For almost a week, people in Los Angeles and across the United States have been rising up to protect their neighbors from brutal attacks and kidnappings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. The Trump administration is systematically targeting and scapegoating some of the most vulnerable members of our communities: immigrants.
ICE agents, heavily-armed and with face coverings to hide their identities, are storming work sites from Home Depots to meatpacking plants. They are separating families and arresting children at schools and hospitals. And when communities bravely stand up for their neighbors in the face of widespread panic, local police and the National Guard are pelting them with rubber bullets and calling them the violent ones.
This is unconstitutional; it is inhumane, extreme governmental overreach; and it is profoundly unpopular. In new YouGov polling, a majority of respondents disapprove of deploying National Guard soldiers and Marines to L.A.
Governmental gaslighting puts all of us at risk
The White House is fabricating an excuse to abuse power and force a confrontation that starts, but does not end, with immigrants. This is a deliberate tactic: causing fear, panic, and chaos to justify acts of violence against unarmed people while distracting from the economic and social harms the government is causing elsewhere. Fossil fuel proponents use similar gaslighting tactics to block climate progress too. They falsify an “energy emergency” so they can claim that it’s the people asking for safe and affordable renewable energy who are the ones standing in the way of progress. Meanwhile, they obscure the real emergency: the urgent threats to life, shelter, food, and health that their fossil-fueled climate emergency is causing.
As they go after workers, parents, students, people with legal status, and U.S. citizens, the Trump administration keeps calling on more branches of the U.S. military to point this country’s deadly weapons at its own people. Meanwhile, tanks are rolling down D.C. streets in preparation for Trump’s military birthday parade this weekend. If the White House’s extreme militarization goes unchecked, the violent raids we’ve already seen in San Diego, Minneapolis and Los Angeles will likely just be the start.
L.A. was prepared to rise up, & community organizing is powerful
We knew these attacks were coming. And the people of L.A. have come out in such strong opposition partly because they were prepared. Drawing on the strength of months, years, and decades of community organizing, people are rising up. They are boldly declaring that there is no justice without migrant justice: no climate justice, no economic justice, no racial justice.
This week, the labor movement stood by the strong message they sent on May Day: “Working people built this nation and we know how to take care of each other.” When SEIU President David Huerta was arrested and injured by ICE this week while exercising his right to document a raid, people rose up across the country in solidarity with him and with everyone he was fighting for and alongside. Climate justice is migrant justice, and we must stand up in the face of this onslaught and protect our neighbors and our communities from this authoritarian regime.
There is strength in numbers, and we encourage anyone in the U.S. to join an action near you if you’re able. In the meantime, here’s one thing you can do from wherever you are: demand that your governor refuses calls to deploy the National Guard against protesters and opposes any efforts by Trump to override their authority.
