“They can’t do that without organized and fierce resistance”: Three Days and Counting of Mass Rebellion Against ICE in Los Angeles

Editorial Board

Motorcycles circled a flaming car at a normally busy intersection in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles Saturday as the militarized and heavily armed LA Sheriffs fortified themselves up the hill. The masses took breaks in their rebellion to capture photos of themselves brandishing Mexican flags in front of the inferno.

In the adjacent neighborhood of Paramount, outside of the monopoly building supply chain Home Depot, protesters erected a flaming barricade closing the street. The large retailer would later be transformed into a military base of operations for law enforcement. The LA sky is darkened, this time by tear gas.

Representatives of the old-state called it an insurrection and the ultra-reactionary Donald Trump pledged to call in the National Guard.

Both the mass response and the activity of the old-state represent an escalation, an explosion predictable for over a year. The Trump administration continues the reactionary policies of the former administration with the adjustment of increasing terror among working people, overextending itself. Trump’s campaign was largely contingent on anti-immigrant fervor, and to make good on these promises assures resistance around the country, culminating in mass rebellions like the one raging for the past two days in LA, which at the time of this writing enters the third day of glorious combat and resistance.

An active participant in the struggles in LA informed the monopoly Reuters, “Now they know they cannot go anywhere in this country where our people are, and try to kidnap our workers, our people—they cannot do that without an organized and fierce resistance.”

The Department of Homeland Security stated that “1,000 rioters surrounded a federal law enforcement building and assaulted ICE law enforcement officers, slashed tires, defaced buildings, and tax payer funded property.” ICE reports that nationwide, assaults on their agents have increased by 413%. The people of LA prove that this increase can become a modest uptick compared to what is possible.

ICE activity has become more dramatic and terrorizing owing to the Trump administration’s policies, dictated by the needs of the imperialist ruling class in response to the general economic crisis of imperialism. This has mandated the most dramatic arrests and raids, ones targeted at workers and workplaces primarily instead of criminal activity. The false veneer of legitimacy has completely eroded. The crisis of overproduction which has unfolded since the 2008 economic crisis made leaps in 2020, and as The Worker has reported, has reached the level of the ruling class destroying its means of production including massive attacks on the workforce. The deportations must be understood as a result of the crisis’s tendency to deepen and the ruling class’s desperate attempt to increase profits.

The ICE raids which catalyzed this latest uprising were carried out against some of the deepest and most revolutionary sections of the working class, targeting immigrant workers beginning Friday. Workers targeted include day laborers who gather at Home Depots looking for hire as construction hands as well as in the fashion district, which is comprised of many gray market shops that sell low-cost clothing and designer knockoffs.

By early Sunday, the masses unrelentingly faced off with hundreds of national guard, resulting in clashes according to the White House. In response, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to deploy Marines. The last time the Marines were deployed in a military action in the US was also in LA, in response to the mass rebellion of 1992 against the police.

Videos from the ground show the masses surrounding and fighting off heavily armored federal agents. According to ICE’s acting director, their forces “were vastly outnumbered, as over 1,000 rioters surrounded and attacked a federal building. It took over two hours for the Los Angeles Police Department to respond, despite being called multiple times.”

On Sunday, protesters shutdown a major freeway in downtown Los Angeles as police fired so-called less-lethal rounds into the crowd. The police report that demonstrators are throwing pieces of concrete, rocks, and bottles at them. Two individuals reportedly drove motorcycles into a police line in an attempt to breach it, injuring two officers.

Federal agents and police have rabidly attacked protesters with batons, flash bang grenades, tear gas, mace, rubber bullets, and pepper balls. One man witnessing the protests was shot directly in the face by the police, leaving a 4-inch laceration reaching the bone. Among those brutalized and arrested on the first day was David Huerta, president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who was pushed to the ground and arrested for obstruction after standing nearby and observing the ICE raids taking place.

Media monopoly ABC broadcast video of a Blackhawk helicopter landing at the Homeland Security office at Paramount right next to the Home Depot, unloading “dozens of boxes of ammunitions, less lethal weaponry… an entire shipment as if they were getting ready for some kind of major battle.”

Ruling Class Mafias Collude to Quell Rebellion

The Trump administration’s escalations against the immigrant masses as well as the response from the masses themselves have only sharpened the contradiction between both ruling class mafias, as the Democrats are eager to traffic with the mass struggles in order to gain electoral support while trying to keep the tide of rebellion from overflowing the banks of their own brutal order. Already they have sent their protest police into action, with the Democrat-aligned “50501 Movement” calling for peaceful protests across the country in solidarity with LA to get ahead of more militant local actions. While the Democrats and Republicans trade jabs on social media, they collude in the streets by unleashing their combined forces upon the masses.

The Democrats have taken the approach of rhetorically condemning the Trump administration and the rebelling masses while actively working with the Republicans to violently quell the masses. California Governor Gavin Newsom claimed that protesters are giving Trump a “spectacle”, writing on X, “Don’t give Trump what he wants. Stay calm. Stay peaceful.”

Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass have condemned Trump’s ICE raids as being intentionally inflammatory, focusing on the optics of the raid. The Democrats have been more successful with deportations compared to Republicans because of this—while Biden deported more than twice as many people than Trump during his first term, such anti-ICE rebellions were not seen. The Republicans hope to achieve more through less by emphasizing the optics and tactics of open terror, whereas the Democrats rhetorically emphasize conciliation and collaboration while enacting similar policies.

The tactics differ slightly, but the aim is the same. Following Trump’s victory last November, LA’s city council voted to become a “sancutary city”, which “prohibit any City resources, including property or personnel, from being utilized for any immigration enforcement.” Less than six months into the Trump administration, the LAPD actively collaborates with and defends ICE and federal agents terrorizing working immigrants, demonstrating the limits of liberal rhetoric.

On Their Own the Masses Go Further than Permitted; They Must be Organized to Go All the Way

The people are the motive force of history, and they once again prove that nothing can restrain them for long. Not only do they take it upon themselves to go further than what the old-state permits, but in the process they far outrun the organized left.

The main danger hampering the left is revisionism, the type that trails behind the Democratic mafia and consistently robs the masses of their necessary organizations while attempting to divert the organic class consciousness won in struggle into fettered echo chambers. With every mass uprising for the past decade, when advanced sections of the working class rise up, the shots are heard around the country inspiring many more working people to the streets.

The battles are most intense for the first few days, with great interest from monopoly media. At this point the revisionists cannot help themselves and begin to trickle in and capture the energy. They do not lead but seek to dampen the activity of the masses and block the few revolutionaries among them. The role of revisionism in mass movements is always to decrease the energy and whither the actions, corralling a few back into the swamps of strictly-legal activism.

The old-state, with the help of revisionism and monopoly media, takes advantage of the moment, making every effort to demarcate the active masses between those who follow their oppressive laws and those who reject them. The people are encouraged to turn over their best sons and daughters to the police, all while their democratic rights are taken away.

It is always right to rebel against reactionaries. The heroic and fearless masses will teach all who are willing to listen to take up their spirit; this alone will cure the left of its impotence, and in return, serious revolutionaries, which cannot exist without being forged in these battles, must begin tirelessly working to provide the masses with the leadership and organization that they clamor for. In this process, always guided by the ideology of the proletariat, class consciousness among the people reaches a leap, and their outrage against this or that assault from the ruling class is transformed into an unshakable commitment to end the ruling class. The daily demands of the people can and must be merged with the demand for political power, and thus the fight to conquer and defend it by means of revolutionary violence, ultimately people’s war.

The fight against the reactionary assault of the imperialist ruling class on the deepest and most profound masses cannot be separated from the fight against revisionism. This is necessary to allow the masses to take matters as far as they desire without rebellion being snuffed out. ICE operations would be greatly hampered if every city in which they were carried out responded by providing the glorious response that the people of Los Angeles have.

Photo: A car allegedly belonging to ICE agents is burned and the words “Fuck ICE” are painted on the side.

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