Martinez, one of five declared candidates for the November 2026 mayoral race, stated his goal was to make Long Beach \u201cICE free,\u201d calling on Latino, Cambodian, Filipino, Black, and Pacific Islander gang leaders to meet him at City Hall at 5 p.m. Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need you to be here to meet me in person, to take back this city, because our leadership is not doing anything about it, and our police are powerless,\u201d Martinez said in the video, repeatedly identifying himself as \u201cyour 2026 Long Beach City mayor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Candidate Defends Intent<\/p>\n
In an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Martinez defended the controversial appeal, claiming his intentions were \u201cnever to harm anybody, never to incite any type of violence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was kind of like a crazy, radical but fresh approach to gain attention to what\u2019s happening in America, specifically in cities that are predominantly Hispanic and Latino,\u201d Martinez told DCNF.<\/p>\n
The political outsider \u2014 a grandfather, licensed steam engineer, and Harvard Law School online student \u2014 admitted he never expected gang leaders to actually respond. \u201cI was very strategic in producing the video. So, no. No gang members are going to respond, no gang members are going to show up. That\u2019s not the reality of the video,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n
As of Sunday, Martinez confirmed that none of the 55 gang leaders had contacted him about the protest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martinez, one of five declared candidates for the November 2026 mayoral race, stated his goal was to make…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[78736,78739,49513,78741,26494,78737,131,133,132,78738,463,13,7575,564,78740],"class_list":["post-162350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-1200-woai","tag-cari-laqui","tag-conservative","tag-federal-government-has-entered-the-chat","tag-iheartradio","tag-joe-pags","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-pags","tag-political","tag-politics","tag-san-antonio","tag-texas","tag-woai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}