While Los Angeles Roils and Burns in ICE Protests, LA DA Nathan Hochman Is Literally Out to Lunch

Nathan Hochman for Los Angeles County District Attorney. (Credit: Nathan Hochman for DA Campaign website, used with permission.)

As my colleague Nick Arama faithfully covered on Saturday night, Los Angeles is in a state of utter chaos due to the violent protests being waged against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who are simply doing the job they are tasked to do: remove criminal illegal immigrants and anyone else who is not here legally, and schedule them for deportation. 

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The first uprising started on Friday, at a detention center near downtown Los Angeles, and continued to escalate and spread into Saturday, where protestors surrounded a deportation bus in a Home Depot parking lot in Paramount, a city further east of downtown Los Angeles: 

From reports, these battles were still waging into the night, and from my lurking on left-wing pages like Indivisible and 50501 Movement, they plan to keep ramping it up. But as my colleague Bonchie reported, so has President Donald Trump. He is not backing down, and is meeting this show of force with more law enforcement, not less:

Well, the "find out" phase of this drama has arrived. President Donald Trump has ordered the National Guard to Los Angeles, and things are about to get frosty. 

At the end of the above video, Border Czar Tom Homan, after denouncing Democrat politicians for putting ICE agents at risk and instigating these riots, announced that the deployment will begin tonight. According to him, mobilization efforts have already begun, and you can bet Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are going to scream bloody murder. 

You know what, though? Let them. Let them cope and seethe because at the end of the day, they have no power to stop Trump from doing what needs to be done to restore order. 

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We know that thanks to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and the Sister Squad of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, local law enforcement is essentially useless in this fight. They also feel hung out to dry, as this X post from local journalist CeCe Woods indicates:

BREAKING FROM LASD SOURCE: “Deputies can barely support regular patrol activity in the field right now due to this incident in Paramount. There are about 400 protesters and 30ish Dep’s spread out over a couple square miles in paramount. Super dangerous. The sheriff and the county board supervisors doesn’t care about deputies. Pretty sure they hate us actually. 

Freaking war zone. They're throwing bricks and m80s at deputies. They're setting fires all around us too.”

There were high hope that with the results of the November 2024 election, some semblance of law and order would be restored to the state. The passage of Prop 36 was a huge victory in restoring felony penalties for theft and violent assaults, particularly by minors. The ouster of woke Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon and the election of Nathan Hochman to the role was also seen as a sign that Los Angeles was making a return to sanity. So, it is curious that Los Angeles' top cop, L.A. DA Hochman has done little to weigh in on all the unrest in the city he has been elected to protect.

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On Saturday he broke the silence, issuing this X post about... sandwiches.

WATCH:

Eastside Deli @eastsideitaliandeli has been a fixture in downtown LA for almost 100 years. And for many of those years, they’ve had a DA SPECIAL on the menu.  

During my predecessor Gascon’s term from 2020-2024, they took that sandwich off the menu to express their displeasure with his pro-criminal policies that were hurting small businesses like theirs.  

When I became DA, Eastside Deli returned the DA SPECIAL to its rightful place on the menu in recognition of our new balanced criminal accountability policies and actions.  

Thank you Eastside Deli for not only a great sandwich but for being a great institution in this county for close to a century.

The city of Los Angeles is literally melting down. The President of the United States has deployed the National Guard to quell the violence, and arrest and detain the unruly and criminal, in order to protect federal and local law enforcement, as well as the people of the city. But Hochman did not issue any statement concerning this news on Saturday. Instead, he prattles about the return of a sandwich that had been removed while the prior D.A. was in office.

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How pathetic.

However, after the Friday violence and the arrest of SEIU President David Huerta for trying to obstruct an ICE raid, Hochman did issue a statement of sorts. While it did not double down on stupidity as L.A. Mayor Karen Bass did in hers, Hochman's statement was essentially anemic, vapid, and incredibly tone death.

Read it and weep. 

As the District Attorney of Los Angeles County, my highest duty is to uphold the law and promote public safety while ensuring justice is administered with fairness and humanity.

While immigration enforcement is under federal jurisdiction and not within the authority of the office, we recognize the real and profound impact these operations have on the trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement.

We are aware of recent large-scale immigration enforcement actions taking place across our communities. These action have understandably caused fear and anxiety among many residents, including families and children. 

Let me be clear: Our office does not prosecute people for their immigration status. We are focused on serious crimes that affect public safety--regardless of a person's background. Everyone in our country, no matter where they were born, deserves to feel safe reporting a crime seeking help, or participating in the justice system without fear of retaliation or separation from their loved ones.

We will continue to uphold the law, protect victims, and pursue justice with integrity and compassion. Los Angeles County is stronger and safer when all residents--regardless of immigration status--can live without fear. 

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For someone who ran on being tough on crime and prosecuting bad actors, Hochman pretends to not get the fact that these ICE raids are here to help him do his job. The ones causing the fear are not ICE agents, but the criminal illegals who help perpetrate the "serious crimes that affect public safety" that Hochman claims his office is supposed to prosecute. Instead, Hochman throws the people of Los Angeles County under the bus by virtue-signaling and siding with the criminal element whom ICE and local law enforcement are doing their level best to try and remove. 

Many in Los Angeles County realized before the November elections that Hochman was a flaming progressive in Uniparty clothing. He pretended for a time to be a non-partisan, tough defender, but then decided to openly endorse former Vice President Kamala Harris and speak out against President Donald Trump. But residents were so fed up with progressive D.A. George Gascon and his soft-on-crime policies that they pulled the lever for Hochman and took their chances. Hochman has made some noises and moves toward actual law enforcement, rescinding Gascon's directives that made it impossible for deputy district attorneys to do their jobs of achieving justice for the victims. Hochman also took a stand in his attempt to block the resentencing of the Menendez brothers. But for the most part, he seems to be following in the vein of the governor of California. Make appearances with a smile and well-coiffed hair, spout about what you will do and how much you care, and then fail to do the actual work. 

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Perhaps this is Hochman's own version of "The Truman Show." Hochman lives in a manufactured world created for his own benefit, no doubt with his eyes on some higher federal office when the progressives he so loves come back into power. And what of the world that Angeleans are being forced to live in? Well, that is not his reality, and therefore can be ignored.  

But the D.A. Special sandwich is back on the menu at Eastside Deli, signaling a new day in Los Angeles.

Huzzah.

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