Most people know MacArthur Park from an old song about a cake and a recipe and a metaphor. Locals know it as a hellhole. I’ve gone past it and kept on going. The outside looks like a migrant tent camp packed with third worlders. It has a reputation for drugs and worse things going on there.

But when ICE showed up at MacArthur Park, Mayor Karen Bass for once wasn’t in Ghana and trooped in to make a show of denouncing immigration enforcement. Gov. Gavin Newsom claimed that Stephen Miller was targeting children.

But anyone who lives here knows the reality. MacArthur Park is no more of a children’s playground than it is a place you bake cakes. It’s a dangerous and violent hellhole. And exactly the place that the federal government should be cleaning up.

But for those who just know the song…