GATT editorial, 12 June 2025

One thing that all exploiting classes—from slaveowners to feudal lords to the contemporary capitalist class—have in common is that they’re always caught off guard when the exploited rise up in rebellion against them. Exploiters all arrogantly think they can rule society and never face the consequences for their crimes against the people. The Trump administration thought it could send masked ICE agents to kidnap immigrants in Los Angeles and get away with it, counting on the fact that local government officials who claim their city is a sanctuary for immigrants would do nothing to stop them. What they didn’t expect was that the masses—especially young proletarian Latinos—would throw down against ICE and the multiple law enforcement agencies protecting them. Rubber bullets, tear gas, and phalanxes of riot police could not deter the defiant ones, who fought back against the cops, besieged government buildings, taunted the pigs for their cowardice, threw bricks at police vehicles, and lit Waymo cars on fire.

The righteous resistance in Los Angeles is the second wave of defiance against the mass deportation machine since Trump’s second term started. Back in February, militant protests against ICE took place in cities across the country, especially the Southwest, and Latino high school students took the lead in organizing walkouts and taking to the streets in the face of police repression. In between these two waves of defiance, people across the country have been looking for ways to resist the deportation machine as the Trump administration fumbles to find ways to beat Biden in numbers of deportations and ratchets up racist anti-immigrant rhetoric. How did we get here? And how can the waves of defiance grow in strength and frequency and drown the deportation machine?

Reactionary revanchism’s current favorite target

It’s no secret that whoever occupies the halls of government in the US, exploited immigrant labor is at the foundation of society, producing the food we eat and providing the services necessary for cities to function, yet immigrants are always at risk of detention, deportation, and being the targets of anti-immigrant hysteria. The deportation machine being ruthlessly deployed by the Trump administration today was built up over decades by Democrat and Republican administrations, with the Obama presidency taking the crown for the largest number of deportations. Where the second Trump administration departs from its predecessors is in ideology, spectacle, and political purpose.

As we analyzed in our post-election editorial,¹ ideologically, Trump’s 2024 campaign relied on mobilizing reactionary revanchism—blaming immigrants, trans people, foreign countries, and other scapegoats for real and imagined social problems. Since entering office, the second Trump administration has put immigrants at the top of the list of its targets, and ICE agents, thoroughly steeped in reactionary revanchism, are all too happy to carry out the hunt. Revanchism explains why ICE actions are carried out with such blatant cruelty and why immigrants are being treated as less than human, with no rights the government is bound to respect.

The cruelty is part of the spectacle desired by the Trump administration. Rather than quietly rounding up immigrants like during the Biden administration, ICE agents have carried out their kidnappings in ways curated for media spectacle. Camera crews and even Dr. Phil have accompanied ICE kidnappings, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had the caucacity to fly to El Salvador and pose for pictures in front of deportees in one of the most brutal prisons in the world. The purpose of the spectacle is twofold: to strike fear in immigrants and their supporters, and to display reactionary presidential power unbridled by constitutional concerns. This explains why, after targeting mostly imaginary Venezuelan gang members, ICE turned to international and immigrant college students who spoke out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and apprehended them in plain clothes and masks, looking more like criminal kidnappers than official government agents.

The spectacle, however, did not bring deportation numbers above those of the Biden administration, failing to deliver on the promises of reactionary revanchism or prove the Trump government’s power. There’s only so many supposed Venezuelan gang members and international students who spoke out against genocide in the US, so the targets of the deportation machine had to broaden to meet the promised quotas. The most Naziesque elements of the Trump administration, especially Stephen Miller, pushed to make good on mass deportation promises by any means necessary, with shifts in ICE tactics in part haphazard striking out in different directions and in part well planned to serve reactionary strategic objectives. This explains why all manner of international and immigrant students are now being threatened with having their visas revoked, and why ICE has begun going after immigrants at their workplaces and court hearings and in so-called sanctuary cities.

The latter serves a deeper political purpose: to delegitimize the liberal bourgeois order that holds sway in cosmopolitan cities concentrated on the coasts. It allows ICE thugs and other federal agents to conduct operations in Democrat-governed urban centers and expose local sanctuary laws as little more than performative rhetoric by liberal bourgeois politicians whose concern is for their careers, not the immigrant masses who live in their cities. From our perspective, these liberal bourgeois politicians do need to be delegitimized, but for serving the same system ICE does. In all so-called sanctuary cities, the police have protected ICE from righteous mass resistance and assisted them as they kidnap immigrants, and no progressive city council, mayor, or governor has ordered their police to do otherwise. Governor Newsom’s feigned concern for the immigrants being rounded up and “standing up to Trump” bravado are little more than preparation for a 2028 presidential bid, in case that wasn’t obvious.

ICE’s gestapo style and the Trumpian willingness to challenge constitutional norms can certainly be called fascistic moves, but alarmist cries about the consolidation of authoritarianism or fascism are driven by a respect for and defense of liberal bourgeois governance—a liberal bourgeois governance we must aim to overthrow along with its openly reactionary counterparts. Every US presidential administration since the country’s formation has committed crimes that could be called fascist and targeted specific sections of the population with brutal repression. Analyzing the second Trump presidency by comparing it to historical examples of fascist governments in 1930s and 40s Europe is at best a flawed method and at worst a fool’s endeavor, especially when carried out by making comparative checklists. Today’s fascistic ICE actions are defined not principally by the specter of past fascisms, but by the revanchist imperatives of reactionary classes today. The Trump administration and ICE may bend or break aspects of traditional bourgeois-democratic governance without ripping up the entirety of constitutional norms, and they can and are targeting specific sections of the population while letting life as normal carry on for others. Fascism isn’t an all or nothing proposition, and the question that matters is what we’re going to do in the face of any and all reactionary onslaughts against the people.

What will it take to melt ICE?

If constitutional methods of asserting the bourgeois-democratic rights of immigrants never stopped deportations under Clinton, Obama, or Biden, they damn sure won’t under Trump. The defiant ones on the streets of Los Angeles have shown the kind of mass struggle that must be at the forefront of stopping the deportation machine. The Democrat politicians, liberal newspapers such as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and immigrant rights nonprofit organizations now counseling protesters not to be militant are doing so because they fear the masses just as much as their openly reactionary counterparts. Furthermore, they know that their charade is being exposed by the defiant ones, who have struck a bigger blow to the deportation machine than any lawsuit, sanctuary city law, or other reformist scheme ever could. For the deportation machine requires our acquiescence to function, and when confronted with irate youth unafraid of rubber bullets and tear gas, it has to retreat behind National Guard troops and riot police. Simply put, ICE can’t kidnap people if their every move is met with militant resistance.

Defiant resistance with a mass character, however, tends to come in waves. Revolutionaries need to jump into those waves whenever they start to rise and move decisively to make them as powerful as possible for as long as possible. In each wave, there are proletarian masses and rebellious youth willing to put themselves on the line and looking for leadership to do so in the most effective ways. But the leadership of revolutionaries in those waves cannot be merely tactical. It needs to be all-around political leadership, raising not just the fighting capacity of the masses but also their proletarian class-consciousness and revolutionary organization, especially if their defiant energy is to be sustained beyond the high tide of struggle. Furthermore, in addition to the street battles with riot cops, revolutionaries need to lead a political battle for public opinion, defending the militant edge of the protests, exposing the liberal bourgeois order that opposes it, and drawing in a larger mass of people to support the defiant ones even if they’re not able or willing to be on the front lines.

When the wave subsides, there is much work to be done to sustain a lower but persistent tide of struggle and get prepared to make the next wave even stronger. Those who were most daring in the streets need to be drafted into the ongoing struggle, and if they’re facing charges, defended as heroes, with their legal battles turned into another arena of struggle against the deportation machine. All those looking to continue the struggle need to be mobilized to go to the masses targeted by the deportation machine—first and foremost immigrant proletarians—in the neighborhoods they live and places they work. It’s only when those neighborhoods and workplaces become strongholds of struggle that rapid response against attempted kidnappings by ICE becomes possible on a mass scale.

Beyond that bedrock social base for resistance, there are millions more people who are outraged by ICE kidnappings and deportations and looking for ways to stand with those targeted by them. Sometimes, such people put themselves on the line, as when ICE recently kidnapped immigrant workers at a restaurant in San Diego. But too often, many of those who genuinely want to oppose the deportation machine are funneled into Democratic Party, nonprofit activist, and Leftist-led forms of political activity aimed at deflating resistance. A united front against the deportation machine under the leadership of genuine revolutionaries, proletarian immigrant masses, and rebellious youth needs to begin to pose an alternative political program and methods of struggle for those sympathetic to immigrants targeted by ICE, pulling them away from the opportunist and reformist leadership that currently holds sway among them.

We write this editorial as the current wave of defiance that started in Los Angeles on June 6 is still flowing, inspiring resistance across the country. In Los Angeles, it now faces the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines, along with a curfew put into effect by the supposedly progressive mayor, Karen Bass, who has unleashed the trained, sadistic brutality of the LAPD against the protests. The defiant ones will always have to go up against police repression, but the rapid deployment of military personnel—coming quicker than it did during the 1992 LA Rebellion—is more unique to the Trump administration. In part, it is a spectacle aimed at projecting reactionary presidential power, but it is also an indication of the weakness of the repressive state apparatus in the face of militant mass resistance.

Deploying the military could become a further weakness for the ruling class, as there is far greater potential for defections in the ranks of the military than from the police when they are ordered to repress domestic protest. US soldiers may be accustomed to brutalizing people in countries oppressed by US imperialism, but they are not ideologically indoctrinated and trained to brutalize people in the US like the police are. Especially if troop deployments become a more routine response, beyond Los Angeles, to militant resistance against ICE, it is imperative to work to create cracks among those troops and challenge them to defect.

However this current wave plays out, we should use it to gain greater strategic and tactical sophistication so that we can foment and enter into the next wave of defiance stronger. And not just so we can better handle rubber bullets and tear gas, but so we can rally more people to our side; quickly train up new leaders with revolutionary politics in command; take advantage of conflicts between the Trump administration and local Democrat governments; further expose the liberal bourgeois order while combating the reactionary onslaught; and shift alignments among the people away from opportunist and reformist leadership and towards truly standing with the masses. If the waves of defiance get stronger and more frequent, and if they start to sweep across the whole country at once, the masses of people have the potential to knock the deportation machine on its ass and deliver a setback for the reactionary revanchist onslaught against immigrants. The defiant ones in Los Angeles have proven that the forces of repression are not all-powerful, and that ICE kidnappers can get caught in the act, get exposed for the fascist thugs they are, and even be prevented from snatching more immigrants. Make way for the defiant ones.

1“The reactionary repudiation of a restorationist program and the ongoing tantrums of two reactionary petty-bourgeoisies,” Going Against the Tide #3 (2025).