(The Center Square) — The Los Angeles park at the heart of a federal horse-mounted raid Monday has long been a hotbed of criminal activity.
The international MS-13 gang originated nearby, and decades of reporting noted the park’s centrality in the sale of fake identification to illegal immigrants and its function as the city’s largest open-air drug market.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass arrived at MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood as the federal operation was underway, exclaiming, “They need to leave, because this is unacceptable. Just wait and see, they will be leaving soon,” after concluding a phone call with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Later, Bass noted that there had been “more than 20 kids playing” in the 35-acre MacArthur Park, calling the federal operation “outrageous.”
However, reports suggest that there may have been some need for greater law enforcement presence in the area due to its long-standing function as a drug and fake identification market.
Until after World War II, Westlake was a wealthy, desirable neighborhood. It was featured prominently in the 1947 noir film “Too Late for Tears.”
In the intervening decades, the area has been overrun by crime, spawning the infamous MS-13 international gang and becoming the epicenter of the city’s drug crisis.
Reporters in a 2006 NPR investigation of illicit sales in MacArthur Park were approached by identification sellers six times in 20 minutes. The journalists noted the going rate for a “completely new identity” is “around a hundred bucks.”
“If it were statistically possible for a neighborhood to be more than 100 percent immigrant, this area would be,” recounted NPR reporter Luke Burbank. “By no coincidence, it’s also a hot-bed for the illegal document trade.”
Identification for sale includes everything from drivers’ licenses to social security cards, resident alien cards and even student identification cards.
“On just about every corner are small clusters of men, their baseball caps pulled down low, their eyes darting back and forth furtively,” continued Burbank. “If their gaze meets yours for even a moment, they’ll flash you a hand sign.”
Burbank’s report found that the Los Angeles Police Department had just two officers assigned to the fake documents unit for the area, and was only shutting down one fake document mill per month. LAPD officers told Burbank they’d need 25 officers to properly do the job.
A 2010 U.S. Department of Justice paper remarked that the park has been “widely known to be one of the largest open-air drug markets in Los Angeles,” but that measures put in place to restore order by then-Mayor James Hahn had made strides toward restoring park access to the non-criminal public.
By 2023, the area had yet again become a “hub for fentanyl sales and consumption,” with the Los Angeles Daily News’ investigation finding skyrocketing shoplifting was in part driven by addicts stealing to fuel their addiction.
In January 2025, the city of Los Angeles conducted another crackdown after the area had become a hub for resale of stolen goods, conducting sweeps with mounted officers. Bass claimed the operations had made a “major difference,” but CalMatters’ Jim Newton’s on-the-ground investigation found otherwise.
“Groups of young men gathered in circles, huddled around pipes and drug paraphernalia,” reported Newton. “Even with the gains against crime here, the playgrounds aren’t getting any use. When I visited on Monday, I counted only one woman in the park, and she was a city employee, picking up trash.”
“There were no children,” concluded Newton.
Los Angeles is a “sanctuary city” that bars city resources from being used for immigration enforcement and cooperation with federal authorities engaged in immigration enforcement. The city bans the direct and indirect sharing of data with federal immigration authorities.
According to the Los Angeles City Council, one in 10 city residents are illegal immigrants.
At the end of June, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the city’s sanctuary city ordinance, citing the supremacy clause regarding the preemption of federal statutes over state and local law in the U.S. Constitution.
Later on Monday, El Centro Sector Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino countered Bass’s order for federal agents to leave and said operations will continue until order is restored.
“Better get used to us now, ’cause this is going to be normal very soon,” said Bovino. “We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
