In the late 1960s, Chicano liberation movements began claiming it as part of Aztlán, the legendary kingdom of the Aztecs, as a symbol of an ancient right to the land. Nearly half the population of Los Angeles is Hispanic or Latino, and the city also has the largest Filipino population in the US and the largest Armenian population outside Armenia. About a third of people living in LA were born outside the US.
These demographics have made LA a favorite target of right-wing attacks on immigration both legal and informal. If President Donald Trump has long relished painting San Francisco as a drug-addled hellscape because of its many unhoused residents, he has attacked LA with equal if not greater intensity. Yesterday he took to X to describe it as a ‘once great American City’ that ‘has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals’, before announcing that he would be taking ‘all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion’.
ICE – popularly known as ‘la migra’ – is an artifact of the so-called war on terror. Founded in 2003, it swiftly went about detaining and deporting thousands of Muslim, Arab and South Asian men, all labelled as national security threats after 9/11. Earlier this year, ICE was involved in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who was taken into custody as a result of his involvement in the Gaza solidarity protests and remains in an immigration detention centre in Louisiana. A green-card holder, Khalil is in the US legally, as are many of ICE’s recent targets. They include Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was arrested without having been accused of a crime and deported to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. (The US Supreme Court ruled Abrego Garcia’s deportation illegal; he was returned to the US on 6 June and is currently being held in a Tennessee prison.)
These high-profile cases are the tip of the iceberg, but they give some sense of ICE’s primary targets under Trump: non-citizens involved in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and non-citizens who are Hispanic or Latino. ICE is also targeting immigrants of other ethnic backgrounds: the X account of the Department of Homeland Security shows photo after blurry photo of Filipino and Haitian as well as Mexican and Central American men being handcuffed by ICE agents, with captions accusing them of crimes such as rape and vehicular manslaughter. But because of the relative porousness of the border between the US and Mexico, it is Mexicans and people from its neighbouring countries who inflame the racist American imagination. These are the ‘bad hombres’ to whom Trump infamously referred in his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, the drug lords and gang members who must be eliminated from the law-abiding and presumptively white population.
In a remark that has since gone viral, Conor Simon, a resident of Honesdale, Pennsylvania, observed: “It’s really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armour to take him away is somehow the good guy.”
Trump may spin spine-tingling tales of ‘bad hombres’, but videos of recent ICE raids tell a different story. The mother of a newborn is handcuffed and shoved, head down, into an unmarked vehicle, her family screaming, the neighbours filming, her baby cradled against a weeping woman’s shoulder. A young boy wails as his father is thrown into the back of a van. Children whose parents have been taken into custody sob on the floor of a school gym, not knowing if they will ever see their families again. The raids have not been on drug dens or sex-trafficking rings. They have been on restaurants and schools, hospitals and court houses. ICE’s war is not simply at home, but on home.
The protests that broke out last weekend in Los Angeles are at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza. They have been met with no longer shocking displays of state violence, including the arrival of the National Guard and seven hundred marines. Protesters have been gassed, shot in the head with ‘less lethal’ munitions, beaten, trampled with horses, hit by cars and taken into custody. The LAPD, like many police departments in the US, trains with soldiers from the Israel Defence Forces, and you can see, in their response to the protesters, the same libidinal thrust of disproportionate force that’s turned against children throwing rocks at tanks in the West Bank. In LA, protesters have dug up stones from the landscaped medians that run down the middle of the larger boulevards and hurled them at ICE’s unmarked cars, or else dropped them from highway overpasses onto LAPD vans.
On social media there are photographs of protesters with signs that say things like ‘National Guard LOL’ and ‘I drink my horchata warm ’cause fuck ICE.’ The novelist Rachel Kushner, a longtime LA resident, posted a photograph of a lowrider three-wheeling past a trio of National Guardsman standing in front of a tank: ‘from 2020 but says better than I could how I feel about the arrival of the National Guard’, she wrote. (Lowriders, customised cars often with hydraulic systems, have been an important part of Chicano culture since the 1940s.) ‘This is for my dad!’ says graffiti under a bridge. There are videos of people riding their bikes in circles around the police, waving enormous Mexican flags. A teenager, holding a skateboard as he walks through a hail of rubber bullets, turns around and flips off the dozens of police shooting at him. In another video, an older Black man scolds a Black officer in the LA County Sheriff’s Department for doing the bidding of ICE, which he suggests is run by white supremacists. There is evidence to support this claim: the Boston Globe reported last week that an agent conducting a raid in Martha’s Vineyard was sporting a tattoo popular among neo-Nazis, and in February a ICE prosecutor in Texas was linked to a white-supremacist account on X.
There have been some complaints about protesters’ tactics, but they’ve been muted. Some demonstrators have sat on the freeway, blocking ICE vans from passing; others have stood barefaced, in T-shirts and jeans, in front of masked and heavily armed rows of cops, staring them down coolly. Others have thrown Molotov cocktails and set police cars – and the occasional Waymo – on fire. We have all spent the last year watching unarmed twenty-year-olds get beaten and shot for protesting a genocide, and we have all spent the last six hundred days watching a genocide. It is absurd to suggest that the state – any state – needs a pretext to maim or kill, to arrest or deport. ICE arrives, guns blazing, to pull children out of the arms of their parents, the LAPD shoots people in their homes, and the president and his cronies loudly announce their plans to suspend habeas corpus and throw dissenters in prison, whether they are citizens or not. Playing nice protects no one.
Last Thursday, just before the protests began, I walked across the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach, to administer a final exam to my students. To prepare for the inauguration of the university’s new chancellor, Julio Frenk, a former health secretary of Mexico, heavily armed members of the LAPD lined every path. Their guns were held across their bodies, ready to aim, and as I passed them I imagined a rookie officer, startled by the sound of a car backfiring or a branch snapping, shooting me in the head. When I arrived at my classroom, I asked my students if the police presence made them more anxious than the exam. They said they had a different fear. They’re afraid ICE is going to raid their graduation.
Anahid Nersessian is an American writer and critic who served as the poetry editor of Granta Magazine. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and New Left Review. In 2021 Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse was named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe. She is Professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.
