FALL 2025
ISSUE 04

₁ Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. City (Verso, 2001), 170.

₂ Mike Davis, “Trench Warfare,” New Left Review II no. 126 (Nov.–Dec. 2020): 12.

₃ Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Haymarket Books, 2006), 298.

₄ See Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Fields (Little, Brown and Company, 1939). Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives (University of New Mexico, 1987); Dorothy Healey, Dorothy Healey Remembers (Oxford, 1990); Christina Heatherton, Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California, 2022).

₅ Paul Ortiz, An African American and Latinx History of the United States (Beacon, 2008), 157–158.

The streets around Ambiance Apparel are imprinted with the memory of almost a century of working-class struggle. On June 6, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided Ambiance, 930 Towne Street, which lies in the southeast corner of the roughly 20 square blocks marking the historical boundaries of Los Angeles’s garment district – since branded the “Fashion District” after cycles of redevelopment in the area. The still-humming and ever-ruthless “rag trade” continues to employ over 45,000 workers within this small radius, the vast majority of whom are immigrants from Latin America, toiling on products whose commodity inputs are global but whose destination is primarily domestic consumption within the United States. Recent investigations of the garment supply chain in Southern California by both independent organizations and government agencies have revealed a flagrant disregard by companies, contractors, and “jobbers” for the basic rudiments of labor law and safety codes in the United States. The garment industry thus presented an easy target for ICE’s supercharged campaign of deportation terror. The public set pieces of violence are what make the unseen, relentless exploitation possible, in an interplay between boss and border power.

On the same day as the Ambiance detainments and about 20 minutes northwest of the garment district, ICE carried out a raid at the Westlake Home Depot and the Day Labor Center run by the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), a long-running workers’ center whose programming focuses on legal advocacy, education services, and skills training for immigrants from across the Global South. The tactic of ambushing informal gatherings of day laborers in Home Depot parking lots had already been tested on farmworkers in nearby Bakersfield. In the weeklong blitz from early to mid-June, Home Depot parking lots across the LA suburbs – Paramount, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, and Whittier – became the focus of ICE’s “enforcement” spectacles.

These coordinated federal operations were staged attacks on some of the nerve centers of the region’s proletarian body politic: social bases, community self-defense and mutual aid groups, cultural outlets, patterns of association, and organizing channels that had been built up over decades in LA, which since at least the early aughts has been a “city of organizers” and the “principal R&D center for the future of the American labor movement.”¹ In targeting the places where ordinary Angelenos have built relationships of solidarity, care, and camaraderie, ICE attacked a long-fomenting political recomposition of the working class there. Janitors, teachers, tortilla makers, healthcare workers, costureras, dockworkers, truck drivers, drywallers, gravediggers, auto wheel assemblers, rideshare drivers, restaurant and service industry workers, car wash attendants, street vendors, grocery workers, undocumented and documented people, nearly always tenants – these have been the protagonists of an intensive, multiphase struggle to rebuild the elements of an organized class politics across differences in nationality, language, industry, and social rights.

Recent street protests in LA’s working-class areas, and the entangled histories underlying them, speak to the challenges that confront prospects for solidarity in the face of anti-immigrant populism. On the one hand, the struggles in and around LA’s enormous geographic sprawl chart burgeoning webs of workers’ self-activity. The city’s recent labor history has been bolstered by these practices: shop-floor cultures sustained through unlikely friendships, everyday commutes, and shared conditions of work; enduring organizing schools rooted in social movements; and cohorts of worker leaders who have firmly adhered to the right to fight back regardless of one’s immigration status. On the other hand, reactionary forces have sought to cement nativism and apartheid into the reproduction of the working class – to hierarchize difference and erect borders between working people, to repress collective action and learned traditions of solidarity.

On the ground in the city’s popular territories – from the garment district down to the Gateway Cities, Boyle Heights to the San Gabriel Valley – we can see the conflict between these tendencies from a different vantage point. In these spaces, workers’ self-activity has expressed itself in the workplace, on the block, and in other pockets of social life, creating a dense map of relations and solidarities that can be activated, even transformed, in struggle. The persistent and escalating mobilizations of LA’s multiethnic working class in response to campaigns of terror and their elevation of offensive and urgently universal demands – amnesty for all, abolish ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – provide a method for constructing a common proletarian political culture and for weaving internationalism once again into the fibers of the working class.

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The historical threads of this antagonism are worth examining. In the early 20th century, employers combined in the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, in alliance with other wings of the city’s business lobby, candidly explored ways to sidestep or quash what had happened in other industrial strongholds, such as the light industry archipelago of New York’s Lower East Side or Chicago’s stockyards and packinghouses. There, the ferocity of workers’ struggle could not be avoided and compelled the implementation of shorter hours and safety regulations. Out west, the open shop served as the “basic principle of Los Angeles industry,” the “foundation stone of its prosperity.” For over a hundred years, working people have fiercely chipped away at that stone while confronting waves of repression from an array of state and private actors bent on preserving the bases of white supremacy. In LA, local law enforcement openly and actively colluded with private vigilantes, enabling terroristic activities such as night rides, cross burning, tarring and feathering, mutilation, bombings, gassings, and clubbings. Vigilante groups, organized through clubs like the American Legion or the Kiwanis, often operated as informal extensions of local law enforcement. Labor organizers throughout the region were acutely aware of the fact that these armed groups could carry out their assaults with impunity and without police intervention.

In the 1930s, mass deportation programs were joined by attacks from Dave Beck’s right-wing teamster goons; United States Border Patrol in the 2000s had its Minutemen. ICE continues this repugnant tradition with its high-profile collaboration with private actors, from Canary Mission and Betar to resentful foremen in farms and factories. In the past, LAPD took care to devise a division of labor that would exist, at least on paper, between their forces and “independent” vigilante violence. Today, ICE is not even bothering to keep up appearances. On August 6, 2025, despite a federal injunction against indiscriminate arrests based on “physical appearance,” ICE raided a parking lot of day laborers employing precisely that tactic, detaining 16, while the regional director of La Migra looked on from under the shade of his large cowboy hat. ICE’s massive hiring spree is a new initiative that has now begun to unite previously disparate powers of labor repression – federal thugs, local cops, and DIY racists – under one big banner: ICE itself. 

In certain precincts, that hiring spree is now blurring the lines between certain sectors the working class and state-sponsored layers of labor repression. The ICE jobs program, which historically sponsored regional forms of working-class entertainment like NASCAR and bull-riding rodeo competitions, is now drawing in an increasingly diverse population of recruits. ICE positions itself as a high-paying government employer that promises signing bonuses and debt relief. In the counties around the Rio Grande, ICE is the major employer, and sometimes the only high-wage employer.² In Louisiana, ICE gigs are among some of the highest-paying jobs available to healthcare workers. A snapshot of this dynamic can be seen within the federal workforce itself, where more than 77 percent of the dues-paying membership of federal unions have been recently stripped of collective bargaining rights by a Trump Executive Order, formally excluding them from Federal Labor Management Relations programs. The few official staffers that remain on federal union payrolls are now increasingly reliant on dues paid by members within the repressive apparatuses. As workers associated with the Federal Unionists Network (FUN) launched workplace actions and rallies against ICE raids in their detention-center-adjacent offices, international unions representing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) workers pressured affiliated locals to quietly withdraw their sponsorship. Still, as displays of solidarity swell around the country, it is clear that working-class nativism is not a foregone conclusion, even amid the most extreme maneuvers at the federal level to make it so.

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The current hardline tack has a clear objective. The strategy of “targeted raids, systemic detention, and the institutionalized practice of selective and ongoing deportation” attempts to instill “constant fear of capture and detention” among undocumented (and documented) populations of migrant workers.³ Entire economic sectors reliant on migrant labor can tolerate the periodic explosion of raids because the purpose isn’t to permanently disrupt the supply of labor, but to manage its costs by dominating it. The effect is to push a section of the working class deeper into more exploitative, informal, and vulnerable recesses, to try to pry apart the sinews that connect migrant workers to a political culture that traverses the boundary lines of the labor market. The aim is not to exclude migrant labor but to further segment and subordinate it.

But the deportation machine’s efficacy has been mixed – and it will continue to encounter limits. In fact, its most ambitious efforts to decompose and then recompose the working class at the barrel of a gun have helped prompt the most heroic strikes of immigrant workers in the country’s history. The Mexican Repatriation program, for instance, undertaken at the start of the Great Depression and which drove out upwards of two million Mexicans living in the United States, coincided in its later stages with an unprecedented labor insurgency in the fields of California.⁴ In the San Joaquin Valley, close to fifty thousand workers in total went on strike, leaving countless cherries, beets, grapes, and prunes to rot. Such histories show that the escalation of techniques of immigration control was often followed by a concordant escalation of labor militancy, where citizens and non-citizens alike joined a concerted refusal of subordination to the regime of the border and won wage increases.

The immigrant struggles of 2006 are typically thought of as an effort to defeat the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (HR4437). But the movement was also triggered by local raids and ICE terror campaigns that began in that same winter. Organizers converted local strikes and walkouts into fuel for a continent-wide movement. The actions started less than two months after the passage of the House Resolution in December 2005. At first, they primarily channeled the rage of Latino high school students, workers, and their families. Some local unionists spearheaded demonstrations, but these actions were not the product of existing national labor networks. Rather, they drew on the subjective resources accumulated through earlier union drives, workers’ centers, and prior cycles of street protests, including those against California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, a similarly nativist bill. The movement of 2005–6 was powered less by the cautious and belated endorsements of mainstream left organizations than by the activation of latticelike solidarity networks at the community level.

The months preceding the big protests of May Day 2006 were defined by tit-for-tat escalations between workplace raids and increasing worker mobilization. The March groundswell saw twenty thousand marching in DC and three hundred thousand in Chicago just three days later, fueled by walkouts and wildcat strikes. In Los Angeles, one million joined the tempest, raising new demands written on homemade banners carried by crowds spilling into downtown: “Amnistía Si!” Similar actions in April expanded the geographic reach of the movement to smaller and newer immigrant boroughs in the South, the Midwest, sunbelt boomtowns, and smaller food-processing hamlets. ICE, meanwhile, responded by escalating workplace raids, most prominently at forty-five different plants of the pallet manufacturer IFCO Systems. This brutal flurry of immigration raids was a distinct marker of the second Bush presidency, one that sharply reversed a steep decline in workplace raids stretching from 1993 to the establishment of ICE in 2003.

May Day, branded as El Gran Paro Estadounidense or Día sin immigrante, was the movement’s equally fervent response. Many millions took up the call to refrain from work, school, or shopping. The meatpacking, garment, transportation, and food service industries were particularly affected as the effects of labor withdrawal rippled far beyond immediate worksites. Paul Ortiz shows how wildcat strikes amongst food-hauling truckers impacted stores that had no intention of closing and whose employees were not even observing the strike. Big names like Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Seaboard shuttered their doors “due to lack of personnel.”⁵ It was the largest work stoppage in US history.

The May Day demands were not only defensive – defeat the bill, stop the raids – but also spoke in a more offensive and universal register, clamoring for amnesty for all. ICE raids immediately shifted into a higher gear, intensifying in late May and June 2006, prefiguring deportation rates that would peak under the Obama regime. This repressive campaign was paired with an ideological disarticulation of the unity of the 2006 strike, with efforts to separate good immigrants from the bad, and even children from their parents. In response, new organizing trends flowered, encompassing rebellions inside detention centers, walkouts in workplaces and schools, and ambitious community organizations like the ten-thousand-member-strong Los Angeles Tenant Union (LATU).

Writing in the long tail of this organizing in 2014, Jonathan Perez of the Immigrant Youth Coalition would explain that measures like the DREAM Act provided a partial, conditional pathway to citizenship for a sliver of immigrants while also integrating nativism into immigrant sections of the working class. The students who first catalyzed the strikes in 2006, however, refused to sideline the older workers trapped in the bottom rungs of the labor market: “You can’t pick and choose who you fight for, and they can’t stay in the DREAMer mentality and start picking and choosing which group of oppressed people you fight for. When we said, ‘Not One More Deportation,’ we actually meant it.”

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While exhibitions of state cruelty vie for our attention, the working class of Los Angeles has presented spectacular moments of its own, both before and after the Ambiance raid. Think of the tens of thousands of striking classified school workers and teachers joining the march downtown, of janitorial workers exercising civil disobedience before the press, or of the episodic appearance of cop cars burnt to a crisp. These spectacles are primed by mundane acts of trench warfare against division unfolding in almost every workplace and neighborhood. When teachers huddle to make plans against arrests, when nurses hand out red cards to their patients, or when tenant associations talk about how to sound the alarm when ICE is spotted on their blocks, they set the stage for a larger offensive.

Despite the remarkable endurance shown by the people of Los Angeles, there is a real danger of falling into a pattern where the next mass arrest event is followed by another reactive mobilization. The first salvos in the Trump administration’s deportation war have inflicted a heavy toll. Dedicated labor organizers across the country have been targeted, detained, deported, or have even decided to “self-deport” pending trial. There is a need, then, to dig in around demands that resist dilution, augmented by longer-term capacity building.

These emphases, reflecting the accumulated experiences of Los Angeles’s international proletariat in previous sequences of popular struggle, still show promise today. Groups like LATU, which conducts careful inquiry into preexisting sites of organizing and entwines its political practices into the deep fabric of social relations among committed base members, are attempting to draw protestors into neighborhood defense groups and assemblies, calling for an eviction moratorium and everyday resistance to ICE kidnappings. Paulo, an organizer in the Koreatown local of LATU, described their three-part offensive: bring direct action pressure on local officials; lay the groundwork for a massive community-wide strike, à la 2006; and anchor such initiatives in the centros, community defense hubs, Home Depots, strip malls, and parks. “The hubs can’t stop the raids, but it’s obvious that they are points of deterrence. More importantly, they are points of inspiration: it tells working-class people . . . we will not retreat to the shadows.”

— August 2025