ICE Raids in Los Angeles Are a Declaration of War, and Angelenos Are Primed for Battle
Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent the city a message when its agents showed up in full force, and that message was responded to in kind by the people of LA.
Tina Vásquez, Prism
This story was originally published on Prism.
Every immigration raid is a tragedy in slow motion, unfolding over time and across generations. When the agents arrive in plainclothes or with their faces hidden to pull day laborers out of parking lots, workers out of factories, children out of elementary schools, families from their court hearings — to rip out the bedrock of a place and plunder the community of its beloveds — it has nothing to do with the law or following orders or criminal histories or even the White House. It’s personal, like a hate crime. Unforgivable, like a genocide.
Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in Los Angeles, an American city unlike any other. To be an immigrant or the child of an immigrant in LA is to be bestowed with a badge of honor. Within city limits, there is an unspoken understanding that you are the lifeblood of this place — and that our place and our people must be defended at all costs.
This is a tidy way to explain why you are watching the children of immigrants run wild and free in the streets of LA, waving a Mexican flag with one hand and willing to throw a rock with the other. In other cities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carries out raids in secret, posing as workers in white vans to nab our fathers or surreptitiously lingering in a hallway to kidnap our primas. ICE sent the city of Los Angeles a message when its agents showed up in full force and in broad daylight, and that message was responded to in kind by the people.
The violence that will likely follow the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard is, in a way, inevitable. ICE raids anywhere are an affront to the fundamental human rights of migrants; ICE raids in LA are a declaration of war. After all, what city could the Trump administration hate more than LA, and what people could be more willing — or better primed — to go toe to toe with the full force of the federal government? Our communities are composed of people who traversed borderlands with nothing more than a backpack, successfully fleeing civil wars, political persecution, dictatorships, state violence, and their own futures — and we are their children.
When you are an Angeleno and this is your lineage, you are fully aware of what local law enforcement is capable of: the beatings, the killings, the rapes, the cover-ups, the deputy gangs that operate as an open secret in communities of color. There is no end to the depravity, so when the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attempts to distance itself from the raids, saying in a statement that the agency is “not involved in civil immigration enforcement,” you know better. Footage posted by the LA abolitionist organization People’s City Council appears to show LAPD officers outside an apparel manufacturer in the Fashion District as a raid unfolded. But more than that, you also know the risk when you join a protest, however agitated, impromptu, or peaceful. The same agency that purports not to engage in immigration enforcement is more than happy to show up in riot gear to pummel residents protecting their immigrant neighbors. Welcome to the progressive city of Los Angeles, where the contradictions are only surprising to outsiders.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency with an Office of Public Affairs that is particularly propagandistic under the leadership of Secretary Kristi Noem, is already hard at work setting the stage for the Trump administration’s military invasion of LA. A Sunday morning press release from DHS alleged that ICE detained the “worst of the worst illegal alien criminals in Los Angeles.”
More broadly, you’re going to hear a lot of noise from politicos and talking heads on your news feeds, instructing the people of LA not to take the bait of the Trump administration’s provocation or otherwise priming the public to see fires and “foreign flags” as justification for military force and the use of rubber bullets, flash bangs, tear gas, or worse. But you cannot let yourself listen to people who couldn’t point to Paramount on a map; people who aren’t from immigrant LA or otherwise don’t think of our communities outside of visits for “authentic” food with their out-of-state friends. These are the same people who spit out the word “riot” only to later position themselves as experts on the “uprising,” the passage of time allowing them to pretend they were always on the right side of history.
Like most wars, the Battle of Los Angeles is a show of unequal force. Funded by millions in taxpayer dollars, military troops are strapping on their tactical gear and grabbing their weapons of war, awaiting orders against skater kids armed with little more than rocks and fireworks, who have committed the great crime of impeding traffic while fighting fascism.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum to deploy 2,000 National Guards members to LA. The next day, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s deputy director of communications, Diana Crofts-Pelayo, said there were already about 300 California National Guard Troops across three sites in the city.
“They were deployed on the ground after President Bone Spurs claimed they saved the day,” Crofts-Pelayo told LAist. Newsom announced Monday that California plans to sue Trump over the deployment.
It’s an extraordinary abuse of the law for Trump to invoke a section of the Armed Forces Act that allows him to bypass Newsom’s authority over the National Guard, marking the first time since 1965 that a president is sending troops into a state without a request from the governor. This is a calculated and strategic decision by the Trump administration to turn LA into a test case for quashing political dissent.
And like many audacious, power-hungry leaders before him, Trump has vastly underestimated his adversaries.
Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
Tina Vásquez is a journalist with more than a decade of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, gender, food, labor, and culture. Currently she is the features editor at Prism and she serves on the board of Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation.
