An estimated 5 million people around the country marched in Saturday’s No Kings protests. The marches in Los Angeles drew crowds of around 200,000, and were overwhelmingly peaceful. However, once the “official” protest drew to a close around 4 p.m., officers of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s departments began to violently repress the demonstrators who remained out, even though the previously issued curfew did not go into effect until 8 p.m. Covering their advance with rubber bullets and tear gas, crowds of demonstrators were forcefully broken up by police in full riot gear or mounted on horseback. Yet Trump and Congressional Republicans have made statement after statement condemning the violence of the protestors, calling them rioters, insurrectionists, and terrorists.
Over the past weeks, many media outlets have breathlessly reported verbatim police statements claiming that officers are under assault, that they are simply doing their jobs and are under constant, unprovoked attack from violent agitators and radicals. If that is the case, as others have asked, where are the images? It is already known that CBP-operated MQ-9 Reaper drones (notorious for their ubiquity in US operations in Africa and the Middle East) were in the skies above LA during protests in the past weeks, surely they must have gotten some evidence of widespread, unprovoked attacks on officers? Police were outnumbered by protestors in every city, and despite the best efforts of Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, LA was no exception. Where is the body camera footage showing what both Republicans and Democrats alike claim is a uniquely violent situation requiring hundreds of officers and tens of millions of dollars in public funds? The truth is that it is not protestors rioting, or “foreign invaders” destroying the city and engaging in unprovoked violence. It is the officers who are rioting. It is the officers who are burning through so many so-called “less lethal” munitions that they require resupply flown in on Black Hawk helicopters.
And to Trump’s point, there has been an invasion occurring in the city of Los Angeles and other cities around the country. It is exactly that which Angelenos have been in the streets protesting, that their city is under siege, just not by over-exploited immigrants seeking to improve their lives. It is a federal invasion, undertaken first by ICE and DHS, then reinforced by National Guardsmen and Marines. None of what is happening on the streets of LA would have occurred were it not for ICE agents, almost always masked and often fully equipped in combat gear, barging into homes, schools, and job sites, abducting people and whisking them off to prisons on the other side of the country.
Doesn’t it all sound a bit familiar? That one side, armed to the teeth, set upon occupying people and forcing repression and unpopular policies down their throats, would cry out when those same people refuse to have their lives and communities torn apart? That when people dare to express the anger built up after years of racism and injustice, the occupying power responds with brutal, indiscriminate force, claiming that it is only acting in self-defense? We should not forget that this government’s latest campaign of street abductions began by targeting students protesting Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The issues of immigrants’ rights in the U.S. and Palestinian rights in the territories occupied by Israel may seem distinct, but they are in fact very much linked and intertwined.
For decades, U.S. law enforcement agencies, including LAPD and ICE, have sent officers to train with their counterparts in Israel. They bring back with them not just counter-terrorism strategies (which are often rooted in flawed, racist perceptions of Palestinians and transferred onto black and brown Americans), but technologies meant to surveil the population. One example is “a drone called the HoverMast, made by the Israeli company Spy Sapience, which can intercept wireless communications and is capable of facial recognition.” Israeli spyware firms are also heavily involved in equipping border enforcement agencies in the U.S. and Mexico.
Although they are taking place thousands of miles from each other, the repression of immigrants at the border and within the country is inextricably linked to the brutal, U.S.-backed, Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Up to now, however, the movement supporting immigrants and the movement for Palestinian rights have been separate. But the fight against these two repressions is just that: one fight. We must look for ways to link the two into a movement that can really oppose the war machine, both at home and abroad.
