“This ain’t new to us”: LA’s Uprising Against ICE Was a Long Time Coming

The author of this piece has requested that we use a pseudonym for safety reasons. 

All eyes are on Los Angeles, as the first week of our resistance rolls on, but not everyone is seeing the same thing. Across official media channels and chest-thumping proclamations on X, the liberal establishment is framing the “chaos on the streets” as a consequence of a federal administration gone rogue, bringing in the National Guard and the Marines to escalate a situation that they claim could have otherwise been easily managed by local law enforcement. That may all be true — but what’s left out of the liberal’s narrative is the brutality of the ICE raids that sparked this uprising in the first place, as well as the longstanding complicity of our Democrat-run city and state governments whose policies have not only enabled ICE but have long relied on the exploitation of immigrant workers — LA’s permanent underclass. 

In the words of my sister, who I texted, with trembling fingers, upon arriving home after the third day of protest: “This ain’t new to us. There hasn't been a day in our lives that we haven’t been living this nightmare.” 

“This ain’t new to us. There hasn't been a day in our lives that we haven’t been living this nightmare.” 

In two sentences, my sister — a graduate of Job Corps, the federal program that served thousands of low-income youth, recently gutted by the administration — cut through the posturing of LA’s political elite. If Trump is declaring war on our city — and be certain that he is — then it must be said that his actions are but an extension of the longer-standing war, one long-ago declared by the Democrats on LA 's working class and poor. Today, their choice of weapon is a “less than lethal” pistol; yesterday, it was an under-the-table paycheck, rising rents and eviction — often lethal.

The median household income of undocumented Angelenos stands at $46,500 — nearly $30,000 less than the county median. Keep in mind that this county median is rapidly rising as our leaders hurry to lure new inflows of upper-middle class professionals, eager to see them fill the seats of their luxury, sportswashing stadiums. The local elite’s obsession with developing “affordable housing” showcases the most sinister aspects of their leadership. Progressive in name only, their plans for affordable housing, which aim to match rents with this rising medium, actively demolish the only thing keeping working-class Angelenos in the city: rent-controlled housing. Our labor, often of the most essential kind, contributes billions annually to the state’s economy. Yet, we are crammed into overcrowded housing only to then be evicted, or worse, deported.

We are now seeing decades of dispossession transmute into a collective rage that floods the streets of LA, from Downtown to Compton. Political elites see chaos, but what I see is a great representation of our fighting spirit, the coraje that moves us to face off with militarized ICE officials with water bottles and to erect makeshift barriers that lock them in place and prevent them from kidnapping another one of our children. I see the origin of our strength in the bonds of community that nourish our resistance on the streets: in the spontaneous rounds of line-dancing that break the crowd into artists and their fans, in the heads and bodies bobbing to the rhythm of 2Pac’s To Live and Die in LA on repeat, and in the bold slogans (“Ilegal y Que?” after legendary Latino hardcore band Los Crudos) blazoned on the shirts of our youth. 

To be clear, the participants in this wave of recent protests are primarily not undocumented people. The whole of LA’s working class, with some connection or other to the undocumented community as direct family, or simply as recipients of our cultural and laboral contributions, constitute those turning out in the streets. And though the situation may have been evoked by the deranged madness of Trump, the rage on the streets is real and long-standing. It is a rage borne from a culture of struggle, and is the basis of the working class’s potential to become the liberators we have been waiting for. 

"It is a rage borne from a culture of struggle, and is the basis of the working class’s potential to become the liberators we have been waiting for."

Emancipation requires a clear-eyed view of the sides of the fight. Liberals say that this is Trump’s war on LA, but the cop-mounted horses that stampeded into the crowd on June 8 were mobilized by Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom. In a rush to prove to Trump that federal forces are not required at this moment, Newsom and Bass have upped the ferocity of their forces against the people while offering no solution to the ICE raids. The streets are witnessing a convergence of liberalism and fascism, a narrowing of the promises of the Democrats that may be opening room for the alternative the people are craving and currently carving out. 

For the past several years, as a proud undocumented resident of LA and a socialist, I have been organizing with the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), an independent political organization made up of hundreds of working-class tenants. Together, we organize our neighbors into building-level associations against their landlords and neighborhood-formations against the city’s pro-gentrification and anti-poor agenda. These days, our members mobilize their community networks to inform each other on ICE activity and opportunities for community defense. I have learned lessons on what sustains a movement beyond crisis from my time in LATU, and I want to draw on this experience to interpret how we should intervene today. 

Street battles are a necessary form of resistance — they grow the tenacity of the working class and fracture the control of our enemies — but street mobilizations must be complemented by formal organizations that can channel that energy into mass action by everyday working people. Since the pandemic many of our organizations — from LATU and our neighborhood associations, to mutual aid groups, revitalized labor unions once lost to the Democratic Party, and many others — have grown and matured. In this moment, it’s vital that we take advantage of this growth and connect our existing organizations with the movement on the street, in order to build this moment into long-term, organized opposition.

Something else is needed too, beyond the spread of organized local networks, direct action and community-defense: we need to build unity around a shared definition of this moment. This articulation must offer the working-class a compelling answer as to who’s responsible for this mess and who and what policies can get us out of it. An uprising of this kind — like the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 — only suggests the unpopularity of the ruling parties but it does not on its own define the nature of this unpopularity, nor does it name an alternative political direction. If we want a different outcome, we must break out of our organizational silos — as unions, affinity groups, or Parties — and form coalitions that can connect on-the-ground fights with the broad-based messaging campaigns needed to reach the masses. Scream it from the rooftops: a different LA is possible!

"An uprising of this kind — like the George Floyd Rebellion of 2020 — only suggests the unpopularity of the ruling parties but it does not on its own define the nature of this unpopularity, nor does it name an alternative political direction."

Across their propaganda channels, the liberals present themselves as the alternative to Trump. To this we must respond: prove it, or get out of the way. Trump may have started this war, but it’s the working class who will have to finish it.