I’m super mad, everyone!

January 2026 kicked off hard! In less than a month, the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro (Jan 3), then tried to bully Denmark and NATO into giving up Greenland (Jan 12). Two U.S. citizens were killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis (Jan 7 and 24). And to top it all off for me personally, in my final year of national park questing, I watched the National Park Service tear down exhibits on sea level rise at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park (Jan 22), tear down exhibits on slavery at Independence Hall National Historical Park (Jan 26), and tear down exhibits on Native Americans in Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Big Bend National Parks. That’s because Executive Order 14253 says these exhibits “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” to which I say “which Americans?”

Living in Los Angeles as long as I have has given me a really special experience interacting with people from all backgrounds—poor and privileged, spiritual and secular, cruel and kind, with and without papers. As a Korean beaver by birth, with no papers to show for myself, the idea that there is only one correct kind of American, which has reached a fever pitch in the last year, is absurd! And so, in times of great stress, what do we do? Look for community! Join with likeminded folks! Speak up!

When I went downtown on January 31 to join the latest protest, I immediately found a likeminded person: David Mather, an art history professor who’s using both of his specialties to turn art into protest, called Chronochromatism (colored time). It’s a super timely approach in an era of whitewashing, and wouldn’t you know it, he even drew inspiration from California’s historical landmark plaques!

Two of these plaque banners really resonated with my experience: a collective dream in progress, where everyone’s invited. To me, there is no better example of a temporary landmark, an All People’s Plaza, than a Los Angeles playground, where folks from all backgrounds with all kinds of stories are all uniformly trying to keep their kids out of trouble. It’s a community that is just community without qualifying it. So when I see propaganda spread about the “harm” communities like this cause, when I see the federal government issue quotas of 3,000 daily arrests of undocumented immigrants (“criminal illegal aliens” in propaganda speak), I can’t help but be alarmed that my community is in danger!

And sure, the Department of Homeland Security has a very hyperbolic website dedicated to their arrests of the “Worst of the Worst.” As I write this, there are 20,248 arrest profiles there; if quotas were met since they were made in May of last year, there would have been 768,000 arrests. 20K criminals out of over 700K arrests. So who are among the other thousands? Well, you have people like five-year old Liam Ramos in Minneapolis, whose dad—a non-criminal—tried to go through the immigration process with a Biden-era app called CBP One, which is no longer in use. Liam was infamously photographed in the cold, in his bunny hat, in ICE custody before he and his dad were shipped to the Dilley ICE detention center in Texas. Happily, a judge has since ordered their release, but situations like these are why I came here to protest. This is the kind of community I see as under threat.

So yes, pausing from history to speak out on the present, I do believe the Department of Homeland Security, especially their masked ICE branch in unmarked vans, is out of control, with “a budget that is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.” Reviewing their press releases, as of February 1, 2026, there are 49 pages of graphically worded Immigration and Customs Enforcement announcements, but when it comes to Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, “The [sic] are no results to display.” I don’t want that in my community, or any community really.

So while I missed yesterday’s much larger protest, I did feel compelled to join this one. I support due process and the rights for folks to feel safe in their own communities. I support them having the opportunity to seek citizenship without having that process interrupted. And I don’t want their stories being erased, because they make up an important part of the American experience, one that I’ve been fortunate enough to see coast to coast, top to bottom, since 2011! So I stand with this movement and say, very firmly, “Don’t Feed the Wildl-ICE!”

So far, the protest has already had an impact: Congress is passing a spending bill while moving DHS funding to a later date. We’ll see how it pans out in the long run, but there’s still so much mess!

Stay vigilant!