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THE LOS ANGELES PROTESTS ARE AN ACT OF SELF-DEFENSE  
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Melissa Gira Grant
June 10, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Residents of L.A. aren’t merely protesting ICE; they’re
attempting to protect their communities from ICE’s raids. _

LAPD officers arrest a protester during an anti-ICE demonstration in
downtown L.A. on June 8., BENJAMIN HANSON/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty
Images

 

Early Sunday evening in Los Angeles, as the city was under siege
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by federal anti-immigration forces, aided by local law enforcement,
Mayor Karen Bass was holding a press conference. Out in the streets, a
reporter noted [[link removed]], it
appeared that the Los Angeles Police Department was “cooperating”
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “using flashbangs and
less-lethal munitions” to push people engaged in “peaceful
protest” away from a federal building being used as an ICE detention
center. The reporter asked if Mayor Bass would comment on this
cooperation, which is against city policy
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“What happened there,” Bass began, “is that when one branch of
law enforcement says they need help, another branch of law enforcement
is going to respond.” In this case, she said, LAPD’s aim was to
control the protest. She distinguished its actions from the
department’s “coordinating with ICE in terms of raiding workplaces
or arresting people who are undocumented.”

 
The Los Angeles mayor was trying to draw a line: While the LAPD is not
supposed to be _directly_ raiding workplaces or arresting undocumented
immigrants alongside ICE, it is free to police the public so that ICE
can raid workplaces and arrest undocumented immigrants. For those in
the streets, choking down tear gas and dodging disabling
“less-lethal” bullets as they try to defend themselves and one
another from violent raids, this is a distinction without a
difference.

Angelenos mobilized this weekend, after ICE descended on their city
and over several days began making very public arrests. Last week,
people arriving at their mandatory ICE check-ins at a federal building
were instead quickly locked
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up in a makeshift detention center, where as many as 200 people were
being held in basement rooms. (“No food. No water. Locked in holding
rooms for over 12 to 24 hours,” said
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Democratic Representative Jimmy Gomez, who represents parts of Los
Angeles.) Dozens of people were arrested
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at a Home Depot on Friday by masked agents in tactical gear. Multiple
federal agencies assisted
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ICE. One witness described
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unidentified agents descending on food vendors nearby: “They were
just grabbing people. They don’t ask questions. They didn’t know
if any of us were in any kind of immigration process.” Another
witness said that he was in his car when ICE agents stopped traffic,
“in all their military gear.” People in the traffic jam could see
ICE putting people into vans. “We weren’t there to protest,” the
man told
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KCAL-TV, but when people got out of their cars and began to record
with their phones, they were tear-gassed. As ICE agents raided a
business in the Fashion District, footage
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community members challenging them indicates, LAPD was apparently
stationed outside. And as the news of the raids spread, and more
people came out to witness and protest, LAPD was there to push back,
to control, to demobilize.

For Bass, it seemed, the problem was not that the LAPD was violently
policing those protesting ICE raids; the problem was Trump’s calling
in the National Guard to do the same thing. By this logic, the ICE
raids, conducted with the support of myriad federal agencies, are a
terrifying abuse of power that police should not collaborate in—but
it’s fine for police to collaborate by keeping protesters and
witnesses away. The upside-down thinking goes even further: It’s
wrong for the National Guard to put down protests against the will of
the governor and city officials, but it’s fine for state and local
law enforcement to do it, so long as state and local officials want
them to. The line of reasoning is maddening, seemingly designed to
scramble and demobilize support for the people of Los Angeles. Accept
the terms of the debate, and you end up in a bizarre argument about
how much violence, from which armed agents of the law, is acceptable.

Those with the clearest view are the ones bearing the brunt of such
attacks. Whether it’s the sheriffs, police, or Border Patrol, “it
was brutal violence,” said
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Ron Gochez, a community organizer, who was part of the protests.
“What they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people
would resist.” Over eight hours on Saturday, he said, after a battle
with Border Patrol—“and it was a battle, because there were people
throwing back tear gas, people throwing anything that they could to
defend themselves and to defend the workers that were being
surrounded”—the Border Patrol retreated. “And the hundreds of
workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape,”
Gochez recounted. “They were able to go to their cars and go home.
That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home
that night.” If any community was going to fight back without
apology, it was this one.

“ICE raids in LA are a declaration of war,” longtime immigration
reporter Tina Vásquez wrote
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at Prism on Monday. Los Angeles was built by communities who have
survived and fled political persecution and state violence, she
pointed out, and who have faced it again—including from police—in
their new homes. “When you are an Angeleno and this is your lineage,
you are fully aware of what local law enforcement is capable of,”
she added, and when the LAPD attempts to distance itself from ICE
raids, “you know better.” No one outside of Los Angeles should be
surprised: “ICE sent the city of Los Angeles a message when its
agents showed up in full force and in broad daylight, and that message
was responded to in kind by the people.”

Bass might say that she supports the people’s right to respond, but
she wasted little time before admonishing her constituents for not
responding in the right way. “The most important thing right now is
that our city be peaceful,” Bass said
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press conference. “Expressing your fears, your beliefs, is
appropriate to do, but it is just not appropriate for there to be
violence.” Drawing lines between “peaceful” and “violent” is
a common move for politicians amid popular protest. They continue to
urge so-called nonviolence even as such directions can feel quite
difficult to follow in a cloud of tear gas you did not set off. It’s
nearly impossible to figure out what compliance is supposed to look
like when police are launching weapons of war on the public. In such a
gross imbalance of power, the police are the ones really drawing the
lines. No matter what a peaceful protester may intend, it’s police
who are deciding when to use violence and whom to use it against—and
nothing we saw this weekend indicates their violence was confined to
those who were not “peaceful.”

It is very difficult to believe that Los Angeles’s political
leadership—or California’s governor or other state
officials—truly wish to stop ICE raids when they are willing to
arrest the only people who are actually standing in ICE’s way. The
politicians want to define protest as merely voicing a demand without
disrupting anything; they don’t want to recognize the value of
putting one’s body between the state and the scapegoated. There is
apparently no “peaceful” way to do that in Los Angeles. And for
those of us elsewhere, who _would_ like these raids on immigrants to
end, who want to end Trump’s abuse of power—we will fail if we
defer to such “leadership” and line drawing. What we are
witnessing in Los Angeles is not only a protest; it is self-defense.

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Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at _The New Republic_ and the
author of _Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work._

* Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Los Angeles; Raids on
Immigrants; Protests;
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