By NATALIA T. and MAR RENO
LOS ANGELES—The Trump administration, beginning in January 2025, has marked a clear escalation in the repression of working-class people in the U.S. The abduction of political activists Mahmoud Khalil, Jeanette Vizguerra, and others, and the collaboration of multiple federal agencies to conduct ICE raids across the country in a brazen manner has sparked mass protests.
In an attempt to make good on his promise to surpass Obama as “Deporter in Chief,” Trump has ordered 3000 deportations per day, and taken the kid gloves off all federal agencies to get the job done. He chose Los Angeles as the first would-be victim of the monster. What Trump didn’t understand is that our city defends its own.
The military takeover of LA
On Friday, June 6, a sharp increase in ICE raids began in the LA metropolitan area, from areas as far north as Glendale to as far south as Paramount and Inglewood. By five days into the raids, 330 people had reportedly been arrested by ICE, and a similar number had been detained for protesting by the LAPD, the National Guard, Homeland Security, and even the FBI. From the get-go, thousands of people were in the streets to protest, mostly adults under 40 and high school age youth.
On the first night of an 8 p.m. curfew imposed by Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, 225 were arrested and charged with failing to disperse. On the second night of the 8 p.m. curfew, officers didn’t wait for the sun to set and began “kettling” protesters (entrapping them in an enclosure of police lines) and making arrests at 7:30.
Alongside an estimated 5 million people across the country, nearly 200,000 took to the streets for the “No Kings” day rally, where later in the afternoon police broke up a march of 2000 people in downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) by firing teargas and rubber bullets, charging civilians with horses, swinging batons, and leaving many with gruesome injuries (lost fingers, broken limbs, etc). Press and media workers haven’t been spared from the brutality, shown by a notorious incident where an Australian journalist, clearly marked and completely to the side of the protest, was shot in the leg with a rubber-coated bullet while broadcasting live.
Since then, community members and organized patrols have documented ICE wildly breaking into homes or cars to make arrests, storming into public markets and neighborhood festivals to grab individuals at random, and even engaging in several instances of hit-and-run traffic incidents. Geographically, nowhere is considered safe from the terror. ICE has targeted student graduations, factories, carwashes, churches, hospitals, Home Depot parking lots, and court hearings. Every act of terror has been facilitated by the full cooperation of the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs, illegal under the laws of a so-called “sanctuary city.”
The catastrophe comes at a time when the city is still in recovery from some of the most destructive wildfires in state history, which occurred in January 2025. Even though the Latino community, who make up more than 50% of the local population, uplifted the city and its residents by participating in mutual aid, cleanup, and reconstruction, this same community now finds itself under an even more brutal lockdown than in the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighborhoods that were once thriving with food, music, and community are ghost towns as people are afraid to leave their homes to work or get food. Several videos have gone viral of children taking on the jobs of their parents, who are in fear of being detained.
Unlike the ICE operations leading up to this period, which tended to target individuals in their homes, these raids are distinct in several ways. First, they are numerically greater, with dozens happening throughout the county every day. There are more agencies involved—not just the usual Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI—but they are now being assisted by the Los Angeles Police Department, sheriffs, the California National Guard, and U.S. Marines. These agencies are intended to be visually present throughout LA communities and have targeted public spaces in largely Latino neighborhoods. At any hour of the day, platoons of a dozen or more police vehicles can be seen zooming down the road, sirens blaring, while helicopters fly nonstop.
LA working class defends itself
The military incursion has not been met with passivity. From the first day of the raids, Los Angeles has been in a state of rapid organization and community self-defense, in which mutual aid and solidarity are the norm. Signal threads, Instagram, and Twitch channels, and a number of other informal networks, are sources of information, coordination, and mutual aid for the tens of thousands of people ready to protest.
The downtown Federal Building, and all of the surrounding area, have been a primary location of protest. It serves as a processing center and a temporary holding area for people taken by ICE. The conditions of this facility are nothing short of heinous; people of all ages, from children to the elderly, are held in a basement parking lot, cuffed and chained, with no access to food, water, or attorneys. Reports state that police even brazenly gassed public elected officials with irritants as they tried to enter the premises. Families wait all day in a desperate attempt to see their loved ones. “He was only given a 20-second phone call. That’s how I know he was here,” said one woman whom we spoke with at a protest.
The character of the protests has been massive, sustained, and spread throughout the city, with a mixture of being spontaneous and organized. On graduation day, in response to ICE agents posting up outside of many LAUSD schools, high schoolers walked out of class by the hundreds and took to the streets to protest—in spite of the police blocking roads and stationing themselves in train station near downtown. On the other hand, organizations and coalitions, such as the broad-based 70-member Community Self Defense Coalition, are training volunteers to monitor and track ICE activity. When a raid is witnessed by the community, it’s called in to a hotline, and as soon as possible, volunteers are deployed to the area to document the action, inform victims of their rights (often by simply yelling through a megaphone), and through mass participation expel ICE from the community.
It’s difficult to estimate how many people have been in the streets at any given moment. The response to the ICE raids has been dispersed, with some demonstrations bringing out thousands and some a few hundred. The dispersed nature of the protests is likely due in part to LA’s vastness geographically (hampered further by the shutdown of Metro stations near downtown and police blockades of the DTLA neighborhoods), but it’s also a result of the intentional mobilization of community forces to places where ICE raids are happening in order to prevent them from arresting and disappearing people.
For example, on June 7, the working-class suburb of Paramount faced a major ICE raid at a meat-packing plant. Thousands of locals and extended community members turned out to the general area to protest, which resulted in the ICE forces eventually having to leave the area, while more than two dozen workers holed up in the break room were able to get into their cars and leave safely. In Compton, South Central, Pico Rivera, and the Northeast, similar defensive protests have unfolded. In the relatively-affluent and conservative suburbs of Pasadena and Glendale, cacerolazos (protests by banging pots) are held outside the hotels where federal agents sleep.
Republicans and Dems vs. the working class
What’s happening in the city is not just the Trump administration attempting to make good on its campaign promise of mass deportations; neither is it an attempt to push the limits of Trump’s own power against the “democratic” institutions of the state (the courts, public offices, etc). Mainstream media portrays a feud between the Democrats and Republicans over democracy, states rights, and more, but in practice, both parties work hand in glove together to exploit the working class and enforce the capitalist wage system. Weeks before the raids unfolded, California Governor Gavin Newsom championed a Supreme Court ruling that criminalizes houselessness, a tremendous social issue in a state with the third highest cost of living index in the country. In LA County, 75,000 people sleep on the streets every night.
LA’s Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, while rhetorically blaming the Trump administration for the chaos of the raids, publicly called on the community to come together to clean up the streets, essentially feeding the false narrative that largely peaceful protesters have caused destruction in DTLA. When asked why LAPD and LAC Sheriffs have broken local sanctuary policy by facilitating the ICE raids, Bass openly lied and claimed that the police were only involved in city business, such as managing traffic in affected areas. Seeking to crush the movement, after four days of protests, the mayor issued a curfew for downtown LA, and on the first night, 225 people were arrested before sundown. On subsequent nights, dozens were arrested before the curfew even went into effect.
Bass’s priority has never been to stop the attacks on the immigrant community or protect human dignity, let alone the economy and basic functioning of the city. In a time when many public officials have been publicly roughed up and arrested for questioning the thugs of ICE, Mayor Bass is well aware of the heinous acts happening on the streets she plays at shepherding.
Organize the working class!
Repression of the uprising in the streets has long been in effect, and with each passing day the movement transforms and renews itself. At the same time, the government is gathering information on individuals and groups through its mass surveillance apparatus. Republicans have sent letters of inquiry to several movement organizations that accuse them of paying protesters, a ludicrous accusation meant to remind us of the McCarthyite and civil rights era, when the state wantonly jailed and murdered movement leaders.
In order to fight back and defend our class, we have to out-organize the capitalist state and its repressive forces. The brutality of the police is meant to deter working-class people from participating; it’s meant to keep us home and afraid. The rich history of struggle against dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, and the Black liberation and Chicano struggles in the U.S., show us that organizations with experienced members have an important protective role to play in planning and leading mobilizations, providing aid of all kinds to those in the streets, and in the strategic direction of the movement.
Now is the time for revolutionaries, labor unions, and community organizations to come together in united-front coalitions with true democratic functioning. Our revolutionary organizations must also cultivate class consciousness through our own education, and sustain the morale of the movement through collective care and politicized social events. These important qualitative features are also needed to prevent infiltration, disruption, and destruction—such as the war waged on the Black Panther Party and other groups through the FBI’s COINTELPRO program in the 1960s and ’70s.
Through continuous organizing to broaden the movement, the development of political leadership in our organizations, collective care, and staying in the streets, Los Angeles will show working people what resistance to authoritarianism looks like.
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