June 9, 2025

By Victor Artavia

“It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime

What better place than here, what better time than now?

All hell can’t stop us now”

Guerrilla Radio, Rage Against the Machine

Los Angeles has been a battlefield since last Friday (6th). Fed up with Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant raids, the Latino community has taken to the streets, directing their fury at federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

Street barricades, burning patrol cars, and Mexican flags flying proudly throughout the city—these are some of the powerful images emerging from this popular uprising against ‘la migra’ in defense of ‘la raza’ (Chicano-Mexican terms for immigration agents and the community, respectively).

Meanwhile, the U.S. government did not hesitate to respond with authoritarian tactics that not only target the protests but also undermine legal processes and deepen institutional conflicts across the United States.

Trump’s Immigrant Hunt

Xenophobia is a central ideological point of the MAGA movement. For this reason, since Trump returned to the White House, he has adopted a series of measures to persecute immigrants regardless of their immigration status. All it takes is having ‘Latino’ features to be marked for deportation by la migra.

For example, he started overhauling federal immigration enforcement apparatus and those in Republican-controlled states to ramp up city raids and streamline mass deportations.

ICE Director Todd Lyons cynically summarized this approach, saying the agency should operate ‘like Amazon, but with human beings.’ The Trump administration’s far-right logic mirrors fascism: using rational methods to achieve irrational goals—in this case, expelling millions based on nationality.”

In addition to this, the White House invoked the “Alien Enemies Act” as the legal framework for its deportation campaign. Thus, it gave immigration authorities free rein not to worry about proving the accusations they use for detentions, said law empowers the government to detain and deport foreigners without due process.

On the other hand, for several months there had been speculation that ICE was going to increase the internal hunt for migrants. As we pointed out in a previous article, the tightening of immigration measures caused a decrease in the passage of undocumented people through the border with Mexico. In view of this, immigration authorities had to increase internal pressure to reach the goal of one million deportations that the government established for 2025.

The Raid That Broke the Camel’s Back

The above brings us to Los Angeles, more precisely to the Home Depot parking lot located on Alondra Boulevard. This place is a recognized gathering center for immigrant day laborers, where each day they usually wait patiently to be hired by some businessman.

But this weekend, they were surprised by a white van, from which a group of undercover agents with no visible identification suddenly got out and proceeded to randomly detain several of the day laborers.

What started as another routine immigration raid became the spark for a new wave of resistance against government repression. Months of fear among migrants across the United States transformed into rage against Trump’s xenophobic administration.

In the months leading up to this, growing grassroots discontent had been building. The April 5th Hands Off! mobilization brought over 600,000 people into the streets defending women’s rights, LGBTIQ+ communities, immigrants, as well as in support of federal workers’ demands.

Likewise, according to a survey from that same month published by The Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos, 53% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s management on immigration issues (a 3-point jump from February).

The Los Angeles revolt is the local expression of the unrest that spreads nationally among the migrant population. When federal agents entered Latino communities and randomly detained 118 migrants while they were working in factories, clothing stores and businesses, the community’s immediate response was to collectively prevent the detention of their friends, relatives and coworkers.

A ‘spontaneous’ response that actually reflects a collective processing of the first four months under the Trump administration. “What to do when la migra comes for us?” —this question had undoubtedly been discussed around countless family dinner tables, workplaces, or community gatherings.

Likewise, in Los Angeles there are large unions that bring together thousands of workers of Latino origin. This is the case of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) which, since last year, contributed its organizational structure for the establishment of rapid response networks to immigration raids.

All of this allowed for the constitution of a social fabric and prior organizational experience that, faced with the attack by ICE federal agents, served as a support point for resistance. According to a video from “Unión por el barrio” circulating on social networks, the community’s reaction allowed for the release of migrant workers who were detained inside factories and businesses.

Despite the protests, immigration agents continued with the raids during the following days. But this did not intimidate the protesters, who maintained the mobilizations and rapid responses to free those detained.

“We’re not afraid of you,” was the shout from John Parker, one of the demonstrators, toward the federal agents and police. “Fuck ICE” and “Death to all cops” were several of the slogans painted on buildings and walls around the protests, according to The Guardian. 

Our reports from Los Angeles indicate that organizations and communities are organizing to prevent the police from “kidnapping” the demonstrators, a word that denotes the migrant population’s contempt toward ICE, whose actions are seen as illegal and, therefore, the detentions they carry out are categorized as kidnappings and not arrests.

It’s too early to tell if protests will spread nationally, but so far repression has not made the movement retreat and solidarity actions are being reported in many places throughout Los Angeles.

Another visible aspect of the demonstrations is the vindication of oppressed nations within the United States. As we pointed out at the beginning of the text, there are many images where Mexican flags (and also from other Central American countries) can be seen leading the mobilizations or waving on the barricades, a powerful gesture for migrant workers who, for many years, were treated as second-class citizens because of their nationality, languages or skin color.

In fact, one of the epicenters of the protests is the community of Paramount, a county whose population is predominantly Latino. Of its 51,000 inhabitants, 82% are of Latino origin and 36% were born abroad. Additionally, in 71% of households, languages other than English are spoken.

Trump’s Authoritarian Response

Trump’s response was swift and predictable. He declared that “a great American city, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals.” This is war rhetoric, which serves him to justify his intentions to use the armed forces for migrant detention.

Technically, the U.S. government cannot use the army to handle internal affairs, as stipulated by the “Posse Comitatus Act.” For this reason, the White House had been considering the possibility of resorting to the “Insurrection Act” for several months, with which it could circumvent this constitutional restriction.

Trump did exactly that over the weekend, seizing control of the state’s National Guard  and deploying two thousand guards to, in his own words, “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion and put an end to these disturbances.”

This hadn’t happened for six decades, since President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to the state of Alabama in 1965 to protect civil rights demonstrators.

For this reason, Trump’s move has triggered an intense political debate in the United States, since the mobilization of the National Guard without state authorization is an authoritarian measure that challenges the legal order of things from the right. In fact, the president even threatened to arrest California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, due to his criticism of the White House for mobilizing the Guard, which Trump labeled “incendiary.”

The Streets Against the Power 

The popular semi-rebellion in Los Angeles confirms that the world is richer than it appears when watching the news or reading newspapers—media saturated with Trump’s bluster and elite geopolitical power struggles.  Although the polarization is asymmetric and the political climate in the United States is deeply reactionary, there’s still life from below, and the class struggle continues.

Trump’s actions resemble those of the sorcerer’s apprentice—chaotically and recklessly attempting  to abruptly change the order of things; he wants to configure a new world in the image and likeness of his political fantasies. But societies are living organisms, and they can explode in the face of constant attacks from those above.

Dialectical reversibility remains a real possibility in the current stage. Reactionary and authoritarian attacks can trigger opposing responses from below.

This is exactly what the migrant community’s struggle demonstrates. With support from unions and other supportive social movements, they’re confronting Trump’s reactionary offensive in the streets.

The revolutionary left must remember this lesson to position itself in the current world without falling into one-sided analyses that inevitably lead to pessimism and skepticism regarding class struggle.

Traslated by Frankie Baldioli