The American Dream as a Nightmare as War Comes Home
Posted by Internationalist 360° on June 10, 2025
Fernando Esteche
In this urban war, every street closure, every flag raised, every cry of resistance is a declaration: “We have returned home, and this time we will not leave. Trump’s tanks may occupy our streets, but they cannot occupy our hearts. The resistance will continue, because history is on our side, and the future belongs to us.”
The militarization of Los Angeles
Los Angeles is bleeding. In the streets of a city that for decades stood as a symbol of the American dream, today the cries of resistance of those who built its greatness from the shadows resonate. The massive raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement (ICE), have unleashed a spiral of urban violence that reflects an uncomfortable truth: as in Europe, the metropolis has war within its own borders.
Since January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump took office promising to carry out the largest mass deportations in American history, Los Angeles has become the epicenter of a confrontation that transcends immigration. In his first month in office, 37,660 people were deported nationwide, but it is in this Californian metropolis where the resistance has taken its most visceral and organized form.
Los Angeles is a fundamentally Latino city. With a population of nearly 4 million, 48% of its residents are of Hispanic origin, forming the economic and cultural backbone of the city. This is not a demographic coincidence, but the result of centuries of displacement, exploitation, and resistance.
California, the nation’s most populous state, has a demographic reality that terrifies white supremacists: Latinos now outnumber the white population. Since 2014, Hispanic Californians have begun to surpass white Californians, reaching nearly 15 million people. This demographic transformation is not just statistical; it’s historic.
The recent raids have unleashed a fury that has been pent up for generations. On June 6, 2025, federal authorities detained at least 50 migrants in coordinated operations that sparked immediate demonstrations. The clashes erupted near a Home Depot in Paramount, a predominantly Latino city south of Los Angeles, where the migrant community gathers in search of daily work.
The escalating violence has forced Trump to take an unprecedented step: deploying 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles. This measure, taken just five months after taking office, exposes the fragility of the established order when faced with organized and massive resistance.
The conflict has generated an institutional crisis between the federal and state governments. California Governor Gavin Newsom has staunchly opposed the military deployment, creating a constitutional tension reminiscent of the darkest moments in American history. California, with its sanctuary laws, has become a bastion of institutional resistance, while local sheriffs find themselves caught between federal deportation orders and state protection laws.
Flags of Dignity: The Symbolism of Resistance
In demonstrations that have blocked freeways like the 110, protesters have displayed the flags of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and other Central American countries. These national symbols are not mere nostalgia, but profound political statements. Every Mexican flag waving in the streets of Los Angeles is a reminder that this land was forcibly seized in 1848.
Central American flags tell stories of countries bled dry by civil wars financed and orchestrated from Washington. Each Salvadoran flag bears witness to the 75,000 dead from the 1980s civil war; each Guatemalan flag commemorates the genocide of 200,000 indigenous people; each Honduran flag speaks of the 2009 coup d’état that plunged the country into chaos.
Conservative white supremacist media outlets talk about an “invasion” to describe Latin American migration, but the historical reality is exactly the opposite. Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as “The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels” by Mexican settlers. This city, like all of California, was Mexican territory until the United States annexed it by force after the Mexican-American War.
The real invader was the Anglo-Saxon conquistador who arrived with a Puritan Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other. Los Angeles was built on the systematic dispossession of Mexican lands, the exploitation of Chinese labor on the railroads, and the plundering of the entire region’s natural resources. The wealth of this metropolis is not a product of American entrepreneurial genius, but of the organized plundering of half a continent.
During the 20th century, Los Angeles became the heart of the global entertainment industry, but its prosperity always depended on the invisible labor of Latin American migrants. Latino farmers, mostly undocumented, represent 96% of California’s agricultural workforce. Without their hands, American supermarkets would be empty, restaurants would be closed, and gardens would be withered.
Organized Resistance: Beyond Survival
What’s happening in Los Angeles goes beyond spontaneous protests. It’s an organized resistance that has learned from decades of repression, coordinated by organizations that have spent decades building power from the most vulnerable bases of society.
CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights) has become the most visible voice of the resistance. Angélica Salas, CHIRLA’s executive director, has reported that the raids took place in at least seven locations, including Home Depot parking lots and a donut shop. The organization estimated at least 45 arrests and denounced the “terror” sown in Latino communities. CHIRLA, with nearly 40 years of experience, represents the institutionalization of immigration resistance in California.
NDLON (National Day Laborer Organizing Network), based in Los Angeles, coordinates the resistance at the national level. NDLON is a national network of more than 50 member organizations across the country working to unify and strengthen its members to develop leadership, mobilize, and organize day laborers. Founded in 2001 in Northridge, California, NDLON operates as a direct democracy where day laborers in member organizations directly vote on policies at NDLON’s biannual assemblies.
These organizations are not simply pressure groups, but grassroots power structures that have transformed the most vulnerable workers into an organized political force.
They have called for demonstrations outside the immigration jail in downtown Los Angeles, coordinating a resistance that combines legal action with street mobilization.
Human rights organizations have built protection networks, clandestine shelters, and communication systems that allow communities to resist raids.
CHIRLA has led important mobilizations, such as marches for immigration reform and protests against the criminalization of immigrants, with an inclusive approach that seeks to unite different sectors of society.
Protesters have succeeded in blocking major highways, blocking federal buildings, and creating a state of civil resistance that forces federal power to reveal its true face: that of the military occupation of their own cities. Every National Guard soldier deployed in Los Angeles is a confession that the system has lost legitimacy among millions of its residents.
The Los Angeles crisis is not an isolated incident, but rather the prelude to a historic transformation. Latinos are no longer a minority pleading for rights, but a demographic majority demanding historic justice. The current resistance does not simply seek to halt deportations, but rather to challenge the very right of the U.S. state to exist in territories that were stolen.
The flags waved at the demonstrations are not symbols of nostalgia, but of vindication. They speak not of the past, but of the future. A future where the descendants of the dispossessed recover what always belonged to them: not just the land, but the dignity to decide their own destiny.
Los Angeles is burning, but it’s not burning out. It’s transforming. Like a phoenix rising from its own ashes, the city is giving birth to a new reality where yesterday’s barbarians are tomorrow’s builders, and where the real invasion was the one that arrived under the Star-Spangled Banner.
The Los Angeles resistance is not just a fight for survival; it’s a war for historical memory and intergenerational justice. It’s a moment when the ghosts of the past take their revenge, and the children of those who were plundered reclaim their inheritance on the streets of the city their grandparents built with blood and sweat.
The Federalization of Force: When Washington Invades California
The Los Angeles crisis has exposed a constitutional fracture that defines the current American political moment. The federal government has seized control of the California National Guard, an extraordinary measure that demonstrates the extent to which Trump is willing to subvert federalism to impose his supremacist agenda.
The National Guard, traditionally under the command of state governors, can be federalized by the president in situations of national emergency. This decision puts Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, in an impossible position: he must watch as federal troops occupy his state against his express will. Newsom called the measure “deliberately inflammatory” and warned that it “will only escalate tensions.”
This isn’t the first time the immigration issue has sparked a clash between the federal government and a state. In 2024, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott seized control of the border by installing barbed wire and arresting migrants in Eagle Pass, directly challenging Joe Biden ‘s policies.
Abbott invoked his state’s “constitutional authority to defend itself,” creating a dangerous precedent of state disobedience that Trump is now using in reverse. What in Texas was a conservative rebellion against a Democratic president is in California a Republican federal occupation against a Democratic governor. The difference reveals the nature of Trump ‘s exercise of power.
Immigration as the Core of the Trumpist Project
Immigration has become the central theme of the Trumpist agenda because it articulates all the anxieties of white supremacy in demographic decline. Trump understands that the immigration issue is not a matter of public policy, but of civilizational survival for white America.
An AP-NORC poll found that voters expressing concerns about immigration rose to 35% from 27% the previous year, revealing how fear of a Latino “invasion” has become the electoral fuel of the MAGA movement. Every mass deportation, every wall built, every child separated from their parents is a message to the Trump base : we are defending the nation’s racial purity.
Trumpism knows that California represents its demographic nightmare come true. A state where whites are a minority, where Latinos rule entire cities, where Spanish is heard on every corner. Los Angeles is not just a city that must be “pacified” with federal troops; it’s the future Trump wants to avoid for all of America .
The military occupation of Los Angeles marks a historic turning point. For the first time since the Civil War, a US president deploys federal troops against the express will of a state governor to suppress a civilian population. This is not a law enforcement operation; it is a declaration of war against multiracial America.
Every National Guard soldier patrolling the streets of Los Angeles is an emissary of white supremacy , a reminder that the Trumpist project will not tolerate self-determination for Latino communities. The federalization of the California National Guard is the prelude to a broader occupation: that of the demographic future of the United States.
The Los Angeles resistance transcends deportations and raids. It is a struggle to define what it means to be an American in the 21st century, who has the right to call this land home, and whether the descendants of Native Americans and the dispossessed can reclaim the dignity robbed of them by imperial violence.
In this urban war, every street closure, every flag raised, every cry of resistance is a declaration: “We have returned home, and this time we will not leave. Trump’s tanks may occupy our streets, but they cannot occupy our hearts. The resistance will continue, because history is on our side, and the future belongs to us.”
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/06/ ... omes-home/
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Militarization and Constitutional Crisis: The King Is Naked in Los Angeles
Franco Vielma
June 9, 2025 , 2:30 pm .
The National Guard has been used to suppress violent actions in Los Angeles, without the consent of Governor Gavin Newson (Photo: Reuters)
The city of Los Angeles (California, United States) is the site of massive peaceful gatherings and acts of violence in protest against the immigration measures implemented by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The specific nature of the demonstrations has been to resist and limit the deployment of immigration enforcement agencies and thus contain arrests for deportation purposes.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts to capture suspected "illegals" have escalated to massive raids in several cities simultaneously, in what Trump has called "the largest deportation operation in the history" of his country.
In addition to ICE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has participated in these operations, which represents a significant shift in its scope of work—excessively and outside its normal activities—and a sign of the maximum use of the federal government's capabilities to achieve its objectives.
Although the events in the California city are the focus of public attention, the first instance of this type of street reaction actually took place in Minneapolis , Minnesota, on June 3, with a spontaneous protest to prevent ICE arrests there.
The White House believes that these demonstrations, due to their massive—and in some cases violent—nature, could trigger similar reactions in other cities.
Furthermore, the response coming from the Oval Office suggests a potential constitutional crisis in the United States.
IT'S NOT ANOTHER RACIAL PROTEST
The record of peaceful and violent social protests in the United States over racial issues is extensive. The events unfolding right now in Los Angeles evoke profound shocks, such as those experienced after the murders of Rodney King (1992) and George Floyd (2020), both African Americans, killed by white police officers.
In the current Los Angeles riots, the Latino community—especially the Mexican community—has played a prominent role. But the reasons for these riots aren't limited to a specific action by a few security agents, nor to the death of a single person.
In reality, the backlash against ICE is a response to the federal government, Trump's anti-immigration policies, and, especially, the sensitivity surrounding alleged abuses by authorities in this area.
For weeks, social media has been flooded with images of mass arrests of people working illegally. Therefore, these are not criminals.
ICE's methods at the courthouses , where people have gone to comply with the steps to regularize their status, have gone viral. This could be considered a de facto violation of current immigration regulations, suggesting that the Trump administration itself is committing abuses.
The Los Angeles riots could spark protests in other cities across the country (Photo: File)
Another element is the massive stigmatization of people through Trump's new laws, which label people in an irregular administrative situation as "criminals." Or, in other cases, the massive repeal of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Humanitarian Paroles, leaving hundreds of thousands unprotected, including the Venezuelan population, subjected to involuntary immigration illegality and subjected to prolonged detention and deportation to third countries (El Salvador).
In perspective, the events in Los Angeles today have sociological components distinct from those of other upheavals.
Its main catalyst is the structured, methodical, violent actions carried out by the Federal Government, which clearly violate the legal rights of those affected.
This time, this isn't just a case of a white police officer murdering an African American. This is the concrete expression of a white leader, who wields the full power of the Washington administration against racialized populations—Latin Americans, Arabs, Asians, and Africans—on a clearly massive, stigmatizing, and abusive scale, through an openly institutionalized aporophobia.
While the appearance of these events lies in race, the most distinctive underlying factor is the functional violence of the State on open, non-particularized scales.
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS AND THREATS AMONG OFFICIALS
The current crisis, driven by Trump's immigration measures and the social response, suggests the existence of much larger underlying variables. One of them is the possible progressive—but visible—breakdown of the American social compact. And this is a phenomenon that could be occurring in a multidimensional way.
For months, there has been a clash between the executive branch of Washington and various judicial bodies, both state and federal, over the president's immigration measures and the judicialization of numerous individual cases across the country.
This has led to open disagreements between the Executive and Judicial branches. These seemed to be a natural diatribe and a constitutional counterbalance between the country's branches of government. But what's happening in Los Angeles opens the door to new terms for a looming constitutional crisis, especially given the sociological and political variables involved.
Trump has been absolutely energetic in repelling these protests, citing his own experience following the massive social backlash over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which undermined his first term.
But the president is applying this force just months after pardoning 1,600 detainees and those facing trial who—in his name—stormed and vandalized the Capitol in Washington four years ago.
The inconsistency and selectivity in the use of force and the law are factors that expose the "naked king," and a rupture of ties between American society and its main representative body is generated.
On the other hand, there are situations occurring right now that should be considered unprecedented due to their nature and context.
The California National Guard has been transferred to federal control and has deployed 2,000 troops to suppress the protests.
The last time the National Guard was used to combat street violence was during the King and Floyd cases, in 1994 and 2020, respectively.
The distinction in this incident, now, is that Trump deployed the National Guard to California without the consent of the state's governor, Gavin Newson. This hasn't happened since 1965, since the "Watts Riots," another violent protest by African Americans, also in the California capital.
Between 1994 and 2020, it was California's governors who asked Washington to deploy the National Guard in their state to contain the violence. But this time, the Democratic governor has stood up to Washington.
Newson sent a letter to the Department of Defense urging it to withdraw the troops it "illegally" deployed to Los Angeles, arguing that it is "violating state sovereignty."
The governor announced he will sue the federal government for what he described as an "unprecedented and illegal intervention" in the recent protests. He denounced a violation of state autonomy and promised to take the case to court.
Gavin Newson also released a letter endorsed by every Democratic governor in the country calling Trump's actions an "alarming abuse of power."
Meanwhile, during an interview with NBC News, Tom Homan, the so-called "border czar" appointed by Trump, indicated that the governor could " face arrest " for committing the "serious crime" of harboring illegal immigrants.
Homan stated that "it is a serious crime to prevent law enforcement from doing their job," referring to Newson's opposition to the deployment of 2,000 military troops to the city.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton Naval Base could be mobilized as part of the federal response to the unrest.
"These violent mob attacks are designed to prevent the removal of illegal immigrants from our territory and pose a huge risk to national security," Hegseth posted on his X account. The official added that the Marines are "on high alert."
Trump himself added a new component to this crisis: he ordered, through communication rather than administrative means, from Truth Social, to "bring the troops" to Los Angeles. He did so without specifying which military component and considering that the National Guard already had a presence on the ground.
This could be considered an ambiguous and dangerous act given the context, as it could induce social exasperation and generate an increase in events.
Trump's unilateral discretionary use of the National Guard was enforced through the United States Armed Forces Code (10 USC 12406).
This only authorizes the president to use the National Guard if the country is "invaded or in danger of invasion by a foreign nation," if "there is rebellion or danger of rebellion" against the government, or if "the President is unable to execute the laws of the United States with regular forces."
The debate, right now, is to what extent the Los Angeles context resembles what is described in this code, even though Trump refers to an "invasion" of illegal immigrants.
Several Trump administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, have referred to an "insurrection" to refer to a supposed state of rebellion against the government.
But Trump said on Sunday, June 8, that for now, he is not prepared to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would empower him to federalize the entire country's National Guard and deploy the armed forces.
However, in California, the governor appears to be stretching the boundaries of the law and taking advantage of potential legal loopholes to take action, while his cabinet officials threaten to arrest Governor Newson and incite the use of marines.
While racially motivated protests have been recurrent in the United States, this time there are clearly different components, both sociologically due to the causes of the mass reaction, and politically due to the type of response that has emerged from the White House and the institutional clash that is occurring regarding the state of California.
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