AS apocalyptic fires ravaged and destroyed homes this past week in some of the most affluent neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, their wealthy residents mainly fled to safer havens.
 
But alongside exhausted firefighters struggling to quell multiple infernos that refused to be contained, groups of Latino immigrants are helping out, passing buckets of water and wielding hoses in a desperate effort to save properties that are not even their own.
 
All of them are working class and none come from the communities ablaze. Several, like Maria Garcia, interviewed by a reporter from National Public Radio, are undocumented immigrants, in her case from Guatemala.
 
Asked why she and other friends and relatives had rushed to a neighbourhood they don’t live in to save the homes of people they don’t even know, Garcia replied: “Our values and principles come first. That’s what our parents taught us.”
 
Said Juan Carlos Pascual Tolentino, a gardener and immigrant from Mexico: “You don’t need to have legal papers or be a US citizen to help others. When you support someone, you strengthen them. When you stop and ask  — could you use a hand?  — they'll remember that.”
 
The current US Congress is less interested in remembering Tolentino’s good deeds, however, than condemning him. Even as he, Garcia and others were fighting the LA fires, Republicans and Democrats were busy on Capitol Hill smoothing the way for incoming president Donald Trump to carry out what he bragged last December would be “the largest mass deportation program” in the country’s history.
 
Trump’s racist invective in the past has included maligning immigrants from Central and South America as “criminals,” “murderers” and “rapists.”
 
A new anti-immigration Bill, the Laken Riley Act, named after a young nursing student murdered last February by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, could soon become law.

It passed the US House last week with broad support from both the Republicans and the Democrats. It was approved on Friday by the US Senate — again with a majority of Democratic senators supporting it — allowing for further debate and amendments pending a vote.
 
The law would “require the Secretary of Homeland Security to take into custody aliens who have been charged in the US with theft and for other purposes.” Riley’s killer had been convicted of shoplifting but released.
 
Under the law, even children who entered the country with undocumented parents, but who are currently protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, could be detained indefinitely for even petty crimes.
 
The Riley Act further permits states to veto federal immigration policy through the courts, which would allow local officials to override government policy and impose a ban on legal immigration effectively from any country they don’t like or that has been unco-operative over deportation issues in the past. It would also allow state officials to single out particular individuals for deportation without due process.
 
The Democrats, in panic and meltdown mode since their drubbing in the November elections, have been eager to shift to the right on immigration. Their loss of the White House, the House and the Senate, has been blamed in part on a “weak” stance on immigration and particularly illegal border crossings, which soared to record levels under President Biden.
 
The Bill has been widely condemned by civil liberties and immigration groups. “Mandating mass detention will make us less safe, sapping resources and diverting taxpayer money away from addressing public safety needs,” said Sarah Mehta from the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Detaining a mother who admits to shoplifting diapers for her baby, or elderly individuals who admit to non-violent theft when they were teenagers is wasteful, cruel, and unnecessary.”
 
Vanessa Cardenas, who leads the immigrant rights group America’s Voice, said the Bill was being used to “exploit a horrific act of violence and portray immigrants as dangerous threats to the US, despite the reality that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born.”
 
Progressive Democratic congressman, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who voted against the legislation, called it “a trojan horse Bill that exploits Laken Riley’s tragic murder to dramatically expand the government’s power to shut down legal immigration and detain people who are not convicted of any crime at all.”
 
If the Bill becomes law, McGovern warned, we could see 12-year-old children detained by immigration authorities just for being “accused — not even convicted, simply accused — of stealing a candy bar.”
 
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.