In many Los Angeles neighbourhoods, usually bustling with taco trucks and flower vendors, streets lay empty and deserted; a scene that is now common in immigrant communities across the United States. Behind this desertion is the Donald Trump administration’s dramatic increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Dozens of agents arrive in unmarked cars with rifles and bulletproof vests. They increasingly wear ski masks, do not display badges and refuse to identify themselves, adding to the fear elicited by their raids.
Undocumented workers are handcuffed, thrown into rented vans and whisked away. Many are sent to detention facilities on opposite sides of the country before their loved ones or immigration lawyers are even aware of their detention, then deported with less than a day of notice.
ICE raids are by no means a new phenomenon, and mass deportations have been a bipartisan policy priority for decades, but the second Trump administration has dramatically increased the pace and scale of detentions and deportations.
In late May, the administration reportedly set a quota of 3000 immigrant detentions per day nationwide, and ICE agents soon began indiscriminately raiding restaurants, car washes, factories and farms. But these abductions have also occurred far beyond the workplace.
Undocumented people are now routinely detained at court and in immigration offices where they are legally seeking residency. Others are detained at their homes, often in indiscriminate raids on apartment complexes. Many people have simply been snatched off the street and thrown into vans in clear instances of racial and linguistic profiling.
Thus far, ICE has detained over 100,000 people during the second Trump administration, a 120% increase from last year.
Bipartisan consensus
This spectacle of violence and terror has made headlines and proved Trump’s determination to target and deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living within the US. But mass deportations have long been bipartisan federal policy. ICE was formed as a part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and has terrorised immigrant communities ever since.
In fact, Democratic President Barack Obama still holds the record for most deportations of any president, at more than 3 million during his eight years in office, earning him the moniker “Deporter in Chief”. Joe Biden began his presidency promising a humane immigration policy and decreased deportations. But during his final year in office, he oversaw the highest annual deportation rate in a decade, surpassing Trump’s first term.
The entire 21st century has been marked by mass deportations, an increasingly militarised border and the growth of a private immigration detention facility industry. So, the aggressive, indiscriminate and racially motivated ICE raids of this year are by no means an anomaly, only an intensification of longstanding bipartisan policy.
While Democratic Party leaders have roundly condemned the Trump administration’s mass deportations, they fail to account for their own party’s complicity in this terror. Ending the crisis will require far more than a change in presidential administration.
Resistance
Activist groups, civil society organisations and some lawmakers have long fought for immigrant rights. But the current popular resistance to ICE has been unprecedented in both scale and tactics. By May, ICE arrests and deportations had reached an astonishing level, and communities across the country began to fight back. Incidents in which angry crowds surrounded and confronted ICE agents garnered national media attention, emboldening other communities across the country to physically intervene in ICE raids.
In early June, two major raids in Los Angeles were met with strong community resistance, and both ICE and local police responded with rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. A major union leader David Huerta was injured and arrested for filming the raid and now faces up to six years in prison if convicted. Dozens of other observers and protesters were tracked through surveillance footage and later arrested at their homes for alleged damage to federal vehicles and obstructing law enforcement operations. Mass protests in downtown Los Angeles followed, focused on the city’s federal detention centre.
The Trump administration responded by sending 4100 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, more active-duty military personnel than are stationed in Iraq and Syria combined. Almost 600 people were arrested in two weeks of protest, with many more injured by rubber bullets and stun grenades.
But these violent encounters with ICE birthed an unprecedented tactic of organised monitoring, early warning and interruption of ICE operations. Immigrant rights movement Unión del Barrio, alongside a growing list of grassroots pro-immigrant groups, has organised 24/7 “Rapid Response Networks”.
Shifts of volunteer drivers patrol neighbourhoods and businesses that ICE has been known to target. There is a hotline number that is distributed to street vendors, day labourers and local businesses, and they are added to large Signal and Telegram message boards.
Response networks also place stationary volunteers on streets where day labourers are known to seek work. With lists of the licence plate numbers of known undercover ICE vehicles, patrollers raise the alarm when ICE is spotted. Volunteers then spread the message to day labourers and businesses through Signal, Telegram and word of mouth, allowing undocumented workers a chance to reach safety.
This approach has succeeded in preventing numerous abductions. ICE convoys now frequently arrive to deserted day labour centres that had been packed with workers only minutes earlier. Restaurants and car washes let workers leave to seek safety mid-shift, and taco trucks conveniently drive away. When ICE does manage to conduct a raid, they are met with strong resistance, as rapid response networks manage to alert thousands of community members in real time.
These volunteer efforts at monitoring, early warning and direct intervention have now spread beyond Los Angeles. They remain, for the moment, the most promising method to deter mass deportations.
Elected leaders, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have expressed outrage at the recent ICE raids, but have posed no real challenge to federal agents. Mayor Bass’ Los Angeles Police Department has, in fact, routinely assisted ICE by violently clearing protesters from immigration raids.
At the federal level, Democrats have posed no meaningful challenge to ICE or the broader anti-immigrant agenda. Trump managed to pass his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ through Congress, which will increase ICE’s budget from $10 billion to $100 billion by 2029, giving it more funding than all but two of the world’s militaries.
The judiciary has met with slightly more success in impeding Trump’s agenda. Courts have attempted to halt the administration from transferring detainees to a brutal prison in El Salvador, end detentions based on racial profiling and ensure that immigrants receive due process before deportation. These are necessary fights, and the judiciary has managed to stop a select few deportations. But judicial fights are likely only to change the shape of ICE operations, not the actual fact of the deportation of millions of people.
Community-level, organised, direct action to monitor, prevent and intervene in ICE raids will therefore only become more important as the now heavily funded deportation machine speeds up. This is not to discount the importance of judicial and legislative action, as the movement will need any tools at its disposal.
But more than six months into Trump’s second term, it is increasingly clear that the Democratic Party and the courts are not coming to the rescue, and in fact have long been complicit in the 21st-century terror of mass deportation. Trump has vowed to deport every single undocumented immigrant in the US, and it is increasingly clear that he has the will and resources to make good on this promise.
With a flailing and largely complicit Democratic Party, a judiciary that more often than not supports Trump’s agenda, and few curbs on the president’s power, it is clear that only community-level direct action will be able to protect immigrant communities.
However, activists must find a way for rapid response networks to be sustainable. These efforts are carried out by volunteers working long hours at their own expense. And while response networks were awash with volunteer patrollers and hotline operators in the early months of the heightened immigration crackdown, this enthusiasm may fade.
Furthermore, people intervening in ICE raids have been subject to arrest across the country, often charged with serious offences such as assaulting federal agents. State harassment of the left, which has intensified dramatically amid ongoing protests against Israel’s attempted genocide of the Palestinian people, has made those involved in anti-ICE organising subject to intense scrutiny.
The task now is therefore to maintain broad support for the direct protection of immigrant communities, which will require enrolling a wide swath of the social movement, civil society and organised labour landscape. No one is coming to the rescue. It is communities themselves that will keep their neighbourhoods safe from ICE.
[Reprinted from Jonathan Cannard is a PhD student in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.]