Los Angeles Stands Up to MAGA

Huntington Park, California—The jackboot has finally landed in Los Angeles.

On June 10 Donald Trump ordered 700 Marines deployed to the City of Angels, adding to the 2,000 National Guard troops he had previously sent in to try to quell the protests against the brutal mass deportation campaign being carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. That campaign landed hard in LA over the past weekend as ICE launched a series of raids centered at workplaces in the downtown area and arresting dozens of workers.

In response, hundreds of people protested at the site of the raids or at Guard deployment areas and at one such action at an ICE staging area, ICE officers injured and arrested David Huerta, president of SEIU Service Workers West, which has 750,000 members. Huerta was released from custody on June 9 and appeared at a rally of more than 10,000 people in a downtown park near the federal detention center. Huerta told the assembled crowd that the struggle must continue and expand and that this movement is not about him but about the lives and safety of the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers that power the LA economy.

Huerta’s arrest inspired a strong response from the Los Angeles and California labor movement and many political leaders. The deployment of the Nation Guard and Marines has been opposed by both California US Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla as well as by Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass—all of whom have demanded that federal troops be immediately removed from the city.

The overwhelmingly peaceful protests will continue and grow because many people in LA—especially from the communities most directly impacted by the deportation campaign—refuse to allow the separation of families. Young children in LA schools are becoming fearful that their parents will not be home when they return because they have been picked up by ICE, or that migrants making court appearances to get a green card or to process their citizenship requests will be picked up by masked ICE agents and be disappeared without due process to prisons in El Salvador or Sudan. They are angry because this campaign represents an assault on entire immigrant communities—whether an individual is documented or not.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign has many people fearful and uncertain of what to do. Fortunately, there are many immigrant rights, civil rights and faith organizations providing “know your rights” training for people and providing as much legal support as they can, while rapid-response networks are expanding to mobilize people to come to the sites of ICE raids to provide witness and support for those under attack. But this racist campaign has sparked the growth of a broad and diverse resistance movement working to end the military assault on their communities by armored personnel vehicles, helicopters, and masked ICE agents, National Guard troops and Marines wielding assault rifles. And it is a movement that can only grow stronger now that the labor movement has joined in.

Beyond the immediate demand to get the troops out of LA, the movement is demanding an end to the MAGA mass deportation campaign and the militarization of the US-Mexico border, and the adoption of a truly just immigration policy—based on respect for the work and dignity of the millions of migrants who have been largely forced to migrate to the US by horrendous economic policies like NAFTA, by US support for brutal dictators in Latin America and elsewhere, by US military interventions in the Middle East, and by the impacts of a climate crisis driven in large part by the United States.

Not surprisingly, Trump has slandered the LA protests as an “insurrection” led by criminals —this after he pardoned 1500 convicted criminals who launched a genuine insurrection on January 6, 2021, carrying Confederate flags, beating and killing law enforcement officers and threatening the lives of US Congress members and then–Vice President Mike Pence while seeking to overturn the results of the US presidential election

While the current situation is undeniably troubling and fraught with challenges, it also creates an opportunity to build and broaden the anti-fascist united front against Trump and MAGA, to not only stop the mass deportations and achieve a humane immigration policy but also to advance a program for a society that is truly just, equitable, and democratic. But first we must build and consolidate our unity, develop a strategy that embraces a broad and creative range of tactics, and that enables us to leverage our strengths against our enemy’s weaknesses.

The Trump/MAGA ethnic cleansing campaign is the front line of their overall assault on the remnants of US democracy—an assault that will not end with deportations. With this campaign Trump seems to be testing how far he can go in challenging the US judiciary and the rule of law, seeking to intimidate the mainstream media into even greater acquiescence, while pushing the Democratic Party leadership into a completely defensive posture. It also gives the president a chance to see whether the US military is willing to carry out any order that he issues. And now there is the added factor that his invasion of Los Angeles helps deflect attention from the negative impact of his detructive tariff policy on the US and global economy, and his recent feud with narcissistic billionaire (and wanna-be Machiavelli) Elon Musk.

Trump and much of the media have called Los Angeles a war zone, and indeed it that is what it is becoming. This is a war launched by a racist despot acting in the interests of billionaires. But it faces a potentially broad and diverse movement of peaceful, creative, and militant resistance led largely by workers of color who are mostly women—the vibrant heart of LA’s economy and its growing labor movement. ¡Si Se Puede!