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ICE’S WAR ON HOME  
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Anahid Nersessian
June 10, 2025
London Review of Books
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_ 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...who inflame the racist American imagination. _

Protesters in front of police in downtown Los Angeles, June 9, 2025.,
Photo: Eric Thayer / AP // London Review of Books

 

‘A border,’ the poet Wendy Trevino wrote in 2018, ‘is a cruel
fiction.’ California has five borders, and of them only the Pacific
Ocean has not been wholly fabricated by war and conquest. First
encountered by Europeans in 1542, when the Portuguese sea captain Juan
Rodríguez Cabrillo led a Spanish expedition along its southern
shoreline, California is the ancestral homeland of seventy different
ethnic groups, including the Ohlone of the west-central region and the
Tongva of the southern coastal area now known as Los Angeles. Until
1848, it was part of Mexico. Ceded to the United States of America
following the Mexican-American War, it became the 31st state in the
Union.

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 favourite 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’.

Such fascist theatrics are nothing new from Trump, and it is
imperative to recognise that the United States’ recent crackdown on
immigration began not with a Republican but a Democratic president.
Under Bill Clinton, border patrol tripled in size to become the
nation’s second-largest law enforcement agency; under Barack Obama,
the budget for the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
or ICE, began to outpace the budgets of the FBI, the CIA, and all
other federal law enforcement agencies combined. During his two terms
in the White House, Obama oversaw the removal of more than three
million non-citizens, more than any other president in history.

ICE – popularly known as ‘la migra’ – is an artefact 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
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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
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(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
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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_
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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’s books include _Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s
Discourse_
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Calamity Form_
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* ICE
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* homeland security
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* DHS
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* deportations
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* Racism
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Latinos & Hispanics
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* latinos
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* Hispanics
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* Mexico
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* Central America
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* Los Angeles
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Stephen Miller
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* Chicano liberation
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* California
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