A Blueprint on How To Fight Against Ice Includes Community
These ‘neighbors from the hood’ saw ICE terrorizing their community—and banded together to fight back.
After seeing friends and neighbors in their community of Pasadena, CA, being terrorized, assaulted, and abducted by masked federal agents, Daniela Navin and Jeannette De la Riva joined together with other neighbors in their area to form Grupo Auto Defensa and fight back. From chasing ICE cars out of town with bullhorns to setting up security brigades so terrified residents can walk outside and go to the grocery store, from providing know-your-rights information to reclaiming public space, protecting each other, and rebelliously refusing to live in fear, the members of Grupo Auto Defensa are defending their community when no one else will. In this crossover episode of Working People, recorded with Professor David Palumbo-Liu and the Speaking Out of Place podcast, The Real News Network editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Daniela Navin and Jeannette De la Riva to discuss the origins of Grupo Auto Defensa and the power of grassroots resistance in the face of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on immigrant communities and the rule of law.
Maximillian Alvarez: Grupo Auto Defensa is a totally grassroots group formed organically by a collection of neighbors from “the hood” as they describe it, who all saw the fascist terror spreading in their community and decided to stand up together and do something about it.
I’m so incredibly grateful to Professor David Palumbo-Liu for having me, Daniela Navin and Jeannette De la Riva on the show, and for lifting up their vital, powerful voices.
I’ve been going home practically every year minus some of the COVID years for the last 20 years since I left when I was 18. And there’s so many familiar things and feelings and sights of going home that just always put my body and soul in a different mode. And it’s like a different part of you reawakens when you’re back in the surround that you were raised in. And I still felt that. But I’ll be honest with you, coming home has never felt the way it did a couple of weeks ago.
If you’re from there, you can start to notice the differences. But on the surface, everything looks the same. But then you start noticing that the parks that are normally filled with kids are so quiet, that the food trucks you’re used to seeing are gone. It’s details like that.
Pasadena specifically is an area that was just battered by incredible wildfires in January. The Eaton fire was blazing through Pasadena while the Palisades fire was blazing just a couple miles away.
There’s so much debris that’s been cleared, but there’s still so much ruins of the former Pasadena there. And in fact, so many immigrants were the ones clearing away that debris months after the fire. And now these are the people who are being taken away. These are the people who can’t leave their homes because they’re terrified of getting kidnapped in broad daylight by masked, unidentified armed thugs. No one knows if they’re agents of the state, no one knows if they’re bounty hunters. No one knows if they’re vicious impersonators who are abducting people to kill, rape, whatever. No one knows.
And this is the situation that the Trump administration has actively and deliberately created in our homes. And it was just so apparent that the scale of the problem was not being matched by the institutional responses from local government, from unions, nonprofits, but where it is being matched with force, with determination, with creativity is from working people like Jeannette and Daniela and their neighbors. And that is an incredible thing.
David Palumbo-Liu: So what has been going down that put this community into high gear in terms of people getting to know each other and stepping in?
Jeannette De la Riva: When this happened for me is when Elizabeth started just going down the street where I live with her horn and just yelling out “ICE is here.” So that’s when I just came out the window and just started asking her like, “what’s going on?” So she told me. So that’s when I was like, okay, this is not going to happen. Not in our hometown. And I think Daniela felt almost the same way.
In the morning before I go to work, we go patrol usually. If my kids are up for it, they’ll be tagging along too. Where everything happens, we start recording, taking pictures. And it’s been tiring. It takes a lot of energy out just trying to be out there. But I love it. I love being out there. I love standing out there with the Grupo Auto Defensa. It’s like a big family that we have that we’re all sticking together.
Daniela Navin: Checking in with each other more, supporting each other. I may not know you, but we’re all a part of the same struggle. We’re all looking for something. It’s strengthened community. And I never thought that I would be the person that would be chasing these masked men and scared shitless.
The amount of people that have stopped us in our corner to tell us that they’re scared to leave but because we’re there, they feel safe, they feel like people are watching their back.
And that’s our little corner. So we’re protecting it. We have eyes in our corner, so we can respond to things. I patrol in the morning. I wake up early, I get myself ready for work, I patrol, and then after patrol I help set up our little corner and then I go to work. And then after work, I come back to our little corner. So we are all just together.
Palumbo-Liu: Tell us what you think allows for this kind of violence to go on over and over again, and how a lot of Americans just are buying the distortions they hear and listen to. What kinds of things need to be corrected that are wrong?
Navin: One of the constant things that I’m seeing online or some of the criticism that I have faced, even with my own family: if they done it “the right way,” they wouldn’t be in this, or they wouldn’t be criminals. I just want to emphasize that the immigration process is long. It’s expensive.
And then you have the notion of we’re the criminals. But then you do have criminals that are in the White House and you have the exoneration of January Sixers.
I’m not trying to exaggerate here. I’m not trying to say this is Nazi Germany, but the threat of being deported has always existed in our family, and it’s always been this idea that this could happen. But what I’m seeing now, it feels like rapid fire. It could happen to you. It could happen to your city. I never thought this would happen in my backyard, and it took that happening down the street for me to engage with my community in the way that I haven’t engaged with it before.
De la Riva: I think that Daniela did say mostly everything that I was about to say. When they snatch people out their car, or breaking their windows or just grabbing them, brute forcing and just throwing them on the floor. I’ve seen some people getting hit by the batons when they’re not doing nothing. They’re just scared of their life. These are humans.
What about if that was their family getting taken away? That was your family’s getting hit, what were you going to do? I get mad and I cry.
Navin: And just to add what Jeannette was saying, they’re showing up without warrants. They’re showing up and just kidnapping people. I think we as an American should have an expectation that we should be able to walk down the street regardless of the color of our skin, what we do for a living, the language that we speak and not be grabbed off the street.
There is that expectation of having due process. What is happening to them when they are taken, how long are they taken for? What are the conditions? And I think that people just don’t realize that it’s the lasting trauma of being taken, the impact to the community. We’re always on the defense. We’re always in distress. I feel like I can’t sleep. We’re restless, we can’t turn it off. We’re just thinking about when is the shit going to hit the fan? If things are quiet, what’s going to happen?
Alvarez: In terms of correcting the narrative, there’s almost too much to correct because the narrative is so patently false and full of lies and bullshit. People are believing it either because their brain has become so addled by the internet or right wing media or in all this conspiracy theory crap or just homegrown plain old racism.
Our lives have gotten harder. Cost of living has gotten higher. All the sort of economic factors that have made people increasingly more desperate and thus more willing to buy into the kind of fascist grift that Donald Trump is selling. There are a myriad of reasons why people may believe the lies that they’re being fed, but to just really drive home some of the basic corrections that Daniela and Jeannette already did beautifully: that people should just be coming in and immigrating “the right way” and following the process.
Family after family is being broken apart through this process that is going so unnoticed because it’s not as dramatic as ICE abducting people in the middle of the street, but they’re doing it in immigration courts all over the damn country. And that feeds into the other point. I do not use the term fascist lightly. I use it very deliberately.
I do want to be clear, it is also very true that this is not just happening to Latinos and people who look like Latinos. I’ve been to immigration courts like the one in Santa Ana where you’re also getting folks of East Asian descent. You’re getting Haitian immigrants. It really is a full on assault on immigrants as such.
But of course, especially in a place like Southern California, that is just so full of different Latinos from different parts of Latin America, and you have a government that’s trying to meet this ghoulish quota from Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 people a day — you don’t have that many warrants. You don’t have that many criminals to get. You’re only going to meet that quota by racially profiling people like they are doing in Pasadena, like they did in Santa Ana with Narciso Barranco, a landscaper who’s lived here for over 30 years, was just doing his job.
We are not the worst of the worst. We are not these hardened criminals. We are human beings like you and me, and we have every goddamn right to be here just like you do. We’re trying to make a life for ourselves and our families, and that is the American dream that we still believe in. And in fact, we’re going to fight harder for it than our parents did for us. And it’s up to us. We’re the adults now, and I am following the lead of incredible folks like Daniela and Jeannette, Elizabeth, Chewy, everyone there in Pasadena and everyone out there who is fighting the fight in their own way. You guys give me inspiration and I know that if we keep fighting and if we keep fighting together, we can get through this.
This episode of the Working People Podcast was originally published on August 19.
