It’s been glorious to see: after months of terror at the hands of Donald Trump’s immigration agents, people have finally started fighting back.
Earlier this month, armed thugs from the hated Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) invaded Los Angeles in a campaign to round up (read: kidnap) hundreds of undocumented workers, all part of Trump’s campaign of mass deportation. Trump’s stated goal is to arrest 3,000 “illegals” a day, and he’s been deliberately targeting sanctuary cities run by Democrats in order to stoke fear and further politicize his white-nationalist anti-immigrant policies. For example, in Massachusetts alone, 1,500 people have been abducted by ICE since January.
But it did not go to plan in LA. On a Friday morning, ICE thugs rolled up on a Home Depot parking lot in Paramount, a predominantly Latinx suburb, harassing and detaining some of the day laborers who regularly gather there. Members of the community spread the alarm and rapidly amassed to confront the agents. Similar scenes took place at an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in downtown LA, where one of the arrestees was David Huerta, president of the state SEIU union. This blatantly political arrest further aroused community outrage.
The protests quickly spread and grew, and soon ICE goons were being pelted with rocks and garbage and chased out of the targeted communities. At the Federal Building, where a huge crowd gathered to demand the release of those arrested, ICE agents were kettled by an angry mob and had to be rescued by police.
LA is a historically rebellious and combative urban center, with the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and the Rodney King riots of 1992 just two of the more famous flashpoints of resistance to the racist establishment.
The protests electrified LA and over the weekend a more widespread uprising broke out, fuelled by months and years of anger and resentment against la migra. When Trump overrode convention and deployed the National Guard and then the Marines against the wishes of California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, the protests only grew bigger and more audacious. Massive crowds of demonstrators repelled attacks from cops and troopers armed with tear gas and rubber bullets. La raza danced to Tejano and mariachi and celebrated with fireworks amid burning cop cars and driverless Waymo vehicles (hated as symbols of big tech and mass surveillance). Slogans like “Chinga la migra” and “Fuck ICE” resounded through the city. The chief of LAPD admitted the department was “overwhelmed.” The flags of Mexico, El Salvador, and other Latin American nations were raised with defiant pride against the grotesque white nationalism of Trump and MAGA.
Coming at a time when fear and despair have pervaded the broad left and the country as a whole, these events have taught a valuable and inspiring lesson: that mass resistance to ICE and to Trump is possible.
Collective anger explodes
Resistance to ICE did not begin in LA. In the days and weeks prior, videos circulated of protesters bravely confronting ICE thugs in Minneapolis, Phoenix, and San Diego, among other places. But the LA uprising has marked a watershed, intensifying the anti-ICE movement around the country. In an echo of the rapid spread of the George Floyd Rebellion in 2020, solidarity protests and actions have taken place in dozens of cities. Anti-ICE slogans dominated the massive “No Kings” rallies this past weekend, sharpening the politics of the millions of protesters who hit the streets nationwide, in contrast to the tired liberalism and Democratic electioneering coming from the front.
The militancy of some of these protests is putting undeniable pressure on ICE’s activities. In Spokane, Washington, protesters blocked a gate at a detention facility and successfully prevented a deportation. In video shot at an action in Tuscon, Arizona, protesters are seen going on the offensive, forming a line of improvised shields and driving ICE agents away with hurled objects including a metal barricade. In New York, a crowd of hundreds blocked the gate at 26 Federal Plaza so that ICE could not get in or out. At another ICE facility in Newark, New Jersey, captives rioted and took over a wing of the building before four of them escaped.
The broad left should work to ensure the anti-ICE movement spearheads a bigger and deeper wave of resistance against Trump and the entire system that spawned him.
Collective anger at Trump’s goon squads running rampant and terrorizing workers, innocent children, tourists, and political dissidents alike would have spilled over sooner rather than later. It turned out to be Los Angeles that sparked a mass movement, and no wonder. With its long and proud history as an immigrant enclave, especially for Latinx people — around 40 percent of the city’s population is foreign-born — LA is a powerfully emblematic battleground in the larger struggle.
In retrospect it was foolish of Trump and his minions to think they could push around Angelenos without consequence. LA is a historically rebellious and combative urban center, with the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and the Rodney King riots of 1992 just two of the more famous flashpoints of resistance to the racist establishment.
The LA protests have taken the struggle against ICE back into the mainstream after several years of being relegated to the fringe under Biden. One immediate result is that Trump’s immigration policies are now less popular than they were before the protests — an indicator that militant struggle can sway popular opinion. The stepped-up immigration raids and politically motivated arrests of activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Jeanette Vizguerra have been among the most visible symbols of the many outrages of the second Trump administration, alongside the racist, misogynist, and queerphobic hysteria of the reactionary culture war and the many assaults on the public sector. The anti-ICE protests are tapping into a vast reservoir of popular hatred for Trump and everything he represents.
The broad left should work to ensure the anti-ICE movement spearheads a bigger and deeper wave of resistance against Trump and the entire system that spawned him. Time will tell, but such a mass movement seems more possible now than it did even three weeks ago.
Mass militant struggle versus Democratic demobilization
It’s worth noting that the protests, though led by the Latinx community in LA, have been multicultural in nature across the country, with many white and Black protesters standing up for the largely Brown victims of ICE. This multiculturalism is another thing the current movement has in common with the George Floyd Rebellion, and it bodes well for revolutionary organizing. Successive new generations are giving up their investment in the system — or never had any investment to begin with — during a period of increasingly dire economic prospects and overlapping crises from COVID to the climate emergency to the genocide in Gaza.
These waves of radicalization have resulted in a collective memory of resistance, as veterans of previous uprisings have shared and disseminated their strategic and tactical knowledge with those new to struggle. Lessons learned on the frontlines of Portland and Milwaukee in 2020 — for example, how to contain or repel tear gas attacks with leaf blowers, tennis rackets, and traffic cones — are being passed down, refined, and expanded on the streets of Los Angeles and Denver in 2025.
More and more people can see that all our struggles are connected. More and more people are chanting, “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go!”
Of course this collective memory is also increasingly international, and so is the solidarity that goes with it. The flag of Palestine has been consistently flown at anti-ICE protests with that of Mexico; all over the country protesters wear keffiyehs and raise signs and slogans that link the oppression of immigrants and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. A year and a half of Zionist genocide and vicious bipartisan repression of protest against it have resulted in an unprecedented shift in consciousness, which has unquestionably animated the anti-ICE movement. More and more people can see that all our struggles are connected. More and more people are rejecting imperialism and colonialism, the violent and racist logic of borders, and the capitalist system at the root of it all. More and more people are chanting, “From Palestine to Mexico, border walls have got to go!”
In efforts to contain this militancy, the Democrats and their allies in the liberal media have predictably rushed to shame violent resistance and to make the same insipid arguments for nonviolence they always make during moments of heightened rebellion. On Twitter, Bernie Sanders invoked Martin Luther King Jr.:
Dr King defeated racist government officials and ended segregation through disciplined non-violent resistance.
Defeating Trumpism, oligarchy and authoritarianism requires that same level of discipline. Violent protests are counterproductive and play right into Trump’s playbook.
This is especially egregious considering King famously defended riots as “the language of the unheard.” As Marxists we may reject King’s pacifism, but coming from the Democrats this kind of talk is not about ethics, but strictly intended to dampen and demobilize mass movements.
The mass radicalization that has been building in the US since the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in the last decade, and that reached a peak during the George Floyd Rebellion, has led to broader acceptance of rioting and other forms of disruptive and destructive resistance, especially among younger generations. More and more people realize that no progressive reforms ever happen under capitalism without confrontations with the police and other armed agents of the state, from Haymarket to Matewan to Stonewall.
However, the Democratic Party remains a powerful force for shunting mass struggles out of the street and into the voting booth, in the process rendering those struggles harmless. This is one of the main lessons of 2020: the party successfully demobilized a historically massive uprising against police violence in favor of the campaign for Joe Biden, who only increased funding for the police and ICE (not to mention arming and backing the Gaza genocide).
The hypocrisy of the Democrats is even more disgusting when you consider the party’s long-standing support for and enabling of ICE.
The idea that the protests are “playing into Trump’s hands” — giving Trump the excuse he needs for an authoritarian crackdown — must also be rejected. On the contrary, the protests and the mounting popular resistance are the only things keeping ICE in check and making their dirty work more difficult right now — it certainly isn’t the Democrats.
The war of words over the protests between Trump and the Democrats, especially Newsom and the Democratic mayor of LA Karen Bass, highlighted conflict within the bipartisan order and gave voice to Democratic voters’ legitimate fears of Trump’s frightening authoritarianism. But the Democrats are of course no strangers to violent repression themselves, as they capably proved during George Floyd and the Gaza solidarity student encampments. Newsom and Bass’s main complaints with Trump were a lack of consultation and the conviction that they could repress the protests more effectively themselves. Considering his vile crackdown on encampments of the unhoused, Newsom in particular should never be viewed as a defender of human rights.
It’s also worth pointing out the spinelessness of left-leaning Democrats and their supporters in the Democratic Socialists of America in abandoning opposition to ICE under Biden. Amid the horrors of Trump’s first term, the Abolish ICE slogan and movement surged in popularity in the mainstream. DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her seat in the House of Representatives in 2018 in part by campaigning on Abolish ICE in her immigrant-heavy district in Queens and Brooklyn. But during Biden’s campaign and administration she and other Democrats abandoned their radical language and went largely silent on the issue. In 2020, AOC voted to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE’s parent agency — glaring if predictable evidence of her willingness to play by the rules of an irrevocably capitalist and imperialist party. During Trump’s second term she has renewed her vocal opposition to ICE; apparently she can only speak out when a Democrat is not in the White House.
Needless to say, the idea that “Abolish ICE” was too fringe or radical an idea to succeed in the mainstream has been proven shortsighted and foolish lately.
The bipartisan war on immigrants
The hypocrisy of the Democrats is even more disgusting when you consider the party’s long-standing support for and enabling of ICE.
Though ICE is most often associated with Trump’s white-nationalist agenda in the public consciousness, it has been a bipartisan project from the start. ICE was founded by George W. Bush in 2003 along with and as part of the DHS. As our comrades at Puntorojo point out in their excellent commentary on the protests, the foundation of DHS and ICE were closely tied to both the expanding US imperialist project abroad and repression of Muslims and other vilified immigrant groups at home. Over time, ICE grew into an agency with far-reaching powers and little accountability, ready-made for spreading terror and cracking down on political dissent in immigrant communities.
ICE has seen its size and funding expand under each subsequent US president, including Barack Obama and Biden. Obama, the “Deporter-in-Chief,” deported more people and at higher rates than any president before or since, and quietly expanded the immigration-detention facilities — concentration camps — that eventually came to symbolize Trump’s first term. Biden continued deporting at similar rates while expanding the camps, despite the popular outcry against them under Trump. Detention doubled under Biden, and he increased funding of ICE by $800 million.
Trump is a monster, but the rage he’s stirred up in LA is in fact showing his weaknesses.
Democrats and Trumpist Republicans may differ in messaging around immigration, with the former eschewing the overt racism of the latter, but their methods have been much the same.
This history reveals the true nature of the bipartisan oppression of immigrants — and the purpose of borders under capitalism. Though ostensibly conducted in the name of enforcing legal immigration and protecting the interests of US-born workers (especially the white workers who respond positively to the racism of anti-immigrant campaigns, whether dog whistled or overt), in reality it protects the interests of the capitalist class. Whatever they may say in public, capitalists depend on immigrant labor, including undocumented labor, for the cheap wages that facilitate their profit making. But they also need immigrant workers to live in fear so they don’t organize or demand more. Terrorizing, detaining, and deporting a percentage of undocumented workers, while spreading racially stoked animosity toward them among the US population, is an effective way to ensure their compliance and divide the working class along racial and cultural lines.
The result is a system that would collapse if undocumented and other precarious immigrants weren’t there to do the most backbreaking labor, and also singles them out as objects of fear and loathing — the rankest exploitation and hypocrisy.
As Puntorojo puts it:
The state-led attack on the migrant and transnational working class has persisted ever since in a bipartisan manner to use the threat of ICE arrest, detention, and deportation to further segregate, terrorize, and render millions of immigrant workers more vulnerable and precarious. Under these conditions, they are made less able to organize and resist, and more susceptible to higher levels of exploitation, and to enable the extraction from their labor of greater amounts of wealth for the capitalist class.
This has been the status quo for decades; but as he has in many other areas, Trump has destabilized this extractive system with his highly visible, unpopular war on undocumented workers. After complaints from bosses in agriculture and hospitality, last week Trump was obliged to scale back raids on immigrant workers at farms, hotels, and restaurants (before reversing this decision). In a much more highly publicized incident, just yesterday border agents were refused entry to Dodger Stadium by the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and then escorted out by police. This backlash by some bosses is surely a sign of the effectiveness of the mass resistance. Beyond that, it also illustrates that Trump’s belligerent America First agenda is exposing contradictions and conflict within the ruling class.
It’s also becoming clear that, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic and the Gaza genocide, capitalist leaders in the west have taken off the mask and are more willing to set aside democratic norms and human rights and soak themselves in blood in their increasingly desperate efforts to maintain the stability of their profitmaking system and imperialist interests. Trump is merely a malignant symptom of these dystopian developments.
Conclusions
The hostility shown by the people of Los Angeles towards ICE, and their willingness to fight back, are exposing ICE for the bullies and cowards they really are, and encouraging others around the country to pick up the struggle. This is an important breakthrough in a climate of fear and repression.
Many on the left have argued that the US has crossed the threshold into fascism with the second ascendancy of Trump to the Oval Office. Trump’s blitzkrieg on immigrants, the oppressed, and our democratic rights are certainly frightening, and demand all our energy in resisting. But it’s a mistake to equate this period of reaction and instability with fascism. Trump doesn’t have the fascist vigilante street army it would take to smash any and all opposition. If ICE was intended to fill in for that street army, they’ve failed miserably (even if many individual ICE agents are primed and ready for a fascist movement). Nor does suspending democracy make any sense for the capitalist class right now.
Trump is a monster, but the rage he’s stirred up in LA is in fact showing his weaknesses. The more people believe liberals and ultraleftists when they cry fascism, the more afraid they will be of resisting.
The best way we can help defend the workers and oppressed people of Los Angeles in their struggle against ICE is to expand the protests wherever we are and make the struggle a national one — to nationalize the intifada against ICE.
The people outnumber the cops: the working class vastly outnumbers the “special bodies of armed men” that repress them. It’s at those moments in history when workers realize or remember that they have the advantage of numbers — as well as the advantage of collective courage, ingenuity, and solidarity, if they could only see it — that the brutal and bloody system of capitalist exploitation can be shaken.
The best way we can help defend the workers and oppressed people of Los Angeles in their struggle against ICE, and the best way we can resist all of Trump’s outrages, is to continue to expand the protests wherever we are and make the struggle a national one — to nationalize the intifada against ICE, so to speak. A national movement is much harder to crush than a local one.
At this time of heightened struggle, more people see the contradictions and injustices of the US’s brutal border regime. Led by the Democrats, liberals will continue to spread confusion and mixed messaging — shaming militant resistance, fixating on the Constitution or opposition to Trump in the courts, or misguidedly flying the US flag in protest.
As Marxists, we must oppose both Trump’s barbarous war on immigrants and the Democrats, who either have no answer to border violence or actively collaborate in it. It’s more important than ever that we remain uncompromising in our opposition to the entire capitalist and imperialist system, its unnatural and unjust borders, and the violence they bring about daily for the most vulnerable people on our planet. Our slogan has long been and must remain: No borders! No nations! No racist deportations!
