Some of the social and socio-economic costs of various presidential administrations’ interference in local events is predictable. Their intentions are often obvious and direct. Often, so too are their impacts. And when not obvious, selected press and news media help make these less-than-direct intentions and impacts visible and audible.
But some of this interference has multiplier effects that may not be seen by those leaders who sanction and launch this interference. Worst still – at least from a budgetary or financial health perspective – those who sanction and launch this interference may not care about these consequences.
Striking The Most Vulnerable Target Cities
The July 16, 2025 issue of the Los Angeles Times provided a view into the additional costs of spending obscene amounts of money to increase the size of ICE units, to illegally seize control of a state’s national guard, and to needlessly reinforce these incursions by sending Marines into the non-fray. (One can find a link to this article in one of our best public transportation magazines: Transit Talent – see https://www.transittalent.com/articles/index.cfm?story=LA_Metro_Ridership_In_June_Drops_After_Immigration_Raids_7-16-2025).
One might suspect that frightening hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of these individuals and their families out of the country might translate into some form of savings: Having to erect fewer concentration camps/deportation holding pens, and cutting back on the number of unlaw-enforcement personnel needed to induce or force this mass emigration. Some may believe it will translate into more jobs for those citizens with lighter skin. Of course, this is an illusion. It will take decades for even massive numbers of these “agents” and their military reinforcements to effect an emigration of the magnitude desired by the administration. Plus the sudden appearance of 20,000 to 30,000 unmasked, unidentified kidnappers who could be anything or anyone will likely give ordinary would-be kidnappers great ideas and unfettered freedom to kidnap (mostly for ransom) and rape whomever they wish. But such forces only comprise our administration’s primary goal. This article is mostly about one of the many dysfunctional and, likely, unintended consequences of these large-scale assaults on mostly harmless citizens with no criminal records of any kind – and about the effects on this County’s public transit system and on those taxpayers throughout the country whose tax revenues will now have to support it. The principal effect: Another wave of declining transit ridership in an already-collapsing sector in a community that was actually making strides to reverse this decline.
Public Transportation Consequences
The mixture of deliberate and unintended consequence is an irony. This is because most of the operating costs for this critical, traffic-reducing, air quality-improving public service — public transit — are provided by the federal government, as well as the states and local communities in which they operate. More money from these funding sources is needed when fewer passengers ride these services and pay fares.
A comprehensive article about these incursions into the County, and its consequences, was printed in an insightful and fact-filled article in the Los Angeles Times (written by Colleen Shalby). The article was titled, “LA Metro’s ridership in June dropped to Lowest of the Year after Immigration Raids.” Its subtitle noted that, “The transit agency [The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority] estimated a ridership count of roughly 23.7 million last month [June, 2025] on its bus and rail systems – a 13.5% drop from May.”
Such a drop would not be a pimple in a city like Tokyo, where fares cover 160 percent of its transit service’s operating costs. But in a County where, two years before COVID-19 emerged, fares covered a mere 8.5 percent of this system’s operating costs (see the graph in https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/upshot/transit-battered-by-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage), a 13.5 drop in ridership is a catastrophe to an industry whose existence, in communities with low ridership throughout the country, is hanging by a thread, and on the brink of system-by-system extinction, as I have written before for National Bus Trader. Last month’s installment in this magazine noted that the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City recently proposed that bus fares be eliminated altogether – a coward’s or ignoramus’ easy way out from choosing to actually provide enough law enforcement officers and various technologies (like cameras) to capture and prosecute the 48 percent of bus riders who board without paying a fare of any kind. These officers would wear uniforms with badges, not unmarked clothing and masks.
In a country where law enforcement and support personnel were sorely needed in Texas following the worst flooding in its history (while tens of thousands of highly-trained personnel were stacked up in Los Angeles County frightening the entire population), where 17M people are or (beginning in 2027) will soon be deprived of their Medicaid stipends and food stamps, and where most transit costs are provided with increasingly-regressive tax dollars, do we really expect taxpayers to support free transit – where continued decreases in it ridership are heading?
One ultimate irony of the multi-faceted travesty occurring in Los Angeles County is the fact that, in recent years, ridership on some of L.A. County’s rail lines has actually increased – a surprising rebound from the COVID-19 era. The LATimes article noted that, in the past four years, ridership on the rail portion (“Metro”) of the County’s transit system had increased by 53 percent, and that a recent survey found that customer satisfaction with the system has risen to 87 percent. But the recent drop in Metro ridership reduced the former (and hard-fought gains) of the system to the lowest point on record since June, 2022.
The LATimes article also mentioned that a variety of factors apart from the focus of militarization also led to ridership drops in various parts of the system. Examples cited included the fact that during otherwise peaceful demonstrations, protesters breached the A line tracks, and burned trash cans outside the Little Tokyo station (near City Hall), which was closed for up to 12 hours a day for nearly a week. And some of the protestors vandalized Metro buses. The El Monte busway was closed for several days. And decisions to keep certain stations (and presumably the track sections between them) open required coordination between the Los Angeles Police Department and the County’s Sheriff’s Department. One unfortunate irony of such open-and-closed stations was that they often left peaceful protesters stranded. According to County Supervisor Janice Hahn, “I think the unintended consequence of shutting down those stations really harmed the people who were peacefully protesting and trying to get out of there.”
According to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, “What the administration has done – the provocative actions of the administration – has also led to widespread fear in our city and people being afraid to get on Metro, people being afraid that maybe raids would take place.” According to County Supervisor Hilda Solis, “I just pray that our staff as well as our patrons – people who ride our system – are not harmed…They’re afraid – they’re fearful for their lives.” In a widely-shared video played in June, masked agents descended on a bus stop in Pasadena and detained several people. The stop, which is owned by the city [i.e., Pasadena], lay on one of Metro’s bus routes.
Continuing on in this article:
Three men who were detained at the bus stop are Pasadena residents and plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit filed against the Trump administration over unlawful stops and a lack of access to legal representation during the ongoing immigration enforcement. According to the lawsuit, the masked agents who detained the men did not identify themselves as immigration officers and did not show any warrants. In detention, the men were provided little food and water and were forced to sleep on the floor of the holding center….
The LATimes commented further that, “In response, a federal court recently issued two temporary restraining orders to the federal government. The Trump administration has since asked an appeals court to lift the restrictions.” Metro’s chief Executive Stephanie Wiggins stated that, “I know that recent events have caused fear, anxiety and heartache in communities we all serve and call home…Many of us have friends, neighbors and loved ones who have been impacted.”
From the Horse’s Mouth
It should be clear that these impacts, and the comments made about them, did not come from a NYC-based writer named Ned Einstein. Instead, in the words of a spectrum of key Los Angeles County officials, the damage that the federal administration’s militarization of this County had a profound affect on a great many of the County’s 9.66 million residents. And not just those with brown skin, most of whom never committed a misdemeanor during their lives as citizens of this country, and some or many of whom likely never received a parking ticket. Not to be overlooked, this takeover of Los Angeles County affected the lives of a huge percentage of citizens with all shades of skin color. Impacts like traffic increases from the lesser use of public transit are not even factored into this equation, along with many other factors omitted.
The bottom line is that actions always have consequences. Whether all the impacts cited by Los Angeles County officials reflect an ignorance of side effects, or that these officials simply do not care about such consequences, is anyone’s guess. Readers of National Bus Trader can make up their own minds about such conundrums.
As members of the motorcoach sector of the U.S. public transportation industry, owners and employees, similarly, need to make up their minds about what, if anything, they should do about such goings on. But the point is: If such illegal actions can occur, and have such stunning impacts on one transportation mode among the many operating in the United States, can the motorcoach industry be far behind? Perhaps many Hispanic citizens do not ride motorcoaches that often, As such, motorcoach riders may not be targeted by agencies like ICE or hijacked national guard units around the country. But if they are, can a sector like the motorcoach industry that has not grown significantly in at least 30 years absorb even slight ridership losses? And what if these losses lead to a restructuring of routes such that the travel choices by this mode are more limited? Such a restructuring would inconvenience the entire spectrum of motorcoach passengers, not just those with brown skin.
Will the impacts on a fellow-member of the public transportation community be ignored by those in the motorcoach field? Or will they add their voices to the opposition, and speak up? We have rarely spoken up about outrageous, patently stupid and dysfunctional injustices, like the requirement for motorcoaches to pay bridge and tunnel fees (and in New York City, congestion pricing fees). The two questions I have are “What will it take?” and “Do we even care?”