LOS ANGELES—President Donald Trump’s assault on the migrant and immigrant communities of Los Angeles has passed the 100-day mark, syncopated by relentless Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol raids on workplaces and homes. Since June 6, the Trump administration has kidnapped 4,163 people across the L.A. area, according to public data released on Aug. 6.
With the military takeover of the city, via federalized National Guardsmen and Marines, L.A. has become Ground Zero for the current anti-fascist struggle that expanded into Washington D.C., and which is now encroaching on Chicago and other cities.
Chicago saw its first ICE-linked death, with the shooting last Friday of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. He joins the list of three people have already lost their lives in connection with ICE raids and protests in the L.A. area.
Jaime Alanís Garcia was killed in a raid in Ventura County farmland, falling nearly 30 feet to his death. Day laborer Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez was killed in an ICE raid at a Monrovia Home Depot location.
In an act of collaboration with the federal government, L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman charged 71 people with crimes at anti-ICE protests, with one, Adrienne Villa, a resident of the city’s long-standing “Skid Row” homeless neighborhood, receiving 14 charges and an unaffordable $1.33 million bail.
Villa was soon found hanged in her cell in June, only several hours after her arrest, but the details of her death were only disclosed by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in August. She is the first anti-ICE protester to die in police custody.
The FBI also raided and harassed organizers with the Centro Community Service Organization (CSO) in connection with charges filed against Alejandro Orellana, an East L.A. activist who handed out face shields to demonstrators.
Those specific charges were dropped, but state repression is increasing, and strategies and tactics to defend the community on the ground are being shared through the movement and with community members.
One of the key decisions organizers in L.A. made was not to wait for the worst of the immigration raids to start before they began organizing. ICE raids in California began on Jan. 7, when 65 Border Patrol agents arrested 80 farmworkers in Bakersfield. Immediately, groups including Union del Barrio (UdB), United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), Centro CSO, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, and dozens of other organizations formed the Community Self-Defense Coalition (CSDC), announcing themselves in a press conference in February of this year.
The same groups organized the Emergency Southwest Summit Against Deportations in April, which gathered organizers from across the country in L.A.’s historically Chicano-dominated East side to discuss how to defend communities from the current federal raids and terror. Various community organizations and activists formed stronger connections and plans for community defense and education in the face of President Donald Trump’s open ambitions for mass deportations and other actions seen by many as steps to normalize fascism in the U.S.
There was widespread preparation in the wake of the first raids in California, which laid strong foundations that would be activated after June 6. “Know-Your-Rights” trainings for community members, educators, local small businesses, and more were, and still are, a regular occurrence. Community outreach was vital to building proper communication networks between activist-organizers and community members—flyering, tabling, rallies, protests, and more were also organized before June 6.
Federal agencies raided hundreds of locations across the Southland, taking an adversarial role against the city and its residents. Events such as the brief occupation of MacArthur Park one weekday afternoon in July largely seem oriented towards sowing fear in the community and demonstrating the power of the federal government against even the city and state governments of Los Angeles and California.
Since then, as the raids and kidnappings of community members became a daily constant, more groups have developed rapid response networks, community patrols, and legal defense measures. Groups like the Los Angeles branch of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), the Harbor Peace Patrols, and the Long Beach Rapid Response Networks have also developed tactics of community patrols, legal aid, and rapid response to raids which overlap with the activities of the CSDC.
These kinds of tactics have possibly staved off many ICE and Border Patrol kidnapping-style arrests. Many of those detained by Trump’s administration have not been allowed contact with lawyers or family. Others have been denied their basic rights, and sometimes, in effect, disappeared by the state. That’s why organizers in L.A. are often using the term “kidnappings” to describe the sweeps. With the recent Supreme Court decision to lift racial profiling restrictions on ICE and Border Patrol in Los Angeles, activists expect a return to mass kidnappings.
However, thousands of people in L.A. have been mobilized by this attack on theirneighbors and loved ones, and the tactics and organizing happening there could serve as a blueprint for the struggles now happening in the nation’s capital, in Chicago, and elsewhere.
The hope locally is that if the community in Los Angeles organizes itself consistently and strongly enough, it may cause the Trump administration to hesitate in its drive to encroach on other cities—especially if they know they’ll get the same pushback no matter where they go. The Republican Party and fascist MAGA movement have set their sights on the immigrant and migrant communities, exactly as they laid out in Project 2025. The time for the popular front to resist these assaults is now.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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