The Los Angeles Protests and the New Stage of Struggle Against Trumpism

 
 
Trump’s mass deportation agenda has seen dramatic encroachments on civil rights, legal precedent, and the dignity of immigrants. It’s bad enough that he has used these means against undocumented migrants, but he has also used immigration enforcement to punish political dissidence, most notably in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who holds a Green Card.

Unchecked, this aggression has only escalated, and it cries out for a response. However, Trump’s accommodationists, and Democratic Party strategists with accommodationist leanings, want to turn the other cheek. Apparently, fighting for the rights of immigrants is not an election-winning issue. In crucial contrast to this, the emergence of the protests in Los Angeles, and across the country, since early June have shown that the mass opposition to Trumpism is willing to fight over this issue. The only solutions, and the only path forward, will emerge from that mass movement.

On Saturday, June 7th, protests erupted in downtown Los Angeles in response to Trump’s mass deportations and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) aggressive raids on workplaces in California. Protestors took to the streets to protect members of their communities from the threat of deportation and fight back against Trump’s authoritarian overreach. Quickly, solidarity protests spread across the country, transforming the LA protests into a nationwide movement.

The National Guard responds to protesters in Los Angeles.

 
Escalating ICE Repression and Fightback

According to The Associated Press, David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has become “the face of the pushback against Trump’s effort to drive up immigration arrests.” Huerta was arrested on Friday, June 6, while protesting outside a workplace being raided by ICE. In response, the typically rather toothless and non-confrontational SEIU recognized the severity of the situation and organized several events and demonstrations. Huerta’s arrest and subsequent release have become a “rallying cry for immigrant advocates across the country.”

Since Huerta’s arrest, protests have escalated in numbers and intensity. For example, Melissa Gira Grant’s article for The New Republic, “The Los Angeles Protests Are an Act of Self-Defense,” reports the following:

Whether it’s the sheriffs, police, or Border Patrol, “it was brutal violence,” said 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.”

 
Anti-Authoritarian Character of the Protests

Journalist Ken Klippenstein has recognized that the protests have an explicitly anti-authoritarian character. On Monday, June 9, Klippenstein posted an article on his Substack trying to determine what protesters were fighting for and against. While his methodology was anecdotal and, thus, hardly scientific, it is worth considering. For research, Klippenstein watched hours of videos of the protests and riots, noting what the protesters themselves were saying.

Klippenstein writes in “False Flags: The LA protests are just human” that “The more interviews I watched, the more I began to realize that people are just as upset by the imposition of the national security state into daily life as they are about people being deported.”

Also on June 9, LA rapper and singer Doechii gave an acceptance speech at the BET Awards. In her speech, she addressed the protests and asked her audience to interrogate the character of the Trump regime:

I do want to address what’s happening right now outside of the building. There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order. Trump is using military forces to stop a protest. And I want y’all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our right to protest, the military is deployed against us. What type of government is that?

Doechii’s question should be answered. What type of government is that? It is exactly the type of government it appears to be—a brutal and authoritarian government.

 The authoritarian nature of Trump’s regime has been recognized by the liberal progressive organizers of the “No Kings” protests as well. The protests, which were held on Saturday, June 14, and were deliberately scheduled to counter Trump’s military parade planned for the same day, saw massive attendance nationwide. On its website, the New York Civil Liberties Union posted a digital “No Kings” event flyer which described the protests as a “nationwide day of defiance” and “a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption from Trump and his allies.” According to NPR, organizers estimated that “more than 5 million people participated in more 2,000 planned protests.”

 
 The Accommodationists

 Meanwhile, centrist accommodationists, like the Democratic Third Way think tank, argue that talk about little things like “democracy” doesn’t cut the mustard with swing voters and can’t be counted on to win elections. While that may be the case, there is far more in this world than elections. The protesters in LA have made clear that when an authoritarian regime is kidnapping their friends, arresting their labor leaders, and sending troops into their city, democracy is more than something worth voting for; it’s something worth fighting for.

Accommodationists and Democratic strategists are also arguing that the brave people on the streets of LA are playing into Trump’s hands. Essentially, they are arguing that we should all comply in advance with his regime: Trump is eager to invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law, but compliance-in-advance may prevent that. Yet, these are the people truly “playing into Trump’s hands.” By bowing to his threats, they are helping demobilize the movement.

 Put frankly, the accommodationists misunderstand Trumpism and fascism. For a clearer picture, we can look at the actual state of would-be martial law in the Trumpist retort to the LA proletariat. Trump’s administration couldn’t even plan far enough ahead to provide beds for its stormtroopers. This is the administrative effectiveness that is sure to arise when the only thing that you base appointment decisions on is personal loyalty: an incompetent serial abuser of women runs Trump’s military. The foot soldiers of the mass deportation regime, ICE, appear wearing Disney t-shirts and often grab the wrong targets. Now, and always, it is important to remember that America’s fascists, like all other fascists, are shambolic cowards. We must not do their mythmaking for them.

The accommodationists also fail to understand that the only thing between the further erosion of democracy and the only thing capable of stopping the threat of martial law is the same thing: a living, breathing anti-Trumpist mass movement. The early days of the second Trump administration were marked by the absence of an anti-Trumpist movement, especially when compared with the early days of the first administration, which saw the Women’s March—the largest single-day protest in American history—and protests in response to the Muslim travel ban. In the absence of a mass anti-Trumpist movement for democracy, Trump’s power only grew.

Some Democrats and liberals are being forced to confront this fact. ICE, just like its master, will accept no accountability, checks on its power, or oversight. Elected Democrats who have tried to interact with ICE as if it is a legitimate American institution, have been confronted with authoritarian measures. Representative LaMonica McIver has been indicted by Trump’s Department of Justice for attending a protest outside of an ICE facility in New Jersey. Senator Alex Padilla was forced to the ground and handcuffed while asking questions at a press conference held by Trump’s secretary of homeland security. New York City comptroller Brad Lander, who has been accompanying immigrants to legal hearings so that they are not seized in illegal arrests by ICE in the courthouse, was detained by masked men showing no badges or identification. Despite these episodes, senior Democratic leadership is still leaning toward the accommodationists and has been very quiet about these outrages. Only the mass movement has been clear-eyed and explicit about the authoritarianism of ICE.

Finally, the accommodationists misunderstand the significance of the emerging anti-ICE protest movement. The escalating protests in LA and their expansion across the country could represent the beginning of an anti-Trumpist mass movement and a positive program for saving and deepening democracy.