“Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo” (They concern us as a result of we don’t concern them).
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Protesters tried to carry a line in opposition to riot police however pushed again with much less deadly munitions throughout a march in opposition to ICE raids in Downtown Los Angeles, June 15, 2025.(Shay Horse / NurPhoto through Getty Photographs)
“It’s scary to see how they handled a US senator,” says Ercilia Ramirez (identify modified at her request) from the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Fe Springs.
“Think about what they’re doing to folks like me,” says Ramirez, a 40-year-old undocumented Mexican mom of a new child. Her voice trembles as she describes final week’s violent, forcible elimination and handcuffing of California Senator Alex Padilla. Padilla was faraway from a press convention organized by Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem inside a federal constructing.
“I can’t simply casually depart my dwelling and go train, to Greenback Tree or to Residence Depot,” she says. “I’m not leaving my dwelling proper now until I completely need to.”
I’m on the cellphone as Ramirez describes her scenario whereas, on the opposite facet of Santa Fe Springs, ICE brokers in army tactical gear raid a preferred swap meet underneath the safety of US Marines and a Black Hawk helicopter, a part of an operation that has extra US troops deployed to Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria.
“They’re kidnapping us, ” says Ramirez, a former Dreamer (DREAM Act activist). “The Trump administration is attempting to maintain us afraid, motionless, paranoid.”
Present Difficulty
Since 1994, when, in response to California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187, Ramirez’s elementary college trainer advised her class, “Put this word in your dad and mom in your backpack as a result of there’s an opportunity you may not have the ability to return to highschool,” she and different immigrants have understood properly what many in the US are simply barely waking as much as: that the difficulty of “immigration” is the gateway drug to fascism, the game-changing plan for extremists to upend political orders and militarize civil societies all through the world, together with the US.
“If that’s what they’ll do to a United States Senator for having the audacity to easily ask a query, think about what they’ll do to any American who dares to talk up,” Senator Padilla advised The Nation through e-mail. “However this isn’t about me, it’s about defending our law-abiding immigrant communities and each single American who values their constitutional rights. Donald Trump desires a spectacle not simply to distract from his failed insurance policies, however to justify his undemocratic crackdowns and his authoritarian energy grabs. What’s taking place in California could also be remoted for now, however make no mistake, this can be a risk to everybody throughout the nation as a result of he won’t cease with Los Angeles.”
Padilla and Ramirez know that, in Adam Serwer’s phrase, “the cruelty is the purpose.” Much less recognized is the counter-reality effervescent desde abajo, from beneath, on the streets, on campuses, in workplaces and houses in the US: Fearlessness is the purpose.
Regardless of the militarism enveloping Santa Fe Springs, Ramirez continues organizing on-line, on her cellphone, and from the properties of US citizen mates.
Impressed by the braveness of probably the most weak, tens of 1000’s in LA and throughout the nation have undertaken daring motion: well being employees placing their our bodies on the road to defend immigrants; lecturers growing “instruments of resistance” kits for college students, households and communities; unions mobilizing to guard employees; college students refusing to bow down earlier than closely armed marines and militarized police; group members driving ICE out of properties, motels, and different workplaces; and 1000’s of on a regular basis folks defending their mates and neighbors in opposition to ICE.
Thousands and thousands extra have began marching in opposition to the militarism led by ICE—the biggest arms-bearing department of the US authorities, excluding the army—and different safety forces underneath cowl of “immigration coverage” and “safety.”
The immigrant spirit contributing mightily to this political second jogs my memory of the track made common by the motion that led to a leftward shift throughout the southern California border, in Mexico, “Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo” (They concern us as a result of we don’t concern them).
Whereas Ramirez is organizing clandestinely, LA lawyer Chris Newman is doing so on the streets.
“I simply drove round downtown LA for the final hour,” he tells me. “The place is a fucking ghost city. Immigrant companies throughout downtown, from the Style District to Chinatown, they’re empty, empty. The message is, ‘Keep dwelling. Be afraid.’”
Newman, the authorized director of the Nationwide Day Laborer Organizing Community, is aware of properly the risk to democracy pursued underneath the quilt of “immigration coverage.” His most well-known shopper is on the heart of probably the most harmful risk to due course of and different constitutional rights in our lifetimes: Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
In the hunt for a approach ahead, Newman cites our legendary mutual buddy and international thinker, the late Mike Davis, who presciently known as LA “town of the long run.”
“The perception he shared as he was dying, the factor that anxious Mike Davis probably the most about this incipient fascism was the extent to which the left had relinquished management of the general public sq., the streets. The streets have all the time been the one sword and the one defend that social justice actions have had.”
Like Davis, Newman is aware of that the present threats to civil society are being spearheaded by ICE and DHS, dwelling to the biggest, most essential restructuring of the federal authorities because the finish of World Warfare II. Constructed one raid at a time, these institutional threats are rooted in historical past. So is the opposition to this risk, anti-fascism.
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“I actually do consider that LA goes to show the tide on Trumpism. I consider that that is the second the place we both say goodbye to our democracy or we defend it. This battle will start and finish on the streets.”
In latest months, few have spent as a lot time cruising these streets in protection of immigrants as Ron Gochez, Lupe Carrasco Cardona, and the all-volunteer members of Union del Barrio (UDB), a socialist, Latin Americanist group group based in San Diego in 1980.
Months earlier than the immigration turmoil of latest weeks, UDB and over 60 organizations shaped a broad coalition to warn in opposition to ICE raids, violence, and what they name the “kidnapping” that tears immigrant dad and mom from their kids. Their handiest organizing strategies are group “patrols.”
“After we see ICE, after all, we can’t impede,” says Carrasco, a trainer in LAUSD. “We don’t advise anyone to impede. However what we do is we instantly alert the entire group that ICE is within the space, and we remind them of defending their rights.”
Gochez traces UDB’s tactical influences to a mixture of Chicano and Black Energy actions and Latin American radical actions of autodefensa, self-defense. “The closest connection that we’ve got could be the patrols that the Black Panther Celebration did of their communities within the Sixties and ’70s. For them, it was police terrorism that they had been in search of out with their patrols. So, in 1992, UDB began doing group patrols close to the border, in San Diego as that was the five hundredth 12 months anniversary of 1492…500 years after Columbus.”
Widespread
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The lengthy historical past of pro-immigrant organizing has all the time been a response to the disturbing anti-immigrant historical past underlying ICE and its predecessors, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, which because the early twentieth century have been influenced by the Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen and different violent extremists utilizing immigration to institutionalize racist hate.
As a result of the multibillion-dollar homeland safety state and the anti-immigrant racism that feeds it have grown exponentially underneath all Republican and Democratic administrations since Invoice Clinton, UDB is, in Gochez’s phrases, “organizing to construct a twin and contending energy in order that the folks see us within the motion as legit forces that they will and will assist, and never the 2 get together system that has endlessly failed us.”
Lately, UDB’s avenue efforts have grown past even its most formidable methods.
“Individuals from everywhere in the nation have requested us for trainings, and we’ve finished them on Zoom,” says Gochez. “We’ve skilled folks from everywhere in the nation.”
The success of UDB and different teams have additionally caught the eye of Republicans within the US Senate like Senator Josh Hawley, who despatched letters to UDB and different LA organizations, threatening to launch an investigation into the teams he accuses of “bankrolling the unrest.”
Steeled by many years of organizing, UDB and the bigger immigrant group won’t be moved by Hawley’s neo-McCarthyism, as they proceed their strategic, intrepid actions that impressed many among the many 5 million folks or extra who joined the over 2,000 #NoKings protests throughout the nation.
For her half, Ramirez will even maintain preventing. “All Trump has finished is create extra of a fireplace within me,” she says, including “We are going to battle—and we’ll prevail.”
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
Roberto Lovato
Journalist Roberto Lovato is the writer of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Household, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution within the Americas. Lovato can be an assistant professor of English on the College of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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