11 June 2025
The first four months of Donald Trump’s second term as US president have been punctuated by the names of some of the thousands rounded up, imprisoned, and deported by the administration’s intensified fear campaign carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
Among the tens of thousands of victims of the increasingly aggressive and militarised ICE raids include Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia grad student and mediator for the Palestine solidarity student encampment; Alfredo ‘Lelo’ Juarez, 25-year-old lead farmworker union organiser in Washington State; Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts PhD candidate and Palestine solidarity activist; Kilmar Abrego García, who was kidnapped and deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison despite his legally protected status; and Jeanette Vizguerra, a prominent migrant rights and labor organiser since her 2009 attempted deportation under the Obama administration.
LA uprising
It’s in this context that demonstrations have erupted in Los Angeles and several other cities in the US. After several raids by ICE led to the force kidnapping over 100 people, protestors began clashing with them and with the LA Police Department.
The following day, Trump “federalised” the national guard – a rarely used power which allowed him to command those troops directly – allowing him to deploy 2,000 national guard troops to attack the protests, rising to 4,100 by 9 June, including 700 marines.
The last time this had been done without the support of the state governor was 60 years ago, in 1965 (when troops were sent in to enforce desegregation in schools against the wishes of racist local administrations). Troops have clashed with the thousands of protestors, shooting rubber bullets into crowds and at members of the press.
Although the rate of Trump’s arrests and deportations quantitatively falls behind the ruthless efficiency of the Biden years, this administration’s audacity and chaotic extra-legal methods are honed to incite maximum fear, repression and a chilling of speech in immigrant communities, amongst labour organisers, and Palestine solidarity activists.
That these groups are in the crosshairs isn’t a unique expression of Trumpian malice, this is by systematic design. The ideological fear tactics engaged against these groups specifically make perfect sense when stripping back the propaganda to look at the circuitry powering the oppressive machine.
New surveillance tools
As part of the Biden administration’s ‘virtual border wall’, towers along the Arizona/Mexico border were built and operated by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer (with a massive 2024 contract awarded to expand their operations over the next decade). Israeli phone hacking software company Cellebrite has continuously been awarded contracts by ICE since 2008.
Vice President JD Vance’s financial backer Peter Theil’s mass surveillance company, Palantir, has supplied ‘new tools’ to the Israeli state from the start of the genocide, while leaked internal messages show the company’s role in physically locating people marked for ICE deportation. Google and Amazon’s cloud storage hosts military data for the Israeli state as well as data and AI systems for US Customs and Border Protection’s ‘machine learning surveillance tools’.
The same companies who have participated in and profited off of Israel’s AI and hyper-surveillance fuelled ‘mass assassination factory’ in its genocide in Gaza and terror campaigns in the West Bank have been some of the major players in the tech-washing of state violence against people who have migrated to the US.
Trump’s embrace of the big tech broligarchy that undergirds both Israeli genocide and US ICE terror is only the latest of his administration doing what it does best: ripping the mask of decorum off US empire and parading out the grotesque reality of capitalist violence that’s been there all along.
Fightback needed
The interconnected web of profit-driven terror can seem overwhelming, but at every turn communities throughout the US are organising to effectively protect themselves against state violence; a bottom-up fight back is mobilising mass protest actions and building local resistance organisations.
The video footage of Rümeysa Öztürk’s abduction was found and publicised through LUCE, an organised community defense group that mobilised its members door-to-door throughout the neighbourhood to find the footage. This helped mount the public pressure to get Öztürk released from ICE detention. These community defense networks crucially focus on building real face-to-face connections of trust and reliable information in direct resistance to the atomised big-data-powered ICE assault that is aiming to repress solidarity through isolation, fear, and chaos.
Unions are mobilising to defend abducted siblings – rallies, campaigns, and protests resulted in SEIU member Lewelyn Dixon’s release from ICE imprisonment, and a growing number of unions have signed on to demand collective action to ‘stand up to Trump’s campaign of terror’.
In 2019, just the mention of the threat of a general strike from Association of Flight Attendants union president Sara Nelson had a first-term Trump government shutdown ended in less than a week. With budget charter airlines like Avelo – which is staffed by AFA union-represented flight attendants – facilitating deportation flights, targeted protests are mounting to pressure organised union action to grind Trump’s deportations to a halt.
Key to these successful and growing organised struggles is their clarity on the link between migrant rights and Palestinian solidarity. The same companies, the same tech institutions that are building the infrastructure for the Israeli state’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza are the architects of the high-tech surveillance police state against migrants in the US. Their quarterly profits rise with every algorithmically-generated target they churn out, be they Palestinian family or US migrant worker (or person crossing state lines for trans or reproductive healthcare).
The capitalist system is united in creating and profiting off of all aspects of its unrelenting, extractive misery. A successful resistance struggle must be equally united against all aspects of capitalism.