In June 2025, Los Angeles became the epicentre of the battle against the second Trump administration’s punitive immigration policies. As thousands of residents poured into the streets to protest the arrest of undocumented workers, Trump mobilized the National Guard against local leaders’ requests to combat supposed lawlessness, epitomised by a few acts of property damage.
Easily missed in the media barrage of burning Waymo cars and heavily armed law enforcement, four of the city’s museums and cultural institutions—the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), Chinese American Museum (CAM), LA Plaza de Cultura Y Artes (LA Plaza), and Grand Performances—issued a statement condemning the administration. Denouncing the “immigration raids” and “aggressive enforcement tactics,” as a “manufactured crisis,” by the state, they refuted the description of LA as a warzone, even though their buildings were vandalized during the protests. Instead, they criticised those in power: police who committed “violence,” and National Guard troops marshalled against “protestors exercising their constitutional rights.” They asserted, moving beyond the specific situation in LA, that “we oppose the unjust mass deportation of immigrants.”
The statement was an act of resistance in a sector that has primarily remained silent in the face of a stunning barrage levied by the second Trump administration on working-class, queer, trans, and nonwhite people, especially immigrants. Anticipatory obedience has been the name of the game for many museums, from cancelling exhibits with queer themes to censoring art by teens. And while the American Historical Association, the major professional organization for historians in the US, sued the federal government after it effectively dismantled an agency that provides grants for historical work, it broke its own rules to prevent a membership vote about a pro-Palestinian resolution suggesting that it is only willing to speak out when historians’ livelihoods are threatened.
As a public historian and immigration justice activist who has seen firsthand how Trump’s increased immigration enforcement traumatizes immigrant communities and hurts cities with large immigrant populations like Los Angeles and Newark, NJ, where I live, I was inspired when I learned about the joint statement. Why did these four—different as they are from each other—have the courage that thousands of similar museums and cultural organizations in the US did not? How did this statement reflect their understanding of the role of museums and cultural institutions in the present moment?
Established as ethnic history museums and cultural centres, JANM, CAM, and La Plaza, respectively, preserve and interpret the histories of Japanese, Chinese and Latino communities in Los Angeles. As I learned by interviewing Ann Burroughs, President and CEO of JANM; Michael Truong, director of CAM; Gay Yuen, board chair of CAM; Rafael Gonzalez, CEO of Grand Performances; and, Letitia Rhi Buckley, CEO of La Plaza, the histories they interpret compelled them to speak out and put into practice the mantra that history matters. Refusing exceptionalist narratives that center stories of assimilation, each finds their motivation to refute current immigration policy in different aspects of the histories of detention, deportation and racialized exclusion they tell. They, along with Grand Performances, a performing arts venue, also act out of concern for the visitors they serve who are affected by current policies.
JANM began taking political stands after the attacks on September 11, 2001, when rising Islamophobia threatened Muslim and Middle Eastern communities. Since then, it has continued speaking out whenever it identifies structural and legal parallels between Japanese internment during WWII and government treatment of other communities. At the moment, the parallels are direct. In March, 2025, an executive order by President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the apprehension of members of the Tren de Aragua gang, resulting in people with no gang ties, like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, being illegally deported. The Alien Enemies Act is the “same legislation that provided the legal basis for the internment and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.” As Burroughs explained, “people are being summarily detained without due process. They’re being forcibly removed. Families are being separated…[they’re] building detention centres.” Although the US government formally apologised for Japanese internment in 1988 under President Ronald Reagan, saying it was caused by “racial prejudice,” the recycling of its legal logic against Latino immigrants today is both egregious and shows how different immigrant groups are positioned as victims or deserving of harsh treatment.
By starting its narrative of Latino LA five hundred years in the past, LA Plaza demonstrates how colonialism shifted US borders and American identity to purposefully exclude Mexicans and other Latinos. The little-known history of Mexican repatriation in the 1930s, when more than a million Mexican Americans were deported to Mexico due to the economic dislocations caused by the Great Depression on the site where LA Plaza stands, illuminates links between labor and migration. Buckley emphasized parallels with the xenophobic language used by Trump today, “Mexican American citizens of the United States were literally rounded up and sent back to their ‘country,’ quote unquote. Didn’t speak Spanish. Were born in the United States but were being sent ‘back’ to Mexico.”
For LA Plaza, though, historical facts are more powerful when paired with stories from people who lived it. As Buckley suggested, gathering and disseminating these stories is what sets LA Plaza apart from other institutions.
“We’ve got this recorded history of a 75-year-old man, talking about when he was 6 years old, and his father was literally kidnapped and sent back to Mexico, and he never saw him again…It creates this human perspective…This is a dad. And he has two kids…This is about people. This isn’t about some inanimate object…That’s where we’re compelled as an organization…to make sure that we are continuously fighting…this dehumanizing narrative that is rooted in lies.”
Gathering and preserving these stories is a political act, while their affective qualities humanize people who are othered.
CAM’s leadership similarly interprets how the media and government have justified exclusion and othering of immigrants depending on labor needs. For board chair Yuen, this perspective reflects the framework of the third world solidarity movements of the 1970s, which saw the struggles of people of color as linked through their shared disempowerment by colonialism, capitalism, and racism. Like JANM, the question for CAM is whether they should wall off the histories told inside the museum from what was happening outside. As Yuen put it, “In 1871, there was racism. In 1934, there was racism. In 1987….Do we just tell those stories? What about current history?” The rise of anti-Asian, specifically anti-Chinese, rhetoric and violence during the pandemic showed the museum that it could help educate non-Chinese people about the impact of past racist propaganda. Of the joint statement Truong said,
“I don’t think we have lost any funding because [funders] already understand that we, as a museum, highlight these stories to ensure that our history…is heard…outside of our community.”
A lesser discussed aspect of these histories is the collective trauma that comes in its wake. Collective trauma is the negative psychological, physical and emotional effects experienced by a group of people when they are harmed by an external force because of their identity. Seeing ICE agents kidnap people in neighborhoods and workplaces today is triggering because of the histories described above, according to Gonzalez, who calls it a “bloody wound.” For both LA Plaza and Grand Performances, this trauma can be partially healed through art and storytelling. As a performing arts venue, Grand Performances offers space for community members to come together. Art “uplifts our souls,” and connects people to each other. Through music “a group of [individuals] becomes a choir,” that other people can hear. Art builds community to heal from trauma, by emphasizing togetherness and resilience while also recognizing pain.
At a moment when the federal government is surveilling museums to eliminate “woke” and defunding those it deems its ideological enemies, the joint statement and the actions that have followed it are courageous. At the same time, critiquing federal immigration policy from Los Angeles, California—a city and state that are run by Democrats who have positioned themselves against Trump’s immigration agenda—offers a measure of security.
But even with the support of local and state politicians, taking a stand can be dangerous. On August 14, while California governor Gavin Newsom was giving a press conference at JANM, approximately seventy-five armed and masked US Customs and Border Patrol officers appeared on site to intimidate the museum and its visitors, possibly in retaliation against the joint statement. Under these conditions and at a moment when most historical organizations stay silent, these institutions offer a model for practicing solidarity. With care for the community, JANM, CAM, LA Plaza, and Grand Performances have stood up to the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants. Although they are devoted to the histories of different ethnic and racial groups, they refuse exceptionalism and instead draw connections between communities and past and present, especially around exclusion, displacement and deportation. They also show that art and storytelling are critically important for community healing and togetherness in moments of crisis. When asked what lesson other museums and cultural organizations should take from their experience, Buckley says, “Be brave…There’s no going back in many ways, right? We’re not.”