A Week Occupied by ICE, or How Close Does the Violence Become

Rhys Langston reports from Los Angeles.

By Rhys LangstonJune 20, 2025

• Politics

I EXHALED the truism. “It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better.” Holding a can of Modelo, it felt tawdry. An uprising had exploded over the weekend and its mention had veered the party conversation toward the politically existential. It seemed my prescription of drumming up class consciousness and a worker-based social movement was not convincingly optimistic on a Monday night in the West L.A. rental house where my friend was celebrating his book launch. It was all theoretical anyway, the violence at arm’s length. I myself would be releasing an album that Wednesday, my underwhelming concern being what tack I could take amid the news of an illegal troop deployment meant to quash resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abductions of anyone who looked like an “illegal” immigrant (really meaning “having Indigenous and mestizo features” or “speaking Spanish”). One thing was for certain: I did not want to teach the following morning.

I awoke late Tuesday, June 10, to be a floater sub on the last day of the instructional calendar at a middle school charter campus in South Central. Light work or chaos, how the coin flip of itinerant educators goes. This time it happened to fall on the former. I entered Room 115 10 minutes late to hear the classroom teacher guiding eighth graders on their graduation walkthrough. She had projected an aerial view of an outdoor space with Photoshopped shapes and numbers that the students knew as their places in line, and they staged a version of their procession in the small classroom. Before the practice moved to the gym, the teacher explained that any family members worried about federal agents could attend the graduation virtually. Though she powered down the Epson projector, it stayed in my mind: the still image of foliage and gray shapes superimposed onto the white, industrial wall. For the rest of the shortened day, the school admin simply sent me small groups of students with last-minute assignments. I clocked out and drove to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building downtown.

The question of doing enough rattled around my slightly hungover head. As I sat in my back seat, parked on the edge of the Arts District, covering the lower half of my face and concealing my arms full of tattoos, the question circulating on the internet—be it CIA psyop, AI slop, or DIY Black American conservatism—of whether Black people should get involved in the anti-ICE demonstrations never entered my mind. I did not need a Communist International communiqué or statistics about Haitian immigrants in detention centers to see the interconnectedness of Black domestic and non-Black immigrant struggle. Besides, my great-grandparents fled white terrorism in Louisiana during the Great Migration and settled in Florence-Firestone, as one of the few Black families in a once white and Hispanic, then predominantly Chicano, area (in the 60s, 70s, and further south). To this day, my aunts call me mijo, and I speak fluent Spanish. So as I walked to the mass of protesters spilling onto Alameda, I chanted back the rallying cries both in English and Spanish.

The Black Lives Matter uprisings of summer 2020 marked my mid-twenties, and as I set out to the ICE protest in my early thirties, I wondered if this was a flash point corollary to that moment (and maybe if I could still be considered a member of the youth contingent). Corporate media outlets were framing the new demonstrations in the expected parlance of “rioters” in a “war zone” spurred by “outside agitators.” Bernie Sanders and that one tweeting menswear guy chimed in and asked us all to act a little more like Dr. King and pursue a degree in immigration law. I had not seen for myself, unable to join the uprising’s seizure of the 101 South a few days prior and shout Chinga la migra! between bites of a bacon-wrapped hot dog grilled on the center lane. I stayed home that weekend, my end-of-semester fatigue as a teaching artist leaving me slumped on the couch, exhausted from balancing six months of album-release preparation while teaching a semester of bilingual visual arts curriculum to elementary school students down in Paramount. When my Twitter algorithm fed me the video of police peppering protesters with less-than-lethal rounds outside the Home Depot on Alondra Boulevard, I recognized it from my commute, wondered if my ESL students could hear it from their homes.

By myself that Tuesday afternoon, I paced among the 200 or so people gathered before the National Guard soldiers armed with launchers and riot shields (and a few M16s). In one visual sweep of the crowd, I saw a pair of 10-year-old children embracing each other as they yelled righteously indignant rhymes next to disabled protesters on mobility devices waving miniature flags. A few hundred feet away, soldiers stood behind tripods on the second and third floors of the Federal Building. Eventually the soldiers at street level tightened into a long phalanx formation, with a second line arriving through the mouth of the parking lot/loading dock entrance behind them. A man in our contingent called out: “They mounted rifles on those tripods before they started using cameras on them! Is there any news media here? I have a video on my phone to share with you.” While we stood in place, our chants grew louder, independent newspeople and content creators moved in with their Black Magic cameras, and eventually the soldiers loosened their ranks. At that point, it had been an hour and a half since I had arrived, and my lack of sleep sent me in the direction of my car, to where the LAPD had now blocked off Temple Street. They told those of us leaving the protest to exit the way we came, closer to the demonstration. As we set out south, the sound of a launcher and sight of smoke billowing from the crowd reversed our course. I should not have to think it fortunate that the LAPD allowed us to pass their blockade. But I do.

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That night, my inner monologue played a familiar tune, asking if I had done enough: reposting legal aid adverts and hotline numbers, donating to a friend’s mutual aid initiative, and attending a demonstration just long enough not to get harmed. Would it have been enough to have gotten tear-gassed, booked for the evening, caught by an aerial CNN camera being trampled by an officer on horseback? And even though the semester ended and my art practice was now my primary job, how, in good conscience, was I supposed to advertise my album due out at midnight? Trying to unlearn my learned helplessness, I found myself in the snare of the great American vanity project known as liberalism, seeking a satisfactory outward confirmation of virtue and moral standing in some visible effort. In actuality, my nerves were on end because the physical and systemic violence was as close as it could be without directly touching me. I began to ask instead, How close would it come? My answer came shortly.

In the following days, ICE kidnappings continued. As No Kings Day—a Christy Walton–supported series of national protests against Trump’s military birthday parade—approached, California’s governor Gavin Newsom initiated a legal challenge regarding the National Guard deployments, US Senator Alex Padilla was forcefully removed from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference, and two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota were shot alongside their spouses. When Saturday, June 14, came around, my parents and I went to Culver City in the morning to participate in the nationwide network of assemblies. Then I struck off alone to join the Downtown L.A. iteration. At 4:10 p.m. on Temple, the LAPD tear-gassed me.

Eyes washed and coughing at home, I sighed and reposted half a dozen fan reactions to my new album on my Instagram story. I weighed the (not yet conventional) wisdom against posting my photo or video of the LAPD’s attack on me and my fellow protesters. Indeed, that week I had moved all political communications to encrypted Signal chats, keenly aware of the lack of privacy in our telecommunications, the surveillance and data collection of social media, and our government’s penchant for monitoring activists, which predates any of our modern technology. However, something in me dared to populate the algorithm with my vantage point from the protests. Was it my latent liberal need for making visible my participation? Or was it something else? I thought about being a Black person with vocal, online socialist critiques and gun ownership records in the hands of the government, about being someone who highlights my Jewish ancestry in my loud condemnations of Israel. So tempting fate (or sitting in perverse ego), and likely already on a watch list, I shared evidence of the LAPD’s escalations.

However, before that moment when police horses charged us and burned our eyes and throats with weapons outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, a window of centrist delulu could be imagined. On the Westside, the mostly upper-middle-class white folks got their catharsis from laughing at the cleverest signs denouncing Trump, and then patronized HomeState or Honey’s Kettle Fried Chicken on Culver Boulevard for a bite after. Downtown, the multiracial coalition in attendance for the flying of the giant baby Trump balloon took their lunch at Grand Central Market. I passed both instances, seeing the pressure valves release on people’s faces and shoulders and the harmony of US and Mexican flags set down side by side as people clinked chelas in cheers. If the sole objective were to rewrite the ruling-class narrative of violent rioting, carefully cropped images and sound bites were aplenty. Yes, frame it as lawful assemblies stimulating the local economy of small business, a choice intersection of neoliberal economics and pluralistic law and order. I am sure 50501, the organization that coordinated the No Kings events and are known for working with law enforcement groups, pined for that.

Kidnappings continued. Under cover of protests and news cycle spectacle, unmarked American-brand vehicles pulled into smaller municipalities, swap meets, and residential neighborhoods. ICE agents apprehended asylum seekers at their scheduled hearings and abducted houseless individuals who had no way of producing documentation. These occurrences and the demonstrations have galvanized many in awareness, though even those under a rock can hear the screams of separated families and the LAPD’s sound cannons.

As this relentless campaign continues, we must now consider the question: why have we been given an oppositional strategy that aims us ultimately toward awareness as a political tool of resistance? For once that action becomes a state of being (“being aware”), the accoutrements of that stasis show themselves as props of passivity and consumption: bingeing MSNBC or CNN for updates, sharing infographics, buying sloganized merchandise. In the end, fascism loves awareness, for awareness is a prerequisite of fear, spectacle, and ultimately an attendant brutality.

Over the last two decades, our supposed opposition party, the Democrats, have helped fund, maintain, and oil the engines of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, while posing teary-eyed beside kids in cages. They have presided over the bipartisan expansion of Big Tech to cantilever a sagging economy, which (teleological interpretation or not), provides the logic for Palantir’s profits and stocks to soar, as it levies its government contract to create a database of information used to track immigrants and political dissidents. In the same vein, the Democrats are party to the aggressive development of AI models that seek to replace all facets of work and labor, which can only end in us losing the last true bit of leverage we have: a work stoppage via a general strike. This supposed opposition party says it fights for our healthcare and economic well-being, but it signs off on our tax dollars funding and propelling propaganda in favor of history’s first live streamed genocide, in Gaza. Therefore, it should come as no surprise when the tool kit they have sanctioned for us (one containing awareness, voting for elected officials, and peaceful protest) is not a commensurate form of resistance to match what we may look back on as Donald Trump’s cloud-computed Kristallnacht.

When those who still believe the myths of America speak of the virtues of “representative democracy,” we must ask what “representative” means. As the political theater of our ruling class becomes ever more vaudevillian in its lack of touch with reality, perhaps democracy is representative the same way a cardboard cutout is representative of a lead actor at the local cinema’s premiere of a blockbuster film. Such a thing is not hard to crumple and break.

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When my tear-gas coughing ceased on Sunday, June 15, I intended to follow the strategy suggested in several Signal groups, to attend smaller actions at localized points. That morning, the nearby city of Bell apparently needed support. I mobilized to Hyde Park to carpool with a friend, but by the time I made it to him, the call to action had ended. Resigning to scope out Downtown L.A. again, we separately drove Florence eastbound, aiming for the 110 North. At the corner of Normandie and Florence, a crowd of about 35 rallied next to an AutoZone, and after a quick text, we decided, spur of the moment, to join.

In speeches from union leaders, mutual aid organizers, farmworker advocates, and community members without need of those qualifications, the street-level discourse connected the ICE abductions to US foreign intervention in Latin America, exploitation of undocumented food workers to class war waged on everyday Americans, depreciating quality of life to taxpayer dollars funding proxy wars. There was a sense of jolting immediacy that for a second masked the terror and erosion of rights under every hour of our present. As we voluntarily dispersed at the end of the bilingual program, I did not ask myself if it was enough. I knew it was not. It was a start, and there were other folks I could see in attendance who knew it needed to get drastic before any peace could be declared. They knew it could, would, get better, that it would have to, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. Everyone would have to take things personally, whether or not they wanted to, whether or not harm touched them today or tomorrow or the next day.

Over six days, the violence of ICE’s occupation of Los Angeles traveled closer and closer to me, though I was still safe, and in cognitive dissonance could still retweet reviews of my newest album. I walked to my car and sat with my seat belt on, parked before turning the ignition. I refreshed my Instagram feed. A picture of a Howard Zinn quote written on a protest sign popped up at the top: “They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we’re disturbing the war.” Yeah, I thought, for real though.

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Featured image: Photo of Downtown ICE protests by Sam Bitman.