As a United States marine, Arturo Flores served in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he worked as a military police officer and trained dogs to find roadside bombs.
It’s his experience in the military that has made what he’s seen on the streets of southern California in recent weeks all the more disturbing to him, Flores said.
Flores is the mayor of Huntington Park, in south LA county.
Like in other parts of LA, many Huntington residents have been terrified amid reports of masked federal agents detaining immigrants, or those that look like immigrants, on the street, in parking lots, at swap meets or large stores and soldiers deployed into the city against the wishes of local officials and the governor.
“It is a campaign of domestic terror that is being imposed on our residents on a daily basis,” Flores said. “It is a level of psychological warfare that I’ve only seen in theaters of war. It’s terrifying seeing it being displayed here in my city.”