Why LA’s MacArthur Park is a Key Battlefield between Fascism and Socialism
Federal agents stage at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles on Monday, July 7, 2025. Source: AP News
David A. Gabriel O. Jenn M. & Shiu-Ming C. | DSA-LA
Last Monday, federal agents stormed LA’s MacArthur Park, an area that represents the heart of immigrant and working-class LA. This is not the first time the raids have targeted the neighborhood. In fact, the federal government is targeting this neighborhood precisely because of what it represents to the city of Los Angeles. The ‘show of force,’ known as “Operation Excalibur”, represented a direct assault on the very concept of a multiracial, multicultural democracy.
Over the last month, the federal government has subjected Los Angeles to brutal violence. White supremacists in the White House, like Stephen Miller, don’t believe that Los Angeles should exist as a vibrant multiracial city. This is an attack on the very existence of Los Angeles, beginning with a violent occupation of the center of this immigrant city. If we are to defend Los Angeles, we must start by defending MacArthur Park.
As socialist councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said this past week, the attack on MacArthur Park is the “canary in the coal mine” signaling a broader assault to come from the federal government on a multiracial society. Almost exactly one month ago, federal agents began conducting raids on immigrants in LA. Their initial salvo began with a vicious set of state-sanctioned kidnappings of migrant workers at the Day Laborer center in the Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhood of LA. Home to numerous unions and political organizations, MacArthur Park is the second-most densely populated neighborhood in the United States outside of Manhattan. The neighborhood is situated between the luxury high-rise hotels of Downtown LA and the rapidly gentrifying areas of Rampart Village and Koreatown. The neighborhood is home to a diverse immigrant community, composed of Koreans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Mexicans, and Filipinos who live and work side by side. Soccer leagues, concerts, and various cultural institutions are also hosted in the park. Last Monday, as DSA-endorsed Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez noted, a children’s summer camp was taking place at the park when it was disrupted, with children forced to flee and take refuge inside a nearby facility while federal agents played soldier on our city streets.
MacArthur Park is the political heart of Los Angeles. May Day marches, union halls, and political institutions call the neighborhood home. A number of DSA-LA members were born or raised in the area, and many of our members continue to engage in significant political work in the neighborhood. On May Day in 2007, MacArthur Park was the site of one of the most infamous instances of police repression in LA history. Over 35 people were injured when the police confronted marchers and attempted to break up the demonstration.
Despite its incredible potential to thrive as a center of community for Angelenos, MacArthur Park suffers from systematic disinvestment. Over the last twenty years, this disinvestment has led to rampant inequality, housing instability, homelessness, and crime. For the feds (and for right-wing opposition locally), these social ills offer a key political opportunity -- they can point to MacArthur Park and discredit the very idea of a multicultural society.
Over the past year, DSA-LA elected Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez has come under fire for the conditions at the park. These attacks make it clear that the state of MacArthur Park will be the cornerstone of the opposition’s campaign against her, powered by the consolidating right-wing forces in the city. This was true already before June 6th, when the raids began. Now, MacArthur Park is also the main target of the federal immigration enforcement effort. Stephen Miller has set it repeatedly in his sights. He’s now made his vision of terror a reality with multiple large-scale raids in the neighborhood and promises of more to come.
Hernandez, meanwhile, has championed reducing the police budget and investing in unarmed crisis response. She has been an outspoken advocate for working-class issues, including street vendors, housing, and tenants' rights. In contrast, earlier this year, Mayor Karen Bass forcefully removed hundreds of street vendors from near the park and installed ugly chain-linked fences on the sidewalks to prevent vendors from selling in the area around the metro station. This opposition to DSA is beginning to unite and coalesce, encompassing both neoliberal and liberal factions, as well as reactionary and right-wing forces, against Hernandez and DSA. The opposition is also perpetuating a disingenuous narrative that, despite the decades-long disinvestment and abandonment of the neighborhood, socialists are responsible for the state of MacArthur Park today. They ignore the fact that Hernandez has only been in office for 2 years and argue that this is what the city looks like when socialists govern.
In response, Councilmember Hernandez has announced a $6 million investment into direct services for people experiencing homelessness and those suffering from addiction in the park. She has made MacArthur Park a priority in her office for the next year, and in doing so, she is making a risky bet — that with real investment and careful attention, MacArthur Park can be revitalized for the immigrant communities that call the neighborhood home -- without displacement or gentrification, as is the usual neoliberal pattern of urban revitalization.
Groundwork’s MacArthur Park Resolution
Early this year, a group of leaders in DSA-LA from Groundwork wrote a priority resolution for our chapter convention, titled “MacArthur Park for the Working Class.” We saw right-wing attacks against our socialist councilmember. We knew that this situation was a significant political moment for Hernandez, where the status quo coalition and centrist politics would try to unseat her.
In our view, Hernandez’s gambit has implications for the socialist political project nationwide. We must demonstrate that socialist policies can address the decades of inequality and disinvestment in our communities caused by capitalism. This moment presents an opportunity to develop a comprehensive campaign that engages a broad range of stakeholders, including elected officials, social movements outside of DSA, community organizations, neighbors, and everyday people. If, with time and attention, socialists can improve the material conditions of immigrant working-class communities like MacArthur Park, we can use an expansive vision of co-governance to show that socialist leadership is effective leadership, elect more socialists, grow our organization, and materially transform society.
Additionally, MacArthur Park is where Hernandez performed the worst in the 2022 election. The area represents a demographic that DSA-LA has struggled to recruit and engage: working-class Spanish-speaking immigrants. But we shouldn’t shy away from that task; we have to dive straight into it. To that end, we secured support and adjusted the resolution with input from both the council office and multiple groups within and outside the organization. The MacArthur Park proposal represented a new model for our chapter and a potential example of what bold, expansive co-governance could look like for socialists in office across the country. The resolution attempted to leverage the significant political muscle that DSA wields behind Hernandez’s efforts in MacArthur Park.
Concretely, the resolution aimed to utilize the chapter’s political influence to allocate more resources to the neighborhood. We proposed conducting community clean-ups as a tactic to build support for the park revitalization effort. Other tactics included leveraging the connections of some of our members to bring in professionals, such as the primary care doctors represented by SEIU CIR, or mental health professionals from NUHW, or social workers from SEIU 721. We could canvass tenants, distribute food and other basic necessities, and train volunteers to work directly with those experiencing homelessness. These efforts would have worked in tandem with a non-electoral political strategy, where we would gather support to pass policies beneficial to the park, such as closing Wilshire Boulevard to create a pedestrian-friendly area or creating low-income and city-owned housing. Other tactics proposed included conducting public meetings, demonstrations, press conferences, and resource fairs to mobilize support for neighborhood reinvestment and shift the public narrative.
The campaign would also be geographically focused on an area of the city where we have significant membership and political strength, and which is easily accessible to the rest of the city. Many members who had ties to MacArthur Park approached us to express their support for the resolution, and members from all five Branches were enthusiastic about the campaign and disappointed to see it fail.
The Councilmember was the first speaker to support the resolution. But we were surprised to see many members line up to speak against it. This was unexpected. Some comrades suggested that the only way to deal with individuals in the park taking drugs or experiencing homelessness would involve carceral tactics. Others framed the argument as thinking that we could train volunteers to do the jobs of mental health professionals — a mischaracterization of our envisioned mobilization of members’ networks and resources, rather than solely as volunteers. Though members could be trained in activities such as outreach to homeless individuals or administering Narcan, this campaign could also include a strong, closely-linked political element, through pressure at City Council to allocate city resources in more humane ways. Some suggested that DSA was too white to organize in meaningful ways in MacArthur Park, a suggestion that seemed offensive to DSA organizers who grew up and live in the neighborhood and supported the proposal.
Unfortunately, the proposal failed to secure the 66% majority needed to become a chapter-wide priority. The failure of this resolution highlights some significant political disagreements within the organization. MacArthur Park presented a new, more ambitious stage in our efforts at co-governance, where we can mobilize significant resources across the chapter and leverage our relationships with other workers’ organizations to engage in a comprehensive, geographically targeted campaign. As with Hernandez´s approach, this proposal was also risky. If we failed, it could have serious political consequences for the socialist electoral project.
Fundamentally, this proposal calls for an expansive view of the organization. We aim to establish a robust socialist organization that leads on multiple fronts, with labor, electoral, political, and social movements working in tandem. We believe in a strong electoral program, but we also believe in pushing and challenging our DSA electeds to take risks. We work through non-electoral years by trying to pass policies in line with our Democratic Socialist Program (DSP), our democratically decided chapterwide political program and analysis. We also work through our unions, political organizations, and other channels to align with the chapter on political goals, take the capitalist class on directly, recruit more people into the organization, and strengthen our collective ability to lead the working class. If our most ambitious electoral projects are to succeed -- like taking over the LA City Council or governing New York City -- they will have to be paired with similarly ambitious work outside of the electoral arena.
The oppositional tendency spanned the DSA political spectrum, with the largest bloc comprising members of the Socialist Majority Caucus in LA. The group represented a more cautious bloc, one that was skeptical of what the DSA could accomplish in MacArthur Park and hesitant to take on a deeply ambitious project.
Nevertheless, most of the ideas in the resolution can still be accomplished, and members have begun to organize around those ideas, as the moment has increasingly made it clear that we must. We are developing chapter committees in each of our Councilmembers’ districts to align on our analysis of the districts’ challenges, to develop collective solutions that aren’t constrained within City Hall, and to foster deep engagement between electeds’ offices and chapter members. We remain firmly committed to the view that socialism works, that bold socialist leadership can succeed, and that we have to be courageous as we govern locally. Now that MacArthur Park is also the target of the federal government in their rabid campaign to round up any immigrant they can, this effort has added urgency, and the duty of a mass socialist organization is to ensure that working people can dream big, execute with strength, and win. In Los Angeles, it begins with MacArthur Park.
Editorial Note: This piece expresses the opinions and views of the authors; it is not an official caucus statement.
