Los Angeles, city of protest: why it's no surprise LA rose up against Trump

The Guardian

2 days ago

Los Angeles is home to nearly a million undocumented immigrants, the largest number of any place in the US. For decades, the city has been a catalyst in the US immigrants' rights movement.
So when federal agents began conducting raids at workplaces across Los Angeles last week, activists say it's not surprising that the city rose up in protest.
'We're seeing it as a struggle to preserve what's left of American democracy,' Chris Zepeda-Millán, a public policy expert at the University of California Los Angeles, told the Guardian on Monday en route to a protest.
Trump's decision to send military troops into a majority-Democratic city has been criticized as a deliberate provocation, perhaps one designed to undermine his political rival, California governor Gavin Newsom, and distract from Trump's current legislative and personal struggles.
But Trump has also decided to stage his immigration battle in a city with one of the most well-developed networks of pro-immigration organizations and pro-immigrant labor unions in the United States.
'They're fighting what they perceive as fascism and militarism taking over their city and their state,' Zepeda-Millán said. 'They're well aware that other activists in other cities are watching.'
Angelenos have been organizing against government attempts to criminalize undocumented workers since the 1990s, and against US government racism towards Mexican Americans for at least a century.
Some of LA's immigrants' rights protests have been huge: at least half a million people are estimated to have attended demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles in 2006, when the Republican party tried to pass a national bill that would have made simply being an undocumented immigrant in the US into a felony.
For the most part, the people protesting in the streets today are not themselves immigrants, or undocumented, Zepeda-Millán said. It's the children and grandchildren of immigrants, people who are themselves US citizens, who are taking up the fight.
'They know very well how much their parents and grandparents contributed to this state, this country, this economy,' he said.
Local Black Lives Matter leaders have encouraged all Angelenos to join the protests in solidarity. 'This is our business. Any time there's a Gestapo covering up their faces, masking their faces, snatching people off of street corners, none of us are safe,' Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter LA, said in a social media video on Friday.
Abdullah, who said she was teargassed at a demonstration on Friday, told the Guardian that the law enforcement response to the immigration raid protests had been different, with officers 'throwing aside any rules of engagement'.
'They're treating us as if we're enemy combatants,' she said. 'I've never seen it like this.'
As the White House has set new, record-breaking quotas for the daily number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrests, activists say, many different federal agencies are now being asked to contribute to Trump's deportation agenda.
'We're not just dealing with Ice. We're dealing with FBI Swat teams, drug enforcement, US marshals,' said Victor Narro, a longtime immigration and labor activist in Los Angeles.
In southern California, communities are now seeing 'paramilitary use of FBI agents, armed vehicles patrolling the streets, doing these very flashy and public types of raids and operations', said Luis Nolasco, a senior policy advocate and organizer at the ACLU of Southern California. In January, border patrol agents conducted raids targeting undocumented workers six hours north of the US-Mexico border. 'The amount of border patrol presence in our region is very concerning,' Nolasco said, because border patrol, even more than Ice 'has a horrendous track record of abusing people's rights'.
Today, nearly half of Los Angeles county's 10 million residents are Latino, 16% are Asian, and a third of all residents were born outside the United States. White people have been a minority in Los Angeles county since at least 1990, according to the Los Angeles Times: California became a 'minority-majority' state in 2000.
Los Angeles county has so many residents who are undocumented that it contains nearly 9% of the US's total population of undocumented people, according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute. In 2023, there were a total of 13.7 million 'unauthorized immigrants' living in the US, the nonpartisan thinktank estimated.
Scholars and activists said that Trump simply does not have the federal resources to deport people from the US at the scale or the pace that his administration has promised. In May, the administration demanded that federal agents arrest and deport 3,000 people a day, or a million each year. (Not all people who are arrested can be deported right away.)
During Trump's first 100 days in office, Ice said it arrested an average of only 660 people a day. At that rate, Zepeda-Millán said, it would take federal agents 50 years to deport the more than 12m undocumented people estimated to be living in the United States.
But Trump can effectively use federal agents to terrorize undocumented people and their families, activists said, something his Los Angeles raids have accomplished. One daughter of a man arrested in the raids described her father being 'kidnapped' by agents, taken away in handcuffs and ankle chains, and detained for days without any contact with his family. Others described shock at raids targeting workplaces, and the detention of hard-working, church-going family members, some of whom have lived in LA for decades.
Los Angeles news outlets have reported that streets in some immigrant neighborhoods of the city have been eerily empty, and businesses reporting a sudden drop in customers, as the threat of arrest and deportation has frightened many people into staying at home.
While many news outlets are currently focusing on 'protesters or things being thrown at police', immigrant communities are feeling a 'hurt' that 'is not usually portrayed in the press,' Camarillo said. Given 'the devastation that's occurring in the places where they are raiding and taking mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and sisters and brothers,' he said, it's no surprise that there have been protests.
LA's demographics, combined with the city's history of prominent 'riots', from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 protests over the police beating of Rodney King, make Los Angeles a 'strategic' place for Trump to draw out protesters that he can label 'insurrectionists,' said Albert Camarillo, an emeritus professor of history at Stanford University.
'This is a TV personality that knows how to stage a spectacle,' Camarillo said.
Part of the apparent strategy behind Trump's showdown in Los Angeles, some activists said, isn't even about immigrants themselves. It's about creating chaos and undermining California's economy in order to hurt Democratic governor Gavin Newsom's likely presidential run in 2028.
'I think the Republican party sees Gavin Newsom as a threat,' Zepeda-Millán said.
But activists caution that previous Republicans attempts to crack down on California's undocumented immigrants to further their political goals have backfired – sometimes spectacularly.
One of the main reasons that California is now a Democratic supermajority state is because the Republican party backed a punitive anti-immigrant ballot measure, Prop 187, in 1994. Thirty years later, the state's majority-minority voters still do not appear to have forgiven them.
California is often labeled a 'deep-blue state' but it's also been a deeply reactionary one. The region's PR machine may focus on the sunny beaches and Hollywood glamor, but LA's reality includes intense racial segregation and systemic deprivation. Los Angeles's law enforcement agencies are notorious for their history of racism and violence, and the city has the largest jail system in the United States.
Those conditions have sparked repeated uprisings by the city's Black residents: in 1965, 1992, and again with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. But this Black civil rights history is intertwined with a lesser-known history of similar Latino civil rights battles in Los Angeles, often led by Mexican Americans.
Though California, like much of the south-west, was part of Mexico until 1848, Mexican Americans have faced widespread discrimination, including been targeted with lynchings and white mob violence.
When Camarillo, the Stanford historian, was growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the 1950s, he said, Mexican Americans were still dealing with 'overt racial segregation' in housing, education, and even movie theaters. Very few of the city's more than half-million Latino residents were welcomed into institutes of higher education: When Camarillo entered UCLA in 1966, he said, he was one of fewer than 50 Mexican Americans in a total student body of 27,000.
In the 1960s and 70s, as African Americans were forming the Black Power movement, Mexican Americans formed the Chicano movement, embracing similar ideals of cultural empowerment, equal rights, and self-determination. Both movements had their militant wings: the Brown Berets, founded in Los Angeles, were the Chicano answer to the Black Panthers.
Camarillo remembers being 'riveted' in 1968 as he watched East Los Angeles high school students stage massive walkouts to protest against their underfunded public schools and lack of opportunities. It was 'the first time high school students had ever walked out', said Camarillo, who went on to become the first Mexican American to earn a PhD in Chicano history.
In the 80s and 90s, a massive new wave of immigrants came to Los Angeles, many of them fleeing from civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador in which the United States' cold war policies had played a major role.
With the state's changing demographics came a backlash from California's white residents, Camarillo said. California voters approved several ballot measures in the 1990s targeting undocumented immigrants and banning affirmative action policies at public universities.
In 1994, Los Angeles high-school students again staged walkouts to protest Proposition 187, a ballot initiative designed to block undocumented immigrants and their children from receiving public services, and require public employees, including teachers and doctors, to report suspected undocumented people to the authorities.
While the measure, which was eventually found to be unconstitutional, passed, it radicalized a new generation of activists, and resulted in more Latino leaders running for office and taking leadership roles in labor unions, activists said.
Today, much of LA's political establishment, including Karen Bass, the mayor, is made up of politicians who got their start as pro-immigrant activists in the 1990s. In 1994, during the battles over Prop 187 and California's punitive 'three strikes' law, Bass was a community organizer working with Latino teens to protest against the legislation.
The Trump administration's raids in Los Angeles appear to be mobilizing a new generation of activists. Already, organizers are seeing changes in responses on the ground. In the past, Zepeda-Millán said, immigration enforcement raids and deportations have been 'notoriously hard to organize around', in part because activists often don't find out about them until after they've happened. At most, he said, one or two activists might arrive to try to assist the person being deported.
'Now what you're seeing is hundreds of people showing up,' he said. 'You're not just seeing regular activists, you're seeing community members come out of their houses to confront Ice and the police, saying they don't want them there.'
That new community response to deportations is in part a result of Latino activists' involvement in the George Floyd protests of 2020, Zepeda-Millán said, in which protesters saw police violence and repression firsthand.
'The generation that you see out there, showing up by the tens and hundreds now, to confront raids, this is the generation of youth that were politically baptized during the Black Lives Matter movement,' he said.
This past week's protests, with thousands of demonstrators, are not even close to the largest immigration demonstrations in LA's history. In 2006, as millions of people protested in hundreds of cities nationwide against congressional Republicans' attempt to turn all undocumented immigrants into felons, the largest protests were in Los Angeles. Narro, who organized a large May Day demonstration in 2006, said participants, even small children, dressed in white to symbolize their commitment to non-violence.
'When you see the aerial pictures, it's like a white blanket covering Los Angeles,' Narro said.
Los Angeles' immigrant communities have not participated in a demonstration at that scale in the past 20 years, but Narro said that Trump, who 'seems to be doing something every day to harm immigrants', may finally change that.
'My hope is, if [Trump] continues, it will hit that moment of groundswell, that immigrant families will just get fed up, and overcome their fear, and take to the streets in massive numbers,' Narro said.