🔥 Melting the ICE 🔥

Los Angeles rises up

People surround a Border Patrol vehicle in Paramount, LA County, Calif. on June 7, 2025. (AP/Eric Thayer)

Quite the time to launch a newsletter on border fascism.¹ As I write, Los Angeles is on fire and Israeli forces have intercepted the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as it approaches the besieged coastal concentration camp in occupied Palestine, where over 2 million people remain trapped, starving, dying, surviving and resisting the unending horrors of Israel’s US-backed genocide.²

(Israel is the quintessence of border fascism: an ethnosupremacist settler-colonial state walled off from the world and perpetually at war with its neighbors, a microcosm of the global apartheid—interior, periphery—that structures our planetary order, that concentrates wealth and safety in some places and proliferates misery everywhere else, that builds walls of militarization and death around enclaves of privilege and alienation.)

Actually, I wasn’t going to launch this project this week at all. I didn’t even know what my first post would be. But then LA happened, and it seemed like a good opportunity to—you know—melt the ICE.

I’ve been wondering when things would pop off again in the US. The pressure has certainly been building. As the poet Wendy Treviño recently wrote: “a militant movement against border enforcement in this country has been a long time coming.” And now, it seems, it might finally be here. And with it—inescapably, inevitably—the hard edge of the imperial boomerang.

“Our brave officers were vastly outnumbered [by] over 1,000 rioters,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tweeted over the weekend, after federal agents invaded and terrorized working-class communities across the LA area, kidnapping people off the streets in the name of freedom and tearing families apart in the name of security—and facing fierce resistance in response.

“We were attacked!” cried the attackers.

In the parlance of Trump’s terminally online army of idiots: FAFO. ICE fucked around, and now they’re finding out.

The people of LA stood their ground, as it were, and the poli-migra stumbled back, tripping over their tactical gear and choking on their own tear gas as they beat a hasty retreat.

And then, of course, the cops retaliated. And the Empire, spitting and fuming, promised to crush the city under the iron fist of “law and order.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s pet vampire, called the acts of community self-defense that erupted in the city of Paramount, south of LA proper and east of Compton, “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Then Trump deployed the National Guard.

Meanwhile, in a tradition as tired as the day is long, local Democratic leaders jumped at the opportunity to pit “peaceful protestors” against “violent rioters.”

California Governor Gavin Newson—never missing a chance to blame the victims or throw the poor under the bus—issued a thinly veiled threat to whoever he thinks might be listening: “Never use violence. Speak out peacefully." Which is to say: don’t give the National Guard an excuse to kill you.

But as the writer and organizer Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule, wrote on Saturday, “We are living in fascist times, they don't need any ‘excuses.’”

LA mayor Karen Bass echoed Newsom’s warning: “Everyone has the right to peacefully protest,” she tweeted, “but let me be clear: violence and destruction are unacceptable, and those responsible will be held accountable.”

And then, of course, Democrats did what they do best: they signed a strongly worded letter, condemning Trump’s “alarming abuse of power.”

The difference between these threats and Trump’s promise to crush the “RIOTERS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!” is one mostly of tone, not meaning. The basic message is the same: get in the way of the gestapo and suffer the consequences.

But these attempts at hard and soft counterinsurgency are failing. As I write, the police and National Guard are hopelessly outnumbered and losing control of the city. Tens of thousands are in the streets, protestors have taken over the freeway, cop cars and Waymos are on fire, and the whole world is watching.

According to Rep. Nanette Barragán, whose district includes Paramount, ICE was unable to conduct any raids on Saturday, “because [of] the protest,” and the City of Glendale, just north of LA, announced that it is formally terminating its agreement with ICE to hold federal immigration detainees at the city jail.

There is little doubt that this rebellious energy will spread—and the more the state clamps down, the more things will explode. The border is not just a wall or a line, it is a political and social order. The border is everywhere, so it can be resisted everywhere.

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Coming up: Later this week, I’ll be publishing an interview with a friend and comrade in Minneapolis about recent federal enforcement operations there, the community’s response, and the broader context of escalating fascism and resisting the deportation and detention machine.

1. That’s not all this newsletter—or whatever this is—will be about, but it will be a central focus. And in general, I won’t be writing about breaking news, so consider this an exception.

2. The Madleen’s crew have been arrested and taken into Israeli custody.