I was away — overseas — for the beginning of the anti-immigration raids and subsequent protests last week.

For a newsman, whenever your hometown is in the news and you are far away, it’s almost as if you’re missing the party.

Not that the massive arrests by ICE in the Garment District in Downtown Los Angeles and the massive protest demos — which ranged from mere-signs-and-bullhorns peacefulness to the burning of CHP vehicles, tossing of boulders at same, stupid graffiti and looting of an Apple store and other businesses— were anything like a party.

I listen to the radio when I travel, and the top story on the BBC was the protests and clashes with law enforcement and deployment of the National Guard and, for goodness’ sake, the Marines right here in our own backyard.

In a moment of what the newsite artnews calls “abundant irony,” an art show I have a ticket to attend down in Little Tokyo on Saturday entered the story: “When artist Nadya Tolokonnikova entered a cell at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) on Thursday for a durational performance called Police State, little did she know that an actual police state would unfold outside the museum walls the following day. The Russian artist is a founding member of the protest art collective Pussy Riot, who, along with a bandmate, served time in a Russian prison after shooting a music video critical of Russian president Vladimir Putin in a Russian church. In the performance, she inhabits a cell and sews clothing, as she did during her sentence.” MOCA closed the museum, outside of which police had a staging area, “out of an abundance of caution and for the safety and well-being of our staff and visitors.” But the artist stayed ensconced in her cell inside, after posing in front of Barbara Kruger’s huge mural on a wall outside that asks the questions, in red, white and blue: “Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does the time?”

The local-local angle here in the San Gabriel Valley seemed to be about worrying when ICE would make raids here plus protesting federal agents staying in the new AC Hotel in Pasadena’s Playhouse Village. As our City Editor Ryan Carter reported about the party-like atmosphere at the demo on Sunday, “The upbeat music of the band was a break in the marching for about 150 to 200 protesters, decrying the ICE action this weekend. Carrying signs and chanting ‘ICE out of Dena,’ they walked around the block multiple times, as the din of supportive honks along Colorado echoed through the downtown corridor.”

According to a note Pasadena Councilman Rick Cole sent to Ryan and to me, ICE itself wasn’t really in the Dena: “Pasadena is not a ‘sanctuary city.’ As with the State of California law, the City has a long-standing policy not to voluntarily collaborate with Federal authorities on immigration in order to ensure everyone in the community feels safe contacting the police when they are victims or witnesses to crime.

“Second, while the cars driven by agents staying in Pasadena were marked ‘Homeland Security’ they were uniformed members of the Federal Protective Service who maintained to hotel management and personally to me, that they were not involved in immigration enforcement. ... Obviously protesters did not know this and were reacting to what they knew. But I hope the initial assumptions and fears do not congeal into urban myths about Pasadena as a ‘sanctuary city’ or that ICE agents launched immigration enforcement from their Pasadena hotel rooms.”

Kruger’s MOCA mural ends with the deeply political, if you think about it, query: “Who laughs last?”

For this is the profound question that is at the heart of the matter in the struggle between (I think) properly laissez-faire California attitudes about immigration, as well as our happily pluralistic culture, and the authoritarianism that reigns in Trumpland. With zero evidence, in citing the supposed need for siccing our own military on ourselves, the president trots out the hoary old trope that the demos were made up of “often paid protesters.” Paid by who? He said that the protests — not violence, note — “will NOT BE TOLERATED.” And how’s he going to enforce this one?: “Also, from now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests.” I wonder where Trump finds such an edict actionable in the legal code?

Bottom line here: Don’t let Trump make political hay out of any of this. Molotov cocktails only light his fire.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.