The Battle for Immigrant Los Angeles

I am old enough to have participated in several mass mobilizations in Los Angeles in recent history. Like today, these manifestations advocated for the power and protection of immigrants, such as the 1994 actions to oppose Proposition 187, the 2000 protests against the Democratic National Convention, the 2006 “Day Without Immigrants” march decrying anti-immigration legislation proposed by Republican then-Senator James Sensenbrenner, and the 2008 co-founding of the May Day Trans and Queer Contingent. These were all monumental, but none has felt more important than the battle currently being waged in Los Angeles by immigrants and the children of immigrants. I hate to use militaristic language to describe this situation. A “battle,” after all, refers to a skirmish during a war. Yet, there is no better way to describe what is happening in Los Angeles right now. Even as I write these words, 4,000 National Guard soldiers, along with 700 Marines, have been deployed to Downtown Los Angeles to repress youth defending our city from the Trump regime’s attacks on immigrants. 

Protesters, many of them youth, take over the U.S. Highway 101 near a detention facility in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

Protesters, many of them young people, are using their unarmed bodies to disrupt the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the city and protect immigrant communities in Los Angeles. These protesters are out there in pursuit of a better future for us all, though many others, including within the immigrant rights movement, do not see it this way and are discrediting their actions as “violent” and not the “right” way. When movement leaders call for “peaceful” protests and curbing the “violence” of protesters (who are often angry youth), they are aligning with the mainstream media and conservatives. 

To promote “nonviolence” as synonymous with “peaceful” while ICE is systematically dehumanizing immigrants – entrapping them while violating their civil, political, and human rights and then sending them to extrajudicial prisons in El Salvador, Sudan, or Guantánamo – is outrageous. It is to minimize the state violence immigrants are subjected to and to demand acquiescence. No matter how violent the state is, we are told that their actions are taken to preserve peace and that protest is the source of violence. Muffling dissenters destroys the possibility of a real and urgent shift in the immigrant rights movement here in Los Angeles and throughout the country. We should challenge the government’s portrayal of this movement and our people as “violent” and collectively figure out future organizing efforts as well as protecting the civil and political rights of protesters, as well as those of immigrants kidnapped by ICE.  

Protesters, many of them youth, take over the U.S. Highway 101 near a detention facility in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

This is the critical juncture that will determine if the City of Los Angeles can sustain a powerful immigrant rights movement for years to come. Now is an opportunity for the movement to be realigned and reworked, and for a generational shift to surge. If we miss this moment, we all lose.

For the past thirty years, I have worked with a variety of groups, collectives, and other types of efforts for immigrant justice via labor, community campaigns, and solidarity movements. I have played various roles, sometimes as an organizer, sometimes as an activist or an ally, and sometimes as an educator. Throughout this time, I have noticed the NGO-ization of the immigrant rights movement. Non-profits are often not led by those most directly affected, nor by undocumented immigrants. 

The movement has organized – and even succeeded –  around using the heteronormative “good” versus “bad” immigrant narrative. In other words, there are those who are seen as “worthy” of being here and are, therefore, “safe;” and then, there are those who are unwanted and seen as “violent.” Within this binary, the youth who rebel are categorized as violent. For example, the last time the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) riot police confronted an immigrant rights march at McArthur Park in 2007, mainstream immigration reformers blamed the youth for “instigating” in their media declarations in order to assuage any wrongdoing on their part. The notion that an organization needs to apologize for an LAPD riot beating is preposterous, but it happened.

Like the “good” versus “bad” immigrant binary, the notion of a “good” versus “bad” way to protest creates an “us/them” binary. It functions as a form of rights-washing to guarantee a false sense of security for some. Those who create or affirm these binaries forget that in order to feel the illusion of safety, it means that there is a sector of society that must be deemed violent or unsafe, so that we lose track of who the real enemy is. Immigrants, transgender people, youth, and others who do not fit or fall in line with the normativity of Trump’s attempts to further make the United States a place for capitalist fascists are being painted as the enemies. Do we want to align with a system that is actually hurting most of us and the planet, rather than with people we have more in common with?

Nobody is secure or safe under the Trump regime – not working people and their children, or transgender children and adults; not Palestinians, Haitians, or Central Americans; not even NGOs. In this dire context, even the citizenship of unborn children is under question.

California Highway Patrol surrounds protesters on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

The Trump administration is an authoritarian regime blatantly and violently defying the rule of law and the constitutional protections of all, including citizens. But his administration did not get here on their own. The Democratic Party also failed to deliver on immigration reform during multiple administrations and aligned conservatively on the issue with Kamala Harris’ recent campaign. Moreover, the resounding silence of the Democrats as Trump dismantles the wins of the long Civil Rights movement in this country has led them to lose trust among youth. The extrajudicial deportations of immigrants, including those of green card holders, are merely exemplary of the abuses of power from the United States government that we already understand in Honduras and, more broadly, in Central America. Now, however, the internal “enemy” is not a “Communist agitator” abroad, but an unaccompanied minor, a working immigrant, a protester supporting immigrants, a transgender woman, or a student supporting Palestine. Next, it will be you who stands in the way of Trump and his neo-fascist agenda. 

We must not fear antagonisms and friction within a movement. Contradictions are often points of growth. As Subcomandante Marcos reminded us in the 1990s about the Zapatista struggle, Maya communities were fighting for a world where many worlds could exist. Similarly in Los Angeles, we must build a broad and representative movement that fits all of our worlds. 

This country was founded on the genocide of Indigenous people, the forced trafficking and enslavement of Africans, and, now, it consists of a large number of immigrants, many displaced from their countries of origin as a result of U.S. foreign policy. Therefore, it is Indigenous, Black, and immigrant people and our descendants who should determine our futures. 

Youth Redefining the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement

While Los Angeles boasts a diverse immigrant rights movement, there are fissures that have been apparent and often ignored over the years, as well as sectors that have been sidelined in the movement. Moreover, the narratives around “stopping the violence” demonstrate the lack of mobilizing power by top-down organizations that have lost the pulse on the issues facing the city. For instance, an entire underground economy of safety has been created through mutual aid networks that meet the needs of undocumented and documented immigrants who are not properly supported by non-profits due to the large demand. 

Additionally, the immigrant rights movement is made up of a massive number of people who may or may not already belong to an organization. Therefore, they may be out of reach for training regarding the most strategic ways to protest or organize. These largely yet-to-be-organized masses are among the poorest, most affected by state terror, and the angriest. They are the ones who hustle to put food on the table. We must keep in mind that movements do not grow when you restrict their breath, they have their own rhythm and sense, and we should listen and learn from those masses. 

To be clear, I am not condoning the looting and burning of cars and tires and I am not saying that youth protesting immigrant rights are the ones responsible for this. After all, there may be plants that unhelpfully agitate at these protests, just like there were in the 1960s with COINTELPRO, which, though disbanded, remains alive in its philosophy. However, the kneejerk desperation by non-profit organizations to call for nonviolence and apologize for protesters getting out of hand misses the point that Angelenos are enraged by Trump’s violence against our communities.

In fact, most of Los Angeles is not in chaos. Beyond the protests in Downtown Los Angeles, most youth are engaged in peaceful ICE watch and supporting immigrants in their own neighborhoods in other ways, even as we experience this massive witch-hunt of the most valuable members of our communities. Others maintain constant vigilance of those detained by ICE, helping families locate them and connect them to legal resources. 

Helicopter flying over protesters in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

The next time you feel uncomfortable with direct action, including the optics of it, consider the militaristic response and what silence and inaction are condoning: sending refugees back to statelessness, separating children from their parents, illegally deporting human beings to violent prisons in countries they may have no connection to, denying Palestinians of the right to return to their homeland, and stripping everyone of the basic human right to protest. If the immigrant rights movement does not realign to change this narrative and counter the mainstream media, Trump might as well have won this battle. More importantly, this will be a lost moment to build power against ICE raids and this system’s attacks on our communities.

Anger is a Response to Fear

On the ground and in pictures, many of the protesters remind me of the students I see in Latinx studies classes as a professor myself. These are the same students who may work to afford school and whose parents may work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They are the same students who may have grown up in under-funded schooling systems in over-policed racialized neighborhoods. These students may have made it to college with little to no financial aid, or they may have had to over-perform in comparison to their wealthier peers to secure scholarships. They are the students urgently ready to learn and graduate to secure decent jobs and help their families out. Or, they may be Latinx youth who never had access to costly higher education, who are struggling to make ends meet, or who may have taken a less-than-desired path because opportunities in a racial-capitalist society elude them. 

Protesters make their way to the jail and detention facility, passing the ICE offices in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

I have heard critiques of the youth protesters’ use of Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Palestinian, and other flags at these protests, dismissing them as nationalist symbols. These critiques, however, fail to acknowledge that their flags are a dream and a representation of where they may belong outside of the state violence they experience here. In the case of the Palestinian flag, it is a representation of self-determination and a hint at shared struggles. This pride is about loving their roots, just like the Italians and the Polish do, in cities across the nation.

The youth chant and sing around a gentrified Downtown Los Angeles, the same DTLA where their parents work for meager wages bussing tables, cooking food, and cleaning office buildings and hotels. This is the same DTLA that has expelled entire families of working people with high rents and trendy restaurants. It is the DTLA where their parents first take the metro, then transfer buses to go to work. The youth have defended their rights across a geography that is not just symbolic, but is the everyday route of the working-class immigrant community in Los Angeles. Without immigrants, DTLA is nothing.

View across from the ICE offices in DTLA on Saturday, June 8, 2025. Photo by Suyapa Portillo Villeda.

Angela Davis once reflected on the violence and racism she grew up in as a young girl in Birmingham, Alabama:

 “...when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible because what it means is that the person who is asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through, what Black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa…” 

Let’s not forget her words as they are still relevant today.