The Anti-ICE Uprising

Seizing this moment and defending our neighbors

Another moment of rupture is upon us, another explosive period where a population that has tolerated oppression and attacks reaches a breaking point, snaps, and is rising up. People from LA to Minneapolis to New York and beyond have launched the next level of resistance in response to relentless assaults from immigration enforcement. Righteous rage at the injustice that is ICE, at the assaults on our communities, at the mass kidnapping of thousands of people, at the ripping apart of families has sparked the first true uprising of the Trump regime.

Los Angeles is at the forefront. The heroic move that prompted this uprising was the people of LA physically putting their bodies in front of the deportation machine. Brave protesters across the country have increasingly been trying to block ICE vehicles from kidnapping their neighbors. And it hasn’t been small groups of activists, it’s been throngs of community members, hundreds and now thousands of people turning out to flood the streets and stop the unmarked cars and vans that the feds use to whisk away their victims. But in Los Angeles people took their resistance up a notch by blocking the vehicles of the Gestapo, using inanimate objects to close roads, flooding the streets by the thousands, and directly confronting the agents of the regime.

You can feel and see this rebellious spirit spreading like wildfire. Across the country, people have had enough. We have had enough of the abductions, of the illegal and more importantly deeply immoral snatching of our neighbors. We have had enough of the terror inflicted on families and workers and communities. And now a moment that has been coming finally broke through, bursting into reality in the form of mass protest and defiance.

Over the weekend people in New York picked up the mantle, blocking an ICE van, forcing agents back into their federal building downtown, facing off with the NYPD, and slowing the violent churn of the deportation machine. Mass community demonstrations in the streets of cities across the country have been seen again and again over the last several weeks, most often in response to ICE raids. These rejections of the attempted kidnapping of our neighbors have been powerful, but now we’re seeing the next step in the deliberate, pre-emptive blockading of ICE operations by thousands and thousands of caring people.

This is what we need. We need to halt the mass violence that is ICE. Every action taken to prevent an abduction, to prevent terror from being inflicted on our neighbors, to keep families together is righteous. Trump and his slimy minions like Stephen Miller are pushing immigration officers to keep ramping up their detainments and deportations, despite the fact that ICE has already arrested over 100,000 people under this administration. This past Tuesday and Wednesday, ICE recorded more than 2,000 arrests each day, a dramatic escalation. So it is exactly this moment that demands a response, that demands we resist and fight back.

This fight isn’t only about one federal agency nabbing migrants, it’s about all of us versus authoritarianism. When the President of California’s biggest union, David Huerta, was acting as a community observer in solidarity with immigrant workers and monitoring a raid, he was arrested and hurt by ICE. When Columbia and the Trump regime got fed up with the pro-Palestine protesters, it was the immigration authorities that were sicced on these students. That is how Mahmoud Khalil was illegally detained and ripped away from his pregnant wife, and the child that was born while he remains in captivity. In short, calling ICE the Gestapo of the Trump regime is not overblown. They are the brownshirts, the jackbooted thugs at the forefront of advancing this authoritarian administration. It’s all of us who resist fascism against ICE. The lines are drawn and clear.

You will hear and read propaganda to the contrary in the coming days. You will hear again and again about the supposed violence of protesters, and you will hear much less about the fundamental violence of ICE. What we have to keep in mind, always, is that protests against ICE do not ‘turn violent,’ they begin with the violence of ICE. They begin with federal agents raiding school graduations to tear families apart. They begin with ICE invading workplaces to tear people away from the lives they’ve built and the communities they live in. They begin with the lie that some people should be kidnapped, and with the immense violence inherent in that act.

I have yet to see a single moment from an anti-ICE protest that comes close to even a fraction of the violence the ICE displays every day. Ripping thousands of parents away from their children, deporting people, sometimes to countries that these people have never lived in, scarring children and hurting families — I see nothing remotely akin to this mass violence in a robot car set ablaze or a line of people forcing cops to back away. These comparisons are deliberately false and invoked to condemn the righteous anti-fascists in the streets.

The bare minimum that all of us can uphold is not conflating the people engaged in self-defense, the people trying to protect themselves and their communities, with the violence of the fascist state and its brownshirts. The place that all of us can begin is clearly condemning the mass, systemic violence of ICE. There is no need to start by condemning the smashing of an inanimate object as real people are hurt and ripped out of their homes every day.

We have to arm and armor ourselves against the propaganda that will be printed and posted day after day telling us that the protesters are the immoral ones and that agents of the state are inherently justified. State violence is not inherently legitimate. Legality and morality do not necessarily overlap, as we know from slavery to the Holocaust to the kidnappings that ICE legally conducts every day. Setting aside the fact that the immigration apparatus regularly defies the courts and breaks the law, we have to interrogate the fact that their mission is itself deeply immoral. The people in the streets fighting these abductions are the ones with righteousness on their side, and no amount of propaganda or social media posting from Donald Trump will change that. The National Guard will not change that. Nothing can change the fact that ripping families and communities apart is deeply and inherently wrong.

Many of us have seen something like this before. Many of us look at the scenes in Los Angeles and see the summer of 2020. The feeling of an uprising, the feeling that thousands and millions of people have had enough, are no longer tolerating the intolerable, are choosing instead to resist in any and every way they can is palpable, invigorating, inspiring. And the same counter-narratives around violence and decorum are, unfortunately and inevitably, present too. Then as now the ruling class will blame protesters while ignoring the foundational violence that gives rise to these moments. Then as now we must ignore these propaganda narratives and stand firmly on the foundation of righteousness, on the clear moral vision that leads us to resist police murders and ICE kidnappings.

At the same time, we must learn. An uprising is a beautiful thing, a call to action, a rupture where liberation starts to break through. But it is one piece of a puzzle, it is a spark that needs to grow into a bigger fire. As Grace Lee Boggs says, these moments are rebellions, but they are not in themselves the revolutions we need. In Revolution and Evolution in the 20th Century she writes:

“A rebellion usually lasts only a few days. After it ends, the rebels are elated. But they then begin to view themselves mainly as victims and expect those in power to assume responsibility for changing the system. By contrast, a revolution requires that a people go beyond struggling against oppressive institutions and beyond victim thinking … revolutions require a patient and protracted process.”

There is no doubt that moments like the one we’re in right now, moments of rebellion, must be seized. And that looks like forcing ICE out of our towns, that looks like preventing kidnappings and deportations. It looks like pushing this momentum into real, tangible victories. The City of Glendale, in the LA area, for example, just terminated its agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to house federal immigration detainees:

According to the Washington Post, some planned immigration raids in California haven’t happened because of the protests as well. The effects are already being seen, and this is just the beginning. We must act with urgency and hold fast to the long term vision, to the aim of real revolutionary changes in society, at the same time. We must force ICE out of every town and then abolish the agency. We must simultaneously organize and bring people into the long-term work of creating a world where our government would never invade our community, would never abduct a single neighbor, would never rip a family apart.

Right now we rise up and fight back, and at the same time we can bring thousands and millions into the even bigger project, into the march toward the horizon of liberation and justice, into the building of a new society. People are ready, people are fighting for a better world. Let’s seize the moment, and catapult ourselves toward the revolutionary future we all deserve. - JP