As the Trump administration continues to escalate its aggressive attack on immigrants across the country, working-class communities have been left on their own to defend themselves. As the Democrats continue to offer little more than feckless words of opposition, the protests in Los Angeles have shown that the so-called guardrails to this administration — the courts, the constitution, Congress — are ineffective in limiting Trump’s authoritarian overreach. In fact, the intensification of assaults on immigrant communities has made clear that there are no guardrails in their system. The only guardrails are us — the organized masses of working people, standing up and standing together in our communities to keep each other safe.
These raids in Los Angeles come after weeks of similar attacks in other areas of California and around the country. A week earlier, some two dozen masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents dressed in tactical gear in armored vehicles, descended on a residential area of downtown San Diego, CA, and raided a restaurant, arresting 19 workers. People in the neighborhood quickly responded and surrounded the officers and their vehicles in protest. ICE agents fired flash-bang grenades to disperse the crowd, and were able to get away and make some arrests. Over the past several weeks, ICE has been increasingly confronted by organized crowds of protestors all across the country from Minneapolis to Chicago to Ohio, and now in Los Angeles, the second largest city in the country, with one of the largest immigrant populations.
Leading up to the workplace raids on Friday, ICE agents arrested many immigrants as they voluntarily came to scheduled, routine appearances at courthouses up and down the state, tearing apart families, arresting adults and children.
All of this came to a head last Friday, as ICE agents descended on several working class areas of downtown and central Los Angeles, areas known for their large immigrant working-class populations, with workplaces that employ mostly immigrant workers. ICE targeted workers at several clothing companies in the downtown Fashion District, at Home Depot stores, where day laborers gather looking for work, and several other businesses throughout L.A. Workers were often snatched and dragged away into unmarked vans without any warnings or verification of their identity. ICE arrested 118 people last week alone on supposed immigration charges, according to the Department of Homeland Security. These raids were a clear provocation of communities in Los Angeles, likely intended to make an example of communities that resist.
And none of these raids happened without resistance. Local immigrant rights groups responded quickly, alerting their networks, and successfully calling out hundreds of protestors to assemble at several ICE raid locations. The protests had loudspeakers to give legal instructions to those being apprehended by ICE. And the groups attempted to block the ICE vehicles from leaving, and were met with pepper spray and flash-bang grenades.
Later Friday evening, hundreds of protestors went to the ICE detention center in Downtown Los Angeles, where many of those arrested by ICE were being processed for fast-tracked deportations, with 200 people packed into a facility built to hold only 100. The hundreds of protestors gathering outside the facility, chanting “Set them free,” were soon declared an illegal gathering and were attacked by L.A. police in riot gear with rubber bullets and tear gas. At one point, the president of California’s biggest union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was standing around and tackled by ICE agents and arrested, and sent to the hospital for his injuries. Protests continued throughout the night with clashes with the police, who made over 100 arrests.
On Saturday morning, militarized ICE agents were spotted gathering across from another Home Depot location, this time in the largely immigrant and Black, working-class neighborhood of Paramount in southeastern Los Angeles. As news spread on social media of another raid, hundreds of protesters from the local neighborhoods soon began to gather, honking horns and chanting at the ICE agents, and successfully preventing them from attempting any raid.
As ICE officers tried to leave in their vehicles, waving batons and firing tear gas and rubber bullets, they were met by makeshift barricades, rocks, and bottles from the majority Latino and Black youth who filled the streets. The clashes continued throughout the day and into the evening, spreading into neighboring cities, including Compton, Long Beach, and Inglewood — all majority Black and Latino working-class neighborhoods. By the end of the night, law enforcement pulled back from some of these areas, leaving to the sound of angry chants: “Fuck ICE — Stay out of L.A.!”
As news spread and footage circulated of smashed law enforcement vehicles and outnumbered ICE agents, and lots of anti-ICE and anti-Trump graffiti, President Trump took to social media, denouncing the protests, and announcing he was sending in 2,000 National Guard troops from the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, the largest combat unit in the California Army National Guard, despite the stern and very public objection from both the Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, and the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom. The Trump administration had declared the ICE resistance an insurrection and once again stretched the limits of the law.
By Sunday, hundreds of armed National Guard troops were spotted outside the ICE facility in Los Angeles, for another day of protests and police clashes all over the city. Throughout the day hundreds of protestors clashed with police on a major freeway in downtown Los Angeles, lighting a law enforcement vehicle on fire. In other areas protestors fought with police, lit a few driverless Waymo cars on fire, and faced teargas, rubber bullets, and arrest. It was a day of widespread resistance to the police, reminiscent of the days following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, and the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police who brutalized Rodney King.
By Monday morning, Trump had repeatedly warned he was planning to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would grant further sweeping powers, including the ability to deploy the military, institute martial law, impose curfews, and suppress the right to protest. The administration has already sent 700 active duty Marines to deploy to Los Angeles, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to send more Marines from another base in Southern California. Ordering these militarized ICE raids has now become the pretext to send the military into Los Angeles.
As the Trump administration carries out a blatant transfer of wealth to billionaires, by slashing social services and eliminating many departments and programs that provide some assistance to the working class, he has escalated his very public attack on immigrants, trying to use these attacks as a wedge to divide the working class, and as a provocation for a more militarized response. He repeats the lies that immigrants are criminals who suck up the resources of communities. None of this is true. Immigrants are workers, essential to the day-to-day functioning of the society. They have lived here for years, many for decades, working, raising families, often doing the most difficult and exploitative work in the country. They are grandparents, mothers, fathers, and children. They are not criminals. They are part of the working class.
These raids only serve to terrorize immigrant communities, to try to intimidate immigrant workers, to increase their vulnerability, and ultimately to increase their exploitation.
At the same time, the administration is trying to suppress all forms of dissent. There is no question that the decision to rely on armed ICE agents with armored vehicles to carry out highly publicized raids — now backed by the National Guard and the Marines — has the sole purpose to frighten people into submission, to try to get us to accept a generalize state of repression. Trump has made it very clear that he would like to arrest, round up and deport citizens in addition to immigrants — anyone who refuses to accept this blatant authoritarian rule of the billionaire class.
There is only one thing that stands in the way of their agenda. It is not the Democratic Party and the politicians and all of their empty threats and promises. It is not the courts with their drawn-out cases that end up going nowhere in appeal. It is us. No one is coming to save us. It is the working class that is under attack by this administration. It is the working class that has every reason to stand together and resist these attacks. And it is the working class — who does all of the work to make this system run — that has the power to stand together to resist these attacks.
These protests over the last few days in Los Angeles have shined a light on the violence of this system. These raids violently rip apart families. They go after workers living the most difficult lives in society. And they often target communities that have been abandoned and hollowed out, where young people, disproportionately Black and Latino, cities with many immigrant families, face uncertain futures, regularly terrorized by the police, facing a system of racism and violence. But many of these are also communities that have resisted, and stood up to law enforcement before.
The Los Angeles protests have shown the potential for a way to stand up. If we can unite our forces, bringing together all of the working class communities that are under attack — including the attacks on immigrants, on trans people, on Palestinians, on those impacted by the travel bans, the attacks on education, our health care, our libraries, and more — united together, we can fight back. As protests continue, spread to other cities, now is the time to unite our forces, and bring all of our various struggles together in defense of immigrants. If we can stand together in defense of immigrants, and refuse to let them divide us, we can push back against Trump and this whole rotten system that is designed to exploit us.
