The New Yorker:

How a small group of activists dubbed the Peace Patrol stymie the deployment of federal agents in California.

By Oren Peleg

On a crisp September morning in Los Angeles, Elijah Chiland, Victor Maldonado, and four other volunteers of the Harbor Area Peace Patrol gathered at Wilmington Waterfront Park, just outside the city’s port. “If you would have told me at the beginning of the summer that, three months into this, we would be waking up at ungodly hours to fight fascism, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Maldonado said.
At 6 a.m., they piled into two cars and drove over Vincent Thomas Bridge onto Terminal Island, a bulk of reclaimed land in the middle of the harbor, passing vast shipping-container yards and small ramshackle buildings left over from the port’s cannery days. From there, they turned onto Seaside Avenue, a narrow road that leads to a memorial of Furusato—the Japanese American fishing village that was destroyed during the period of Japanese internment—near the island’s southern tip. About a hundred yards past the monument, a manned checkpoint marks the entrance to a small peninsula of federal land that houses a U.S. Coast Guard base and a prison. Seaside Avenue is its sole access point. The unique location of this complex makes it ideal for federal agents looking for a protected staging ground out of public view, while also allowing anyone to monitor the movements of those agents as they enter and exit the facility.

Back in June, Chiland, a Los Angeles public-school teacher, heard rumors that National Guard troops were being marshalled on Terminal Island in preparation to arrest anti-ice demonstrators across the city. This inspired Chiland and his wife, Maya Suzuki Daniels, to co-found the Harbor Area Peace Patrol, a group of community activists that track the movements of immigration authorities around Los Angeles. “I came down here to check on that, because we wanted to let people know,” Chiland told me. He didn’t find any National Guard members that day, but “what I did see was a convoy of eleven vehicles”—some labelled Border Patrol, others unmarked, with tinted windows—leaving the federal complex and heading for the city. The next morning, another member of the newly established Peace Patrol returned to check if the Border Patrol convoys were back. They were. “We’ve been seeing them every day since,” he said. Today was day ninety-one.

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