“This Is a Hunting of People”: LA Protesters Turn Out to Resist ICE

Since June 7, when Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of marines to Los Angeles to back up ICE’s increasingly confrontational strategies against the immigrant community, local residents have taken to the streets in protest of the administration’s immigration raids and vast infringement on their rights.

When mainstream media isn’t ignoring the protests, the coverage has all too often echoed the narrative of violence pushed by the administration, or, alternatively, one of passivity, of a populace either too cowed or too disinterested to react. But, on the ground, in the neighborhoods that have borne the brunt of this assault, immigrant rights organizers, trade unions, and community groups have been feeling their way toward building a resistance movement against the sweeps.

These protesters, who refuse to go silently into the night of American reaction, are the heroes of our age. They are the US equivalent of the Central and South American women who, for decades, took to the streets to draw attention to the disappearance of their loved ones. One day, if there is any arc of justice, they will be recognized as such.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people headed to MacArthur Park, where last month federal authorities carried out an extraordinary cavalry and armored vehicle show of force, to reclaim the space. Many of the demonstrators wore Unite Here Local 11 red T-shirts. Others, who had walked out of their jobs in local fast food restaurants to protest the escalating immigration crackdown, wore purple SEIU shirts. And still others wore shirts bearing the logo of the Garment Worker Center, an organization representing low-wage garment workers, with or without legal status, around the metropolis. There were representatives from immigrant rights groups such as CHIRLA, and from know-your-rights legal networks.

Twenty-seven-year-old Amalinalli, a US citizen, stayed away from her McDonald’s shift that morning in solidarity with her neighbors and coworkers who were targeted during the raids. “A lot of people are too afraid to go to work,” she said, “so work is slow. They cut your hours back or have less people per shift; it’s a mental and emotional safety issue.” Even though Amalinalli is a citizen, she fears that she will be detained because of the color of her skin and the sound of her name. “There was an ICE raid on Wednesday or Thursday just a few blocks from this park, near Home Depot,” she said. “They took a few people just walking down the street. Just grabbed them, you know, like you pick up a water bottle to go.”

Another McDonald’s worker, Candi, originally from El Salvador, talked about seeing one of her coworkers cry about the prospect of being arrested and deported. “I had never seen a man cry, but I did at work. And that really impacted me. My coworker who was crying actually quit his job. He said he would rather sell all of his belongings than be arrested by ICE.” Candi talked about how quiet and empty her neighborhood streets had become. “The community is now avoiding going outside. They’re avoiding going to do errands. They ask their neighbors who are able to go outside to help them.”

Candi has seen military vehicles on the streets; she has seen masked men, not wearing official uniforms, arresting people in the streets. “Everyone’s choosing not to go out,” says a woman from Mexico who works for an airline-catering company. “It’s very quiet. The stores, everything’s quiet.” The lady she used to see selling tamales outside of the local grocery store has vanished. Other mom-and-pop businesses are closing their doors, either driven out of business by the lack of clientele or hunkering down and hoping that more tolerant times return.

This is the ancillary consequence of the ICE raids: As customers and entrepreneurs avoid going out in public, the masked agents are rending the fabric of LA’s immigrant neighborhoods, leaving economic devastation in their wake. MacArthur Park, the surrounding streets of which used to be filled with the hustle-bustle of street vendors and peddlers, is eerily denuded these days, the park and the streets adjacent to it populated now mainly by the homeless and the mentally ill. Immigrants still live in the buildings surrounding the park, but those immigrants are lying as low as possible.

Tuesday’s protest helped to expose the heartbreak that is too often left invisible when people are forced to go into hiding in an effort to avoid being detained and deported.

Fifty-six-year-old Javier Garcia (a pseudonym) told me the government’s assault “spiked a panic in me.” Garcia has been in Los Angeles for the past four decades, since leaving his home in Mexico’s Guerrero State as a teenager. For many years, he bounced from one insecure job to the next, in an array of different industries. Then he settled into garment work. For more than 20 years, now, he has earned his income in the city’s garment factories, rarely earning more than $15,000 a year.

Since June, Garcia has been unable to work, both because some of the factories where he was accustomed to picking up piece work have shuttered to avoid ICE raids, and also because he is increasingly concerned about being detained and deported. Like so many of the people I talked to, he has largely vanished from public spaces, spending almost all of his time inside his family’s apartment, where he lives with his wife, their daughter and their grandson, and relying on occasional financial assistance from the Garment Worker Center’s Immigrant Defense Fund. He’s fallen behind on the rent and doesn’t know how he’ll make ends meet over the coming months.

It is clear that it took an extraordinary act of personal courage for Garcia to participate in the public protest. After all, despite recent court rulings mandating that ICE and other agencies stop their roving snatch-squad operations, numerous accounts indicate that it’s business as usual for the masked secret police.

The agents have been terrorizing California for months, with operatives violently seizing people, including elderly men, in Home Depot parking lots, car washes, and numerous other locations. These stories, and the video footage shot by byestanders, show how Trump’s secret police are operating in broad daylight; craven cowards who hide their faces as they do their dirty work, all while armed to the teeth as they terrorize the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized. They are images that should shock the conscience of every American.

Garcia knew just where he was on their pecking order; he arrived at the protest with an emergency contact number penned onto his forearm in case ICE agents grabbed him.

“I would say there’s a psychological impact and an economic impact to my family. It was like an unexpected bomb of emotion,” Garcia explains. “This is a hunting of people. I live close to where some of these raids have happened, a block away.” He’s not scared, he clarifies. “What I feel is more panic. It’s a different level. The panic is the thought of being detained and being separated from my family. It is this feeling that no matter where you are, something bad could happen. In one minute, I could never see my family again. In one minute, I could be taken who knows where.”

This is America in 2025. A land of masked men operating with impunity as they terrorize communities and kidnap workers. A land of terrified workers desperately trying to reassert their dignity and reclaim their neighborhoods in the face of a relentless federal onslaught.

I asked the garment worker what he would say to Trump if he met him. He appealed for empathy. “Trump hasn’t suffered what I’ve suffered. Like having to cross a border and risk your own life. He doesn’t know how to build something from the ground up. He only knows how to sit at a fully constructed table. He hasn’t suffered as others have.”

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