Blame disruptive protest tactics on ICE’s state-sanctioned violence in raids | Opinion
The distance between police chasing a guy passing out fliers and a journalist sharing his local newspaper is, roughly, the length of Sha’Carri Richardson’s gold-winning fingernails.
When The Wall Street Journal reported that agents for Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, “drove a phalanx of military vehicles” scouring the California suburbs in search of a man accused of merely posting where those tanks might show up, I saw little difference between his public service and the community work to which journalists aspire. Such an action should be understood as a threat not just to freedom, but also to the safety of whoever they target.
ICE’s escalations against civilians, acting in accordance with the Trump administration’s deportation mandates, resemble, as Zeteo’s Prem Thakker deftly noted, the conduct of foreign authoritarian regimes. The agency is racking up examples, the following of which are just a sampling of agency’s increasingly normative behavior:
A Florida foster-care home, raided in search of a Honduran teen.
A stateless Texan woman, Ward Sakeik, detained for months after returning from her honeymoon with her husband, a US Citizen.
New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, Brad Lander, arrested while escorting an immigrant from a court hearing.
An Emmy-winning journalist, Mario Guevara, who sought asylum in the US arrested while covering a “No Kings” protest. ICE has since taken the first steps towards deporting him to El Salvador.
A US citizen in her ninth month of pregnancy, Cary Lopez, shoved and detained by masked agents who said she interfered with the arrest of her husband. The woman, who has since been hospitalized with sharp pains in her stomach, denied she had any role in their brutality. “I can’t fight back,” Lopez said of her arrest. “I’m pregnant.”
Saturday’s No Kings rallies remind onlookers that there are millions who at least sympathize with pregnant women and foster care teens. With some notable exceptions, like the man who drove his SUV into a rally of pedestrians in Virginia, or the rifleman who provoked a bystander’s death in Salt Lake City, the marches were pretty chill! And why wouldn’t it be? Marchers obediently cooperated within government-sanctioned lines. They were protests, yes, powerful symbols of how wide the dissent has spread. But protests that comply with permits hit different.
The ICE protests in Los Angeles that preceded No Kings weren’t yielding to the status quo, the brutal sweeps of neighborhoods targeted by ICE. Because some refused to comply, the local police, who weren’t technically working with ICE but functionally prevented civilians from hindering ICE raids in their neighborhoods, sprayed protesters and everyone else with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Observers weren’t spared. Police shot an Australian journalist with a rubber bullet while she was broadcasting, as well as a freelancer who required surgery for his two-inch “anti-lethal” wounds. Even witnesses say they were gassed while using their phones to record the chaos.
For some, violence is most legible, or maybe only legible, when people respond to the tanks on their doorstep. For others, the violence is already here. “The state is using brutal violence to separate us,” said community organizer and award-winning high school teacher Ron Gochez, likening ICE raids to government-sanctioned kidnapping. “To take us against our will from our families, from our homes, from our jobs and to take us somewhere else.”
“We don’t want to be violent, and we don’t advocate for violence,” Gochez added of efforts that included thwarting Border Patrol from arresting hundreds of factory workers. “But when they use brutal violence against our people — and kidnapping mothers and fathers from children is violent — when they do things like that, we have every right, every historic right, to defend our communities by any ways that we can, and we’re going to continue to do so.”
After an eight-and-a-half-hour standoff, Gochez said, those workers returned home to their families.
What would you do for your family?
Those far removed from Gochez’s problems would prefer that those who joined him in protest become what activists Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba called “shock absorbers” of state violence. Rather than defend themselves, they would rather Gochez and his community act as willful sponges, waiting patiently until 2028, when a handful of fickle swing state voters might finally vote out those responsible for the aggressive policies.
Shock absorbers are allowed to petition the legal system, even though the officers who shoot and spray, who detain and deport, heed the president’s lawless and flagrant trampling of the courts. A few shock absorbers will call their lawyers from their jail cells or hospital beds, if they are lucky.
But a handful of those community members didn’t just absorb the ICE raids. They did what that injured pregnant woman said she couldn’t — they fought back. Some battled with phone cameras documenting the violence; others placed their bodies on the line. Others smashed police cars that, left undamaged, could very well be transporting the cops on their way to shoot more journalists or bystanders. A few even burned self-driving taxis — spare a prayer for the fallen Waymos. Sometimes, angry people assert their rights by dumping your tea in their harbor.
You may believe those frustrated with how the police and ICE address their communities should continue in this manner. But whether you condone or condemn their response, if their government continues abusing or ignoring the law to maintain the status quo, more people will respond, by any means necessary, to protect their families.
Despite the intensity of the wreckage, public sentiment on immigration, which has never been a totally fixed point, is shifting in tandem. One poll conducted during the LA actions found that while President Trump remains comfortably favorable on “border security,” he is now in the red on “deportations” and “immigration.” People aren’t nearly as opposed to those who resist
Those in Los Angeles who chose to defend themselves showed, like the more peaceable No Kings marchers, that they disapprove of monarchs reigning over their lives. But unlike those who sympathize with their cause, whether through rallies between police horses or even this journalist politely opining from his home office, you can be completely sure that when they shout “No Kings,” they mean what they say.
This story was originally published June 18, 2025 at 5:24 AM with the headline "Blame disruptive protest tactics on ICE’s state-sanctioned violence in raids | Opinion."
