Trump’s “violent campaign of raids and detentions during the summer of 2025 in Los Angeles set the stage for similar and subsequent abuses in cities around the country,” as Human Rights Watch said
June 6 marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s unjustified invasion of Los Angeles, which terrorized local residents in their own homes and essential workers at Home Depot while deliberately seeking to stoke unrest at community-led protests in order to unlawfully deploy troops and suppress the freedoms of everyone from coast to coast regardless of immigration status.
During that time, “federal immigration enforcement in the LA region skyrocketed, with immigration arrests quadrupling between April and June,” the American Immigration Council (AIC) noted in September. “Immigrants without criminal convictions made up an increasing share of monthly arrests, jumping from 35 to 69% and challenging the Trump administration’s claims of targeting criminals for deportation.”
“They just come and grab you, like grabbing a baby,” one day laborer said at the time. “They don’t ask any questions.”
AMERICANS TARGETED AND HARASSED BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN
Many of these wrongful arrests also included U.S. citizens like Cary López Alvarado, who was racially profiled and physically assaulted by ICE agents just one week from her baby’s due date. Javier Ramirez, a car washer who was born in San Bernadino, said ICE agents shouted “Get him, he’s Mexican” as they stormed his property. “I pleaded with them, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen. I was born here,’” he later testified. “But my words fell on deaf ears.” Hollywood-born López Alvarado said that when she tried to tell agents that she was pregnant, they responded with, “OK, your baby is going to be born here, but you’re from Mexico, right?”
Mass deportation agents snatching Californians off the street based on how they look and the accent in which they speak would prove to have devastating consequences nationwide, after a Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump during his first term issued an un-American decision that gave a greenlight to the now-dreaded “Kavanaugh stops.”
“Evidence of racial profiling by federal immigration officers in LA initially resulted in a court order barring them from stopping someone based solely on race, language, job, or location,” AIC noted, “which the U.S. Supreme Court later overruled.” In one of the most extreme examples of these Kavanaugh stops., construction worker and U.S. citizen Leonardo Garcia Venegas has now been targeted and harassed three times.
L.A. SET THE STAGE FOR FEDERAL OCCUPATIONS ALL OVER THE COUNTRY
But as we also noted at the time and other trusted voices affirmed, it wasn’t just about L.A., because the administration’s unjustified invasion of its own people in the region was really a trial run for intentionally brutal, wasteful, and constitution-shredding campaigns sloppily disguised as federal immigration enforcement actions in other major centers, including Chicago, Charlotte, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. The administration’s “violent campaign of raids and detentions during the summer of 2025 in Los Angeles set the stage for similar and subsequent abuses in cities around the country,” Human Rights Watch said in November.
In Illinois, the administration treated a South Shore neighborhood like it was an active war zone, with federal agents from ICE, Border Patrol, the FBI, and the AFT “rappelling from helicopters onto rooftops and breaking down doors” and ransacking apartments in order to drag senior citizens, parents, and children – “some of them naked,” the Chicago Sun Times reported in September 2025 – from their beds and homes in the middle of the night. 18 residents who were terrorized in this military-style assault have since filed legal claims. “Residents were targeted based on race and ethnicity,” a complaint said. “Detainees were not told why they were being held and were never shown warrants, and were barred from contacting attorneys.” Other tenants said they returned home to find their apartments ransacked and possessions stolen.
That same month, Rev. David Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church, said he heard federal agents laughing after they shot him with pepper balls outside the Broadview detention facility.
“Every time we have been attacked with pepper bullets or tear gas or pepper spray that I have been present, it has felt like it came from anger that we were there, and not from any determined safety need or protocol,” added Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist pastor who was also targeted by federal agents. “They are unhinged.”
SACRED GROUNDS VIOLATED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
In North Carolina, parishioners who were doing yard work fled the church grounds in terror after agents descended on the area to pluck community members off the streets, the Charlotte Observer reported Nov. 17. “Inside the church, women and children sobbed as they wondered whether their loved ones had been taken.”
Elsewhere in town, one Latino business owner said he had no choice but to shut down his bakery for the first time in nearly three decades in order to protect his employees and customers. We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again: the humanitarian disaster that is mass deportation is also an economic loser that hurts all Americans struggling to pay their bills. When the federal government should be investing in families worried about how they’re going to pay for groceries, gas, and healthcare, it instead deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C. to rake leaves at a cost of nearly $2 million a day.
STATE-SPONSORED BLOODSHED IN THE STREETS
Then our nation watched in horror and anger as Trump’s amoral promise of “bloody” mass deportation came to fruition in Minneapolis, where his masked agents gunned down two Americans for the crime of standing with their undocumented neighbors.
Renee Nicole Good’s widow, Becca Good, said her spouse “lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow.” VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti was attempting to tend to a community member who had been pepper-sprayed when he was shot execution-style in the head. “Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends, and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital,” his family said. “Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.”
THE BACKLASH BEGINS
But if it was the federal government’s goal to stifle dissent through state-sponsored violence and intimidation, the mission failed. “Protests in Los Angeles against raids on suspected undocumented immigrants have turned into the strongest domestic backlash against President Donald Trump since he took office in January,” Reuters reported last year. That outrage has driven the record-breaking “No Kings” protests, the first of which launched just days after the administration’s invasion of L.A.
“I’m here because of the incredible amount of cruelty that’s going on in the world,” said an attendee from March’s “No Kings” protest, which drew more than eight million people. “It’s just cruel conditions for people who are taken by ICE, it’s the cruel way that they’re taken.” Neighbors have also shown up for each other in different ways. In cities including Chicago, Seattle, and L.A., resistance has been the “sound of whistles,” the AP reported. In the Charlotte area, community members filled a church to attend an ICE watch training. Remember the bakery that closed for the first time in years due raid activity? One community member stationed herself outside the store to stand guard.
“I’m going to walk the streets with my whistle and I want to keep my neighbors protected because they deserve protection and they deserve to live in a world where they’re not scared,” she said.
THE FIGHT TO PROTECT EACH OTHER CONTINUES
But while L.A. residents “painstakingly countered last year’s ICE raids,” they “still anticipate further rounds of repression” as DHS (to its own admission) is now trying to carry out less visible kidnappings, as Truthout notes. Detained individuals in New Jersey, however, have been demonstrating that abuses carried out in our names cannot remain hidden forever, whether they are playing out behind private prison walls or away from the eyes and cameras of ICE watchers. And in L.A., community members say they’re prepared to keep fighting for each other.
“We know that they’ve hired thousands of more agents, and they’ve bought all those crazy warehouses and turned them into their concentration camps,” community activist Ron Gochez told Truthout. “So, we anticipate a second round of repression, and we’ve been training people in our efforts to beef up our ranks to be able to defend the community once that happens.”
