I keep starting this and deleting everything. I spent last week trying to capture what was happening here in LA in real time, constantly feeling like I couldn’t catch up before the next horror struck. Even now, as I try my best to summarize everything that’s happened in LA in the last month, I find myself unmoored and horrified by Trump’s open attack of unprovoked aggression against Iran. Southern California has been struck by what can only be described as a shock-and-awe fascist terror campaign meant to make us cower in our homes and shrink away in private subjugation. Instead what we’ve witnessed is ferocious courage in the face of some of the most brutal state violence the United States has ever unleashed domestically. In a county where nearly one million people are undocumented, in a city where literally every other person is Latino, the Trump administration attempted to bring kitted-out fascist goons into our streets to rip people out of their jobs and away from their families. The lines of demarcation, of choosing to capitulate or stand up to fascism, have been brought into razor-sharp focus.

The depth and breadth of people who have turned out over the last few weeks has been staggering to witness. The moment that really kicked things into high gear was when a clothing warehouse in Downtown LA was raided by ICE on Thursday, June 5th and was swarmed by the group Union Del Barrio and various other organizations, including the SEIU service workers union. The president of that union, David Huerta, was violently arrested, and was only released Monday afternoon.  The interview with Ron Gochez of Union Del Barrio linked below does an excellent job illustrating how violent and absurd the last few weeks have been. Every day from that moment onward felt like an eternity; things were escalating every hour, the brazen violence of ICE was everywhere on LA social media. As ICE agents were getting swarmed by protesters wherever they went to make arrests, they needed further backup, leading to the National Guard being called in. By Sunday, June 8th things were at a fever pitch; thousands showed up in the streets of downtown to confront ICE and were met with a staggering amount of force from LAPD. The carnage unleashed by LAPD and LASD over the last few weeks has been some of the most horrifying shit I’ve ever seen them do. In reaction, however, we’ve also seen people show bravery and solidarity for each other in ways that are staggering to witness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZQcVPtkMdc&t=9s

The reaction we’ve witnessed this month is what I can only describe as a collective social immunity response. People understood on an almost vibrational, instinctual level that the whole organism of LA was under attack. Latinos might be a minority of the country, but they are the majority here, and the sense that it was suddenly unsafe to be walking around with brown skin lest you be grabbed by fascist thugs in body armor seems to have electrified people’s nervous system’s with overwhelming anger. I do not give a single damn about Waymos being lit on fire. I do not care about broken windows or graffiti. Seizing people from their workplaces and their homes and using extraordinary rendition to send them to indefinite detention in other countries is fascist violence in the most extreme form. This is how ethnic cleansing campaigns begin. Spencer Ackerman, one of our premier anti-imperialist journalists, wrote about how this moment represents the full return of the “imperial boomerang,” the notion that empires who engage in wars of colonial repression abroad inevitably bring those wars back to their own people. The occupation of our streets by the Marines, National Guard, FBI, DEA, and ICE, all of them in full tactical gear and carrying live-round machine guns, is eerily similar to images we saw of US troops “liberating” Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a reaping of the blood-soaked seeds we have sowed across the globe. How can you look at images of CECOT and not see direct comparisons to Auschwitz and Dachau? The people of LA have collectively demonstrated that we find this to be an assault on our social body and have responded accordingly.

Marines are currently stationed the federal building that’s less than two miles from my house. They are carrying live round ammunition and occupying an American city. I want you to really internalize what that means. The National Guard is still here, overruling Newsom and Mayor Bass’ sovereignty, as they’ve explicitly said they don’t need to be here. LAPD have rioted against protesters armed with nothing but water bottles and the occasional rock as if they’re staging an invasion of the city. People have been trampled by horses, shot point-blank in the head with rubber bullets, journalists have been attacked on camera. The organization Ground Game LA shared that a medic on the ground during the No Kings protests on June 14th treated severe injuries from LAPD/LASD until their clothes were covered with other people’s blood. It has become painfully apparent that LAPD see themselves as more aligned with the Trump administration than they do with the LA city government, and while our city council has criticized their response, it’s likely that they won’t meaningfully bring their violence to heel. Officially, LAPD doesn’t collaborate with ICE, but they’ve been exposed sharing license plate data and other information with our American gestapo. LAPD have very plainly signaled that they are aligned with the Trump administration and not the people of LA.

American reactionaries hate cities like LA because cities obliterate the American notion of hyper-individuality. It’s impossible to spend time in LA and not be aware that your own personhood is not that significant in the greater social fabric of a city like this. Having to constantly navigate other people and their needs, being just one person in a sea of movement and traffic, makes a certain type of American’s brain short-circuit. People look at footage of the rivers of cars on our freeways and shrink away in disgust at the thought of so many poor people being gathered in one place, rather than being horrified by the infrastructure that forces everyone into cars. Pieces of shit like Stephen Miller have a lizard-brained revulsion to the human beings who have always been integral to this city. Latinos were present at the very founding of LA; they have been a foundational part of this city’s culture longer than LA has been part of America. On a visceral level, the last couple weeks have reminded me that I identify much more as an Angeleno than I do as an American, and I am intensely proud to call this place home.

It’s a strange time for coalition-building and alliances. I had no plans to participate in the No Kings protests until all of this shit kicked up here. I went to one near my place after seeing Kristi Noem explicitly announce that the Trump regime intends to occupy and “liberate” LA from its socialist leadership. As she said this, my senator Alex Padilla tried to ask her a question and he was immediately seized and handcuffed. Now, I frankly despise Padilla for how he has handled the genocide in Gaza: He’s been a strident defender of Israel and he shut down his phone lines for months rather than have to listen to voicemails demanding the genocide end. But seeing a democratically elected representative get detained like that sent a shock of fear down my spine. It’s essential in this moment to build broad movements of resistance, and sometimes that means hanging around liberals who want to hold American flags and signs about the gosh-dang cheeto-in-chief. I didn’t get much out of being at the No Kings march beyond having an excuse to walk around in the sun with some friends, but I do ultimately think it matters that Trump’s fascist parade was drowned out by one of the largest single-day protests in American history. I also think moments like this tend to make people whose engagement with politics is generally shallow see things with more clarity. Why is the mass gathering of people peacefully rejecting Trump’s policies something that the LAPD responded to with such an overwhelming display of force? Plenty of people who were downtown that day will come to some interesting conclusions from their experience. And I pray that the people who participated in No Kings are ready to take the streets again to demand no war with Iran.

What’s been particularly inspiring is all the ways people have adapted as this crisis continues. These raids came during the peak of graduation season; parents scrambled to create support networks to prevent ICE from snatching undocumented parents just trying to celebrate their kids’ milestones. Rapid response networks of people with time on their hands have sprung up, with people patrolling their neighborhoods to try to document ICE raids as they happen. Almost any major street I’ve walked this week has “Know Your Rights” information posted, with signs denouncing ICE. Most amusingly, networks of protests have popped up across the county to chase ICE agents out of every hotel they’re staying at. The best example of this came in Pasadena, where a bunch of ICE and Border Patrol were staying at a hotel. A large crowd of protesters showed up outside of the hotel and someone managed to slash all the tires of their vehicles. When a tow truck showed up to repair the tires, the crowd managed to swarm the tow truck driver and convinced him to turn around, leaving the fascist goons stranded for hours. The hotel eventually kicked them to the curb. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25AUCNZKEnY

The past couple weeks have made me think about this video that went viral late last year of Māori legislators staging a haka protest of the New Zealand parliament for trying to pass very racist laws. Every time I watch the video it shocks my nervous system; there’s something incredibly clarifying about watching these lawmakers shut down business as usual and scream on a deep, primal level to oppose the erasure of their people. The video scared the shit out of reactionaries, but it also made a lot of people around the globe cheer. It feels like their protest is about something much deeper than the specific law; it feels like the nervous system of humanity reacting to being pushed to our very limits. That’s how the last couple weeks have felt in LA; everyone is walking around in a punch-drunk daze, but there’s also a lot of righteous anger people are feeling. I think living through the fires and seeing the right callously blame us and our elected leaders for them, seeing Trump threaten to withhold aid all the while, is also fueling these protests. The threats to Medicaid and other lifesaving programs for our neighbors is fueling these protests. We are hurtling towards a hot summer, both literally and metaphorically, because the climate crisis is going to make temperatures soar and the Trump regime is only pouring gas on the situation. My hope is that Trump has pushed the fascism lever too hard and too fast for people to become acclimated to what they’re trying to do and accept it. But what we’re going to need to do is tap into a much deeper form of collective anger than we generally have before, because our survival depends on it.