Los Angeles is an occupied city. U.S. military and National Guard in combat gear “protect” federal buildings. Federal ICE agents, masked and likewise in full military gear, kidnap Brown people off the streets, terrorizing the whole region… and the whole country.

Last Monday witnessed a full-on military operation with the National Guard and ICE on horseback and in tanks in MacArthur Park, the center of immigrant Los Angeles. Mayor Karen Bass showed up, demanding that the federal troops leave immediately. Responding later that day, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino said, "Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles."

In a press conference that afternoon, Bass said: “What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation... It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”

And this is what is unfolding and being threatened before our eyes.

Kidnapped: 2,800 and Counting… 

ICE has now kidnapped over 2,800 people in the greater LA area since June 6. They have continued to target neighborhood car washes and Home Depots, grabbing vendors and gardeners. They've also returned to carrying out major raids of farmworkers in the fields of Ventura County, and promising more. 

These ICE raids have also been met with significant resistance. But this resistance must urgently grow and deepen, taking up the demand and orientation from RefuseFascism.org: Shut Down ICE! No Military Occupation! Shut Down the Whole Trump Fascist Regime! Trump Must Go Now!

What's happening in LA is a "test case" for other "sanctuary cities" across the country. It's also the city with the largest immigrant population in the country. More than one-third of LA County's population—or 3.5 million people—are immigrants. An estimated 800,000 are undocumented. Over one million people are living with someone who is undocumented—their mothers or fathers, partners, cousins and siblings forced to live in the shadows. 

These fascists are also using the attacks on immigrants as a vehicle to crush any Democratic Party opposition—threatening to go into Boston and Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and more. Last month, Trump and his fascist Border "Czar" and grunting pig, Tom Homan, threatened to arrest the California Governor Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Bass. Just this last week, Trump said he is considering a federal takeover of Washington, D.C. And he threatened the New York City Democratic Party candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, with arrest and revoking his citizenship (which he cannot legally do), saying, “We’re going to straighten out New York... Maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.”

These are not empty threats. It's what they are laying the basis for.

A U.S. Military Operation in MacArthur Park

Mid-morning last Monday, an occupying army descended on MacArthur Park. This area has been called the “Ellis Island of the West Coast” because of its concentrated community of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Ninety armed troops from the California National Guard in 17 Humvees, four military tactical vehicles, and two military ambulances drove into the park. A Blackhawk helicopter flew overhead. They were joined by about 100 federal forces, including Border Patrol, wearing tactical gear and carrying military-grade weapons but no identification. Some were on horseback.

According to leaked internal Army documents, this was a “show of presence" operation: "to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area (JOA)."

In other words, this had nothing to do with "stopping crime"—this was about showing that the U.S. military and federal ICE agents are in control. The language in the military documents echo the language and views of a U.S. military putting down an insurgent force. This is no accident. Journalist Ken Klippenstein, who received these military leaks, wrote: "Treating Los Angeles as a foreign country with insurgents to be defeated, military and homeland security intelligence views MacArthur Park as a viper’s nest of illegality."

While the raid itself may not have gone as smoothly as they planned, it had an effect of sowing terror—and anger. Word spread quickly and many people responded and confronted the ICE agents on the spot, following and filming the armored vehicles, with those images—and the fascist specter—flying all over social media.

Determined Resistance—Which Urgently Needs to Grow

As ICE raids continue throughout the region, and in the face of repression and FBI threats,¹ ICE has been met with significant and courageous resistance. 

On Tuesday, masked ICE agents invaded a surgical center in Ontario. They were chasing a gardener who worked for the medical center, who had come to the U.S. several years ago from Honduras, and was sending money home to pay for his mother's dialysis treatment. These anonymous masked gestapo goons showed no ID and no warrant, and the medical staff heroically tried to protect their coworker. While they did not succeed, they showed courage—nonviolently and bravely defending the basic rights and life of an immigrant under illegitimate assault. 

Later, Homeland Security lied about the incident saying "Hospital staff assaulted law enforcement." 

On Thursday, dozens of ICE agents descended on a farm in Ventura County, east of Los Angeles. Glass House Farms is one of California’s largest legal cannabis farms with almost 1,000 people working on the farm. Word of the impending raid had flooded social media earlier that morning, alerting protesters to mobilize right away—and hundreds of them did. 

Homeland Security forces barricaded the main road onto the farm to block the protesters. They fired tear gas and rubber bullets repeatedly at the protesters but could not force them to disperse. The confrontation continued for hours, at one point the crowd growing to over 500. Among the protesters were family members of farmworkers who feared their loved ones were being detained inside.

The protesters blocked the road in and out of the farm, at one point keeping National Guard vehicles and ICE vehicles trapped inside. At least five protesters were taken to the hospital, and four more treated at the scene, with injuries caused by ICE violence. One protester was reportedly struck in the face by a rubber bullet. 

Members of THE REVCOM CORPS For The Emancipation Of Humanity were on the scene. They wrote:

The crowd consisted of Latino people of all ages, and a lot of older white people from the area. The scene was very emotional. People were yelling at the National Guard asking them why they were there and why they were kidnapping people, with much fury and anger. One man showed us a video a family member who was on the farm sent him of ICE thugs running to grab people. That was the last he heard from her. He got a text from someone else who was captured saying ICE was beating them to sign papers approving of immediate deportation. 

When the National Guard started letting some the documented farm workers go, people were cheering for them, with some of the workers breaking down in tears seeing the crowds of protesters there in support. Some people put their fists up, honking their horns and playing “fuck Donald Trump” loudly from their speakers and actively taking the "trump must go now!" posters from their car windows. One woman was distraught and in tears saying in Spanish "they took all of them!" 

You got a sense that a lot of people were traumatized and in shock about what was happening. But you felt the sense of a community caring for each other. People kept bringing donations for the protesters of food, water and masks. This is also significant because the FBI has explicitly investigated organizers for distributing perfectly legal items like masks, in the midst of protests.

There were a lot of people who saw what was happening on social media and came by themselves—people who were going up against what their friends and family are doing right now, which is either being scared or just general inaction. One woman I talked to argued that now is the time for people to wake up. A number of people made their own connections to what's happening now and what happened in Nazi Germany—arguing that we can't let this happen again.

A similar confrontation took place at another Glass House Farm in Carpenteria, in Santa Barbara County. Protesters confronted ICE agents there as well. A city councilmember was injured by federal agents; and another, attempting to conduct oversight, was denied access to the farm.

Over 300 immigrants were captured in both raids. In Camarillo, one farmworker was killed while running for his life. He fell off a greenhouse as he was being chased by ICE and broke his neck and skull. See the video from Michelle Xai for more about this terrible crime:

A Fight in the Courts Over Open Racial Profiling

There is now a legal fight about whether ICE can continue to profile people based on how they look, where they work, or what language they speak.

On Friday, a federal district judge in Los Angeles issued two temporary restraining orders against ICE agents’ massive and unlawful roundups and detentions of immigrants in seven southern California counties. The first order bars ICE from arresting people solely based on their race/ethnicity, speaking with an accent or being at locations such as bus stops, day laborer sites, car washes or agricultural sites. The judge also ordered ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to guarantee that immigrants who are arrested are provided with lawyers and that the conversations between those detainees and their lawyers are confidential. 

Homan’s response to the judge’s ruling was to double-down on their intent to continue racial profiling and shredding of people's constitutional rights: “ICE officers and Border Patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them and question them. They just need the totality of the circumstances. They just got through their observation, get articulable facts based on the location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions—like a uniformed border police walks up to them at for instance a Home Depot and they got all these articulable facts plus the person walks away or runs away… What they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them, it’s not probably cause, it’s reasonable suspicion.”

In other words, if you are working, walking or speaking while Brown, and have the good sense to try to leave when you see ICE coming, you are a suspect! 

Homeland Security has already filed an appeal but we don't know if they will also outright defy this legal ruling.

Take These Fascists Seriously When They Promise a Coup

Last month, when the U.S. military first descended on Los Angeles—in violation of the Constitution and in defiance of the expressed wishes of the governor and mayor—the fascist head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) held a press conference where she said DHS and the military “are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

Think about her words—"liberate" LA from this system's elected officials. In other words, she promised a coup.

This was the same press conference where Democratic Senator Alex Padilla was violently dragged out of the room, assaulted and thrown to the floor for asking a question.

These words—and all the actions of the Trump fascist regime since—should bring alive the extreme direction and rapid momentum. 

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said in social media message Revolution #124, "Donald Trump’s whole fascist regime is caught in a contradiction of its own making: his continual Big Lies":

These terroristic attacks on immigrants, and those standing with them, are part of this fascist regime’s overall moves to forcibly impose a return to the kind of situation that existed in this country for most of its existence—where racist oppression and oppression based on sex and gender, and crude, unthinking allegiance to American supremacy are openly proclaimed, and this is being enforced now by a regime full of deranged anti-scientific fanatics, while those who oppose this are violently attacked. This Trump fascist regime is determined to blast ahead to enforce all this with increasing and intensifying police-state tyranny.

The millions and millions who do not want to see this future need to act now with the urgency this situation requires to STOP this fascist regime. To find out how, and how to get connected, go here; and to get more deeply into where all this madness is coming from and what to do about the system that spawned and reinforces it, go here.