A glossy campaign mailer from Councilmember Traci Park is arriving in Westside mailboxes with a dramatic warning: “ICE is out of control.”
The piece shows a heavily armed immigration agent in tactical gear and urges residents to report ICE sightings to a hotline if they “see or hear something.” It promotes what Park calls a “community notification network” and presents her as sounding the alarm about immigration enforcement.
The message is striking because it bears no resemblance to the councilmember’s actual record. Traci Park has repeatedly opposed LA’s sanctuary city protections and has argued that the city should preserve flexibility to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. She has framed sanctuary policy as symbolic and risky, often invoking the trope of “violent criminals” to justify maintaining pathways for cooperation with ICE.
She has also never condemned the immigration raids that are terrorizing immigrant families across Los Angeles, including on the Westside. When local residents were detained or disappeared into federal custody, Park did not publicly name the victims, attend vigils, or acknowledge the organizations providing support to affected families.
Instead, her legislative agenda has focused heavily on expanding enforcement and surveillance. Park has aggressively pushed license plate reader cameras, real-time crime centers, and other forms of mass data collection across the Westside. Civil liberties advocates have repeatedly warned that these systems generate detailed location data that can be accessed across law enforcement agencies, including federal authorities such as ICE. Park has never proposed enforceable limits on how that data can be shared or accessed.
Her voting record reflects the same priorities. When the City Council considered an amendment to pause LAPD’s use of 40mm projectiles and tear gas after those weapons were fired into crowds that included journalists and bystanders, Park voted against the measure. The amendment was introduced after hundreds of projectiles were fired into crowds protesting the ICE raids, and was designed to introduce accountability and ensure compliance with state law. Park chose to preserve police “discretion”.
She also voted against expanding funding to provide lawyers for immigrants facing deportation, leaving detained and non-detained immigrants without legal representation even though legal counsel is widely recognized as the single most important factor in successfully fighting removal. Against that backdrop, the new mailer reads less like a reflection of Park’s policy positions and more like a political rebrand.
The infrastructure promoted in Park’s flyer also raises serious questions. The flyer urges residents to call a hotline to report ICE activity, but the number connects to a voicemail box that instructs callers to leave the address or intersection where ICE is located. There is no indication that calls are answered live, that sightings are verified, or that trained observers are dispatched. Real immigrant rapid response networks rely on trained volunteers and verification systems before alerts are shared with the community. A voicemail line collecting unverified reports is not a response network.
It also raises the question of where those reports go. The bottom of the mailer directs people to Park’s campaign website, meaning residents reporting immigration enforcement activity are effectively being directed toward an anti-immigrant representative’s political campaign. Los Angeles already has established rapid response hotlines run by immigrant rights organizations that verify reports and deploy observers, including West Los Respuesta Rápida here on the Westside. Instead of strengthening the networks that already protect immigrant families, the mailer directs sensitive reports about ICE activity into a political operation, creating a surveillance funnel disguised as a help hotline.
The intended audience for the mailer is also telling. Despite claiming to support immigrant communities, the entire flyer is written only in English. Communities most directly affected by immigration enforcement in Los Angeles include large numbers of Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Tagalog, and Armenian speakers. If the goal were to help immigrant residents report ICE activity, multilingual information would be essential. An English-only flyer strongly suggests the message is aimed at English-speaking Westside voters who are upset about the raids and may not be familiar with Park’s record, rather than the immigrants most likely to face ICE themselves.
The mailer also highlights Park’s partnership with the Salvadoran American Leadership and Educational Fund, or SALEF, as proof of her support for immigrant communities. As reported in TruthAboutTraci.com, LAist and Palisades HQ, Traci Park solicited a $570,000 behested payment from Airbnb last fall and directed it to SALEF, funding the immigrant outreach programs she now promotes in campaign messaging. The arrangement links three actors with overlapping political interests: a councilmember who has received significant campaign support from Airbnb, a corporation lobbying City Hall to loosen Los Angeles’s short-term rental rules, and a nonprofit that now serves as the public-facing vehicle for the partnership despite having little presence in the Westside immigrant communities most affected by ICE enforcement.
Behested payments are legal, but the circumstances surrounding this one raise significant questions. Airbnb has already given $175,000 to Park’s 2022 campaign and has long been criticized for worsening Los Angeles’s housing crisis by incentivizing the conversion of long-term rental units into short-term listings, a practice that disproportionately harms immigrant renters and working-class households. The City of Los Angeles is also currently suing the company for allegedly price gouging wildfire victims.
Taken together, the relationship allows a corporation accused of disaster-era profiteering to gain positive visibility through a charitable transaction brokered by an elected official it has already supported politically, while the resulting programs are used as political cover for Park’s anti-immigrant record.
Another unusual detail appears in the small print at the bottom of the flyer, which states that the mailer was “designed by an LA Fire survivor.” The reference appears unrelated to immigration policy and instead invokes the recent Palisades wildfire disaster that Park has heavily centered in her political identity. Why that experience is highlighted in the design credit of a political mailer about immigration enforcement is unclear.
What is clear is that the story presented in the mailer does not match Park’s record. She opposes sanctuary protections. She voted against funding lawyers for immigrants facing deportation. She is building surveillance systems that can be accessed by federal authorities. She sided with LAPD when force was used against protesters demanding an end to deportations. She backs an LAPD chief who said he would refuse to enforce a state mask ban for ICE agents. She opposes tenant protections that help the very immigrants being targeted and losing their homes.
The story this mailer asks Westside voters to believe simply isn’t true. But when you have millions of dollars from MAGA donors, corporate developers, and police unions behind your campaign, apparently you can just print and mail a false record to the entire district and funnel reports about ICE activity into a political hotline instead of the networks actually protecting immigrant families.