An Urgent Message From the Streets of Los Angeles

Despite the militarism enveloping Santa Fe Springs, Ramirez continues organizing online, on her phone, and from the homes of US citizen friends.

Inspired by the courage of the most vulnerable, tens of thousands in LA and across the country have undertaken bold action: health workers putting their bodies on the line to defend immigrants; teachers developing “tools of resistance” kits for students, families and communities; unions mobilizing to protect workers; students refusing to bow down before heavily armed marines and militarized police; community members driving ICE out of homes, hotels, and other workplaces; and thousands of everyday people defending their friends and neighbors against ICE.

Millions more have started marching against the militarism led by ICE—the largest arms-bearing branch of the US government, excluding the military—and other security forces under cover of “immigration policy” and “security.”

The immigrant spirit contributing mightily to this political moment reminds me of the song made popular by the movement that led to a leftward shift across the southern California border, in Mexico, “Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo” (They fear us because we do not fear them).

While Ramirez is organizing clandestinely, LA lawyer Chris Newman is doing so on the streets.

“I just drove around downtown LA for the last hour,” he tells me. “The place is a fucking ghost town. Immigrant businesses all around downtown, from the Fashion District to Chinatown, they’re empty, empty. The message is, ‘Stay home. Be afraid.’”

Newman, the legal director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, knows well the threat to democracy pursued under the cover of “immigration policy.” His most famous client is at the center of the most dangerous threat to due process and other constitutional rights in our lifetimes: Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

In search of a way forward, Newman cites our legendary mutual friend and global thinker, the late Mike Davis, who presciently called LA “the city of the future.”

“The insight he shared as he was dying, the thing that worried Mike Davis the most about this incipient fascism was the extent to which the left had relinquished control of the public square, the streets. The streets have always been the only sword and the only shield that social justice movements have had.”

Like Davis, Newman knows that the current threats to civil society are being spearheaded by ICE and DHS, home to the largest, most important restructuring of the federal government since the end of World War II. Built one raid at a time, these institutional threats are rooted in history. So is the opposition to this threat, anti-fascism.

“I really do believe that LA is going to turn the tide on Trumpism. I believe that this is the moment where we either say goodbye to our democracy or we defend it. This fight will begin and end on the streets.”

In recent months, few have spent as much time cruising those streets in defense of immigrants as Ron Gochez, Lupe Carrasco Cardona, and the all-volunteer members of Union del Barrio (UDB), a socialist, Latin Americanist community organization founded in San Diego in 1980.

Months before the immigration turmoil of recent weeks, UDB and over 60 organizations formed a broad coalition to warn against ICE raids, violence, and what they call the “kidnapping” that tears immigrant parents from their children. Their most effective organizing methods are community “patrols.”

“When we see ICE, of course, we cannot obstruct,” says Carrasco, a teacher in LAUSD. “We do not advise anybody to obstruct. But what we do is we immediately alert the whole community that ICE is in the area, and we remind them of defending their rights.”

Gochez traces UDB’s tactical influences to a mix of Chicano and Black Power movements and Latin American radical movements of autodefensa, self-defense. “The closest connection that we have would be the patrols that the Black Panther Party did in their communities in the 1960s and ’70s. For them, it was police terrorism that they were seeking out with their patrols. So, in 1992, UDB started doing community patrols near the border, in San Diego as that was the 500th year anniversary of 1492…500 years after Columbus.”

The long history of pro-immigrant organizing has always been a response to the disturbing anti-immigrant history underlying ICE and its predecessors, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, which since the early 20th century have been influenced by the Ku Klux Klan, the Minutemen and other violent extremists using immigration to institutionalize racist hate.

Because the multibillion-dollar homeland security state and the anti-immigrant racism that feeds it have grown exponentially under all Republican and Democratic administrations since Bill Clinton, UDB is, in Gochez’s words, “organizing to build a dual and contending power so that the people see us in the movement as legitimate forces that they can and should support, and not the two party system that has forever failed us.”

Recently, UDB’s street efforts have grown beyond even its most ambitious strategies.

“People from all over the country have asked us for trainings, and we’ve done them on Zoom,” says Gochez. “We’ve trained people from all over the country.”

The success of UDB and other groups have also caught the attention of Republicans in the US Senate like Senator Josh Hawley, who sent letters to UDB and other LA organizations, threatening to launch an investigation into the groups he accuses of “bankrolling the unrest.”

Steeled by decades of organizing, UDB and the larger immigrant community will not be moved by Hawley’s neo-McCarthyism, as they continue their strategic, intrepid actions that inspired many among the 5 million people or more who joined the over 2,000 #NoKings protests across the country.

For her part, Ramirez will also keep fighting. “All Trump has done is create more of a fire inside of me,” she says, adding “We will fight—and we will prevail.”