“It was a month ago that President Donald Trump unilaterally decided that the city needed National Guard troops to contain anger over his Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to forcibly remove undocumented immigrants from the city,” Newton wrote. “Since that moment, practically everything about the protests or the federal response to them has lacked a connection to reality. It has largely been a series of orchestrated appearances, drive-by observations and theatrical pronouncements. Relatively few in a city of 4 million people even notice.”

“Roughly 1,850 National Guardsmen remain deployed in Los Angeles more than a month after first arriving on a scene that was already under control. No one has died… And yet, the soldiers are still here,” Newton said. “But while Guardsmen wait for permission to go home, the administration ratchets up its postured flexing. On Monday, Homeland Security officers dressed up as soldiers and rode on horseback, stomping around MacArthur Park. The scene was more amusing than threatening — onlookers whipped out cell phone cameras to document the sight of horses traversing the grounds.”

In The Los Angeles Times, Joel Kotkin wrote “ICE raids are cruel, but so is an economy built on undocumented labor.”

“Even as Californians protest the crude and often brutal deportation tactics employed by President Trump’s ICE and Homeland Security agents, we’re giving too little thought to how our state, and the nation, is failing the very immigrant community we want to protect,” Kotkin said. “The simple truth is that the low wage/high welfare economy dependent on illegal immigration isn’t sustainable. Economic reality suggests we need a commonsense policy to restrict new migration and to focus on policies that can allow current immigrants — especially those deeply embedded in our communities and those with useful skills — to enjoy the success of previous generations.

“What would a commonsense policy look like? It would secure the border, which the Trump administration is already doing, and shift immigration priorities away from family reunion and more toward attracting those who can contribute to an increasingly complex economy. Deportations should prioritize convicted criminals and members of criminal gangs,” Kotkin wrote. “Law-abiding immigrants who are here without authorization should be offered a ticket home or a chance to register for legal status based on a clean record, paying taxes and steady employment. In addition we need to consider a new Bracero Program, which allowed guest workers to come to the U.S. legally without their families in the mid-20th century.”

My take.

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• The cannabis-farm raids are a perfectly legitimate form of immigration enforcement.
• Other actions, like the profiling a federal court just stopped, are a very different matter.
• Both violent standoffs with protestors and the rights violations show the difficult situation our country is in with illegal immigration.

As usual, “the right” and “the left” are very much talking past one another, but on two distinct immigration stories worth fleshing out on their own. The first story is the two cannabis farm raids in Southern California — including Glass House Farms, one of the largest distributors in the world. The second is the Trump administration’s general immigration-enforcement approach, particularly in Southern California.

Let’s start with the cannabis farms. To put it simply, these are the kinds of raids I would expect from the federal government. Employing hundreds of allegedly illegal workers at one cannabis farm is effectively an invitation for law enforcement action, especially when some of them are under 18. “Child labor” evokes too exploitative an image to me — Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said all the minors detained were at least 14, which is the same age I started working — but California prohibits minors from working on cannabis farms. 

A few things about this story are ironic. First, Republicans are decrying violations to California’s labor laws for minors, despite generally opposing laws that limit minors’ ability to work. Second, the owner of Glass House is a former cop and Trump voter. That a place like Glass House is employing so many unauthorized migrants underscores some structural issues in agricultural employment, and claims from Glass House that its operation was on the up and up don’t resolve any questions about how these kids got to this farm and were employed without papers. Child trafficking is a genuine problem along the border, and we have no way of knowing whether some of the kids were forced to be there.

Meanwhile, the response to the raids provoked exactly the kind of conflict I’d been worried about under Trump’s immigration approach: News spreads about a major enforcement action, protesters arrive to “resist,” and tensions quickly escalate. “Protesters throwing rocks” doesn’t adequately describe the situation; videos showed that it was actually quite dangerous for the immigration officials, who resorted to using tear gas to disperse crowds. One protester appears to have fired a handgun toward officers. The whole thing is a mess and, of course, these direct and violent confrontations only reinforce Trump and the right’s belief that immigration officials must be heavily armed during these raids.

The second story, and perhaps the bigger one, is the Trump administration’s general enforcement tactics in the region. ICE has significantly increased its daily arrests in recent weeks and is now holding roughly 54,000 unauthorized migrants in detention facilities. And they’re just getting started. The agency is planning to ramp up enforcement and detention with their newly flush budget to hit an aggressive deportation quota, which will lead the administration to stop focusing on “bad hombres” and instead start targeting anyone here illegally — including those performing jobs critical to industries like agriculture and hospitality. 

We’ve reached the point where employers are having their limits tested — a conflict that President Trump is apparently struggling with himself. The public is being tested, too. Given that we’re no longer just targeting drug traffickers, gang members or hardened criminals, Americans’ support for this kind of enforcement will be increasingly determined by how these stories play out in the communities experiencing these deportations. For now, it seems like the general public is souring on Trump’s deportation agenda.

If the administration’s raids on these cannabis farms are on the justifiable end of what they’ve done to enforce immigration and labor laws (and I think they are), many of its actions leading up to the raids are on the other side of the spectrum. On Friday, I wrote about some of these more horrific actions, many of which took place in Southern California. Perhaps most memorably, the administration deployed National Guard troops and federal officers on foot, on horseback, and in military vehicles in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. Troops were purportedly deployed to support a crackdown on a park notorious for criminal activity, especially the distribution of fake IDs and illicit drugs; but in reality, the operation was botched — the National Guard was supposed to be protecting federal immigration officials but showed up late and then marched around aimlessly.

Nothing may have gotten out of hand at MacArthur Park, but it did show an administration gearing up for a fight. Trump appears to be intimidating local officials and communities into submission through the militarization of our immigration police, which I find to be a gross and un-American expression of power. As journalist Ken Klippenstein put it, “Many in the military who are on the ground in Los Angeles think that ICE and others from homeland security dressing up in Army green and using armored vehicles on the streets of an American city undermines the reputation of the armed forces.” And I agree. How will the military’s reputation be affected if American citizens experience the armed forces as a hostile police force in their own communities? Conversely, how will the police’s reputation be affected when it’s outfitted like the military?

I always find these questions more helpful if we make them personal: If you were in a park with your kids when it was suddenly swarmed by heavily armed, soldier-looking police with humvees and military trucks, how would you feel? 

Meanwhile, a federal judge ruled that the administration has been unconstitutionally targeting people for speaking Spanish or appearing to be Hispanic, then denying detainees the right to consult with a lawyer. These are basic American principles: The police aren’t allowed to profile you, and you have a right to representation. As I’ve said again and again, if you remove these basic rights for suspected noncitizens, you remove them for everyone. We have no way of knowing whether the people the government is targeting are U.S. citizens if their rights are violated in the process (and U.S. citizens are already getting caught up in the dragnet).

I want to be very clear: The U.S. is in a bad place with illegal immigration. Many millions of people are here illegally with no pathway to citizenship. Regardless of whether you support deporting them en masse or not, the morally defensible and legally legitimate process of locating, detaining and deporting millions of people without violating their rights is extremely difficult, expensive, and time consuming. This is all great justification for limiting illegal immigration in the first place, which we could do the Trump way (he has successfully brought illegal immigration to an all-time low with aggressive border enforcement) or by opening up more pathways to legal work permits and citizenship — or with a combination of the two. 

But the current situation does require a response, and the Trump administration is well within its rights to raid cannabis farms where hundreds of people, including children, are potentially employed illegally. Protesters resisting those raids are making immigration enforcement more dangerous. At the same time, the Trump administration is regularly violating the rights of American citizens and noncitizens alike across Southern California. Its intentional provocations are unsettling and justify resistance from the public and local officials. 

More than anything else, the perils of enforcing immigration through deportation should show responsible legislators why it’s so important to limit illegal immigration and address asylum claims before unauthorized migrants enter the country in the first place.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: I’m curious why you didn’t include a section on what trans writers are saying in your coverage of the Skrmetti decision. I’ve been enjoying your expanded use of “what X writers are saying” and this is an issue where I’d like to hear more from those directly impacted.

— Claire from Chicago, IL

Tangle: We should note up front that we did include two perspectives from transgender writers in our coverage of United States v. Skrmetti, though we did not label them “What transgender writers are saying.” Under the commentary for the left, we included a piece from Erin Reed, a journalist who writes a popular Substack newsletter, and a piece from M. Gessen, a New York Times columnist. 

Why not put these pieces under their own banner? While we are increasingly looking for opportunities to use this 2/2/2 format (what the left/right/and X writers are saying), we also want to be careful to not effectively create a 4/2 ideological split, where we sample writers from a specific group who just add two more liberal or conservative views to the mix. 

In this case, virtually all of the pieces we surveyed from the left — and transgender writers, specifically — were staunchly opposed to the ruling, so having two “What the left is saying” articles and two “What transgender writers are saying” articles would have created an imbalance. We could have had one piece from a trans writer and one from a parental-rights advocate, but that range of perspectives on the case was naturally covered by our normal format. 

Conversely, both today’s piece and our recent edition on the floods in Texas offered great examples of when the 2/2/2 format works well. The two pieces from Texas and California writers offered distinct perspectives through location-specific insights we didn’t see from national commentators. 

We agree that including commentary from groups with a direct stake in the issues we cover is important, and we’ll continue to do so — both within our standard three left/three right format and the 2/2/2 format, where appropriate.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

In recent months, early warning systems protecting global cybersecurity infrastructure have shown significant gaps in coverage. In February 2024, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), which tracks known security vulnerabilities in software, hardware and operating systems, stopped publishing new entries. Then, in April 2025, a leaked letter suggested that the funding for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, which serves as a key numbering system for tracking software flaws, was about to expire. Both programs help patch vulnerabilities in cybersecurity systems, which are the second most common targets for cyberattackers. The CVE’s funding was eventually extended, but the backlog in vulnerabilities disclosed to the NVD has stretched to 25,000, roughly 10 times its previous high. MIT Technology Review has the story.

Numbers.

• 78,618. The estimated number of workers in California’s legal cannabis market in 2024, according to a May 2025 report from the UCLA Labor Center. 
• 38%, 32%, and 22%. The percentages of workers surveyed in the cannabis industry who self-reported their ethnicity as Latino/Hispanic, white, and African American/Black, respectively, in the report. 
• 5.5 million. The size, in square feet, of Glass House Brands’s cannabis facility in Camarillo, California. 
• 47.3% and 50.1%. The percentage of Americans who approve and disapprove, respectively, of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration, according to RealClearPolitics’s average of polls through July 8. 
• 55%. The percentage of Americans who said immigration levels in the U.S. should be decreased in a 2024 Gallup poll.
• 30%. The percentage of Americans who said immigration levels in the U.S. should be decreased in a Gallup poll released on July 11. 
• 204,297. The number of individuals booked into detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement between October 1, 2024 and June 14, 2025, according to a Cato Institute report.
• 65%. The percentage of those booked who had no prior criminal convictions.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just shared Isaac’s TED talk.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was the xAI chatbot Grok’s antisemitic turn.
• Nothing to do with politics: A woman in San Jose is having her home flooded with unwanted Amazon packages.
• Thursday’s survey: 2,544 readers responded to our survey on Elon Musk’s proposed “America Party” with 48% saying they would support a different third party. “We need a legitimate third party option. Elon Musk is not offering this option,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Even though early screenings are one the best ways to prevent cancer deaths, one in four women in the United States is behind on their cervical cancer screenings. One reason for this may be that the standard cervical cancer screen method, a pap smear, is physically invasive. However, the FDA recently approved a new at-home self-testing option developed by CELLECT Laboratories, a startup exploring the feasibility of placing nanomaterials in menstrual pads to detect the virus that frequently causes cervical cancer. “Women are desperate for proper health care that is made for them, by them and that they can trust,” CT Murphy, a leading researcher at CELLECT, said. “This technology is not only wanted, but desperately needed.” Good Good Good has the story.

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