The people vs. ICE: an uprising against state terror
The following article is from the Puntorojo magazine editorial collective in North America.
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The scenes of fleeing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles being pelted with rocks, bricks, and any other makeshift projectiles by lines of people taking aim at the despised migra agents inflicting so much harm and terror in their communities. A burning ICE vehicle in the middle of an intersection, with people setting off fireworks, taking selfies, and even dancing on the burned-out car. Throngs of people on a highway bridge overpass dropping objects onto police in their cars, smashing windshields, and forcing the cops to quickly retreat from the scene with their shields up. Rows of heavily armed cops shooting rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters into crowds of anti-ICE protesters with complete disregard, intending to harm and provoke, while people make shields out of durable objects, trash can lids, and metal chairs. Thousands of people coming out to join the uprising, waving Mexican, Central American, and Palestinian flags, even as the Trump regime has called out National Guard troops to take up positions around the city.
These are some of the scenes from the anti-ICE uprising in Los Angeles in June 2025, emerging street battles and clashes between the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the working class and heavily armed ICE agents—the American Gestapo.
ICE unleashed in the shadows of imperialist war
ICE was created in 2003 in a period of massive state investment and buildup in military and state repressive capacities in the period after the attacks of 9/11. Then US president, George W. Bush— with broad support from the Democratic Party—launched the invasion (and 20-year occupation) of Afghanistan in October of 2001 known as “Operation Enduring Freedom”. This was followed in early 2002 with Bush declaring at his State of the Union address that the US state was initiating a generational and global “War on Terror”, beginning with intention to attack the “Axis of Evil” nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The US invaded and occupied Iraq on March 20, 2003, under the name “Operation: Iraqi Freedom.” Analysts have since documented that the US has conducted and spread military action—invasion, occupation, airstrikes, drone attacks, special ops, assassinations, and advisory and training roles— into 78 countries that has led to the killing of nearly 5 million people.
While the attacks of 9/11 gave a pretext, the US state had already been in the process of preparing for a new phase of an imperial war to re-assert US military hegemony in the Middle East, Asia, and other parts of the world. This was expressed most directly through the influence of a right-wing ruling class think tank known as “The Project for a New American Century” (PNAC), which since 1997 had advocated for a more assertive and interventionist US internationally. PNAC promoted the idea of preemptive war, regime change, and neocolonial occupation to reassert “American primacy” against its rising imperialist rivals and enemies.
Since 2001 military spending has increased dramatically, with the Pentagon spending over $14 trillion dollars to fund expanding war and occupation. This is the context in which the US state simultaneously opened a domestic front in its generational war, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 2003, the bipartisan US state developed and merged 22 federal armed enforcement agencies into the Department of Homeland Security as an all-encompassing domestic state-repressive apparatus. ICE was created to repress so-called “national security threats” within US territorial boundaries, with agents given broad license and individual discretion to execute the charge of surveilling, pursuing, detaining, and deporting those deemed by ICE to be “Individuals believed to pose a threat to public safety or national security.”
From the outset, ICE became a distinctive and exceptional type of policing agency, given broad license to act without oversight, accountability, and to conduct its operations with impunity and without fear of repercussion or recrimination. The extralegal nature of ICE has enabled the agency to become deeply politicised, to attract and recruit agents with far right, racist, and violent dispositions; and to be weaponised, operationalised, and unleashed by a reactionary and white supremacist regime for explicitly political purposes.
ICE as a weapon of class war and political repression
ICE was initially deployed through the “National Fugitive Operations Program” to surveil, target, arrest, and deport undocumented Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern people from over 20 targeted nations who were residing in the US. The focus then shifted towards targeting undocumented workers from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean after the mass immigrant worker mobilisations of 2006, where over 3 million people participated in strikes, marches, boycotts, and walkouts demanding legalisation. Between 2006 and 2007, ICE agents orchestrated hundreds of invasive raids across the country in over 100 cities and towns nationwide that targeted factories, farms, homes, and public community spaces.
ICE was deployed to arrest workers organising union drives, conducting workplace protests, or otherwise participating in class struggle activities in different locations across the country. Numerous undocumented activists were identified and targeted for their political activism and advocacy. Through these fugitive recovery operations and workplace and community raids, over 80,000 people were targeted, arrested, and deported in 2006-7 alone. The state attack using ICE was to “neutralise” the mass immigrant workers’ movement by mass arresting and deporting its most militant, organised, and resistant sectors.
The state-led attack on the migrant and transnational working class has persisted ever since in a bipartisan manner to use the threat of ICE arrest, detention, and deportation to further segregate, terrorise, and render millions of immigrant workers more vulnerable and precarious. Under these conditions, they are made less able to organise and resist, and more susceptible to higher levels of exploitation, and to enable the extraction from their labor of greater amounts of wealth for the capitalist class.
The imperative to contain, control, and instill the permanence of fear in the migrant and transnational working class as a function of the US capitalist system can explain why both the Republicans and Democratic Parties have worked together to build up ICE and detention and deportation capacities through successive administrations. The DHS has since become a massively expanding state repressive apparatus that has seen its size and scale growing exponentially, with an initial budget of $38 billion in 2003 and rising to a bloated $103 billion by 2024.
Trump’s currently proposed 2025 budget proposal (his so-called “big beautiful bill”) that recently passed the House of Representatives includes $185 billion in new funding for immigration and border law enforcement. If passed, this will dramatically expand the Department of Homeland Security by nearly doubling its current budget. Specifically for ICE, the bill will allocate $45 billion for immigrant detention and $14 billion for deportation operations.
Since the creation of the ICE, the targeting and systematic deportation of “removals” of sections of the undocumented working class has become a permanent feature of the landscape (removals from the interior of the US, not including “expulsions” from within the border region). Under George W. Bush (2000-2008), more than 2 million undocumented workers were arrested and deported; under Barack Obama (2009-2016) over 3 million people were deported, despite him getting elected to president alongside a supermajority of Democrats in Congress on a promise to legalise all undocumented workers; under Trump I (2017-2020), 1.2 million were deported; and under Biden (2021-2025) over 400,000 were deported with millions more expelled from the border region, although he was also elected on a campaign promising to suspend deportations and to pass a general legalisation of the undocumented.
The foundational characteristic of ICE as a state-repressive instrument deployed against labor unionism and political dissidence was recently displayed with ICE agents targeting and arresting pro-Palestinian activists and sympathisers. High-profile arrests and abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both of whom are legal permanent residents in the process of attaining citizenship, show how the state is now expanding the purview of repression of political opponents to go beyond those who are undocumented. Furthermore, more than 1,000 people have had their visas revoked or statuses terminated for alleged Pro-Palestinian activism.
The use of ICE as a state weapon against the working class, while simultaneously used against the political opponents of US imperialism, Zionism, and Palestinian genocide—reveal the scale of the political crisis of legitimacy in the US state. It also reveals the scale of violence to which the state is willing to deploy against broad segments of the population to quell dissent and opposition to the economic and imperialist objectives of the US capitalist class.
Towards mass resistance—and the abolition of ICE
Increased ICE activities targeting migrant workers and political activists has been increasing over the last decade. Since the Obama Administration, ICE has become increasingly integrated into national policing efforts to participate in a wide array of enforcement activities, including efforts to repress political protest and social unrest. For instance, DHS and ICE agents were also deployed in cities across the country to surveil, disrupt, and repress the Black Lives Matters protest movements of 2014 to 2021. In some cases, like that in Portland, Oregon, DHS agents used unmarked vehicles to track, abduct, and incarcerate protest participants over the course of the protests.
Rising anger and active opposition to ICE has taken shape in recent years. In 2017-18, a nationwide movement called “Occupy ICE” was organised to block and disrupt operations at ICE facilities across of the country. This movement advanced the demand of “abolish ICE” in very practical terms: disrupt their activities and make it impossible for them to operate. This impact and popularity of the movement, under Trump’s first administration, even compelled some Democratic Party candidates to mouth support. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and others stepped forward and feigned support for the abolition of ICE—only to quickly walk it back and reverse course after the election cycle.
During the election cycle of 2024, both Democrats and Republicans ramped up their support for an immigration crackdown and the unleashing of ICE. Having no alternative to offer amid the recurring crises of capitalism and imperial decline, both capitalist parties converged in a full-throated attack on immigrants, refugees, and transnational workers. The complicity of Democrats in shifting the political terrain against immigrants enabled the racist and reactionary Trump to scale up his fascist rhetoric, mobilise his base of support (including in ICE and the Border Patrol), and declare a war on immigrants as the main onslaught of his second term—with the Democratic Party in complicity or silence.
The last few weeks and days show the potential for a movement of militant mass resistance to ICE, the Trump regime, and the whole state-repressive apparatus that underpins the US capitalist system. There have been several community-based confrontations against ICE raids in Worcester, Massachusetts, San Diego, California, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in several other parts of the country. The current uprising in Los Angeles shows that we have the numbers, power, and capacity to disrupt and defeat ICE operations and drive these invaders out of our communities.
For the struggle against ICE to grow, advance, and inflict more setbacks and defeats on ICE, there will need to be more coordinated acts of confrontation and disruption across more cities with the militancy now being witnessed in Los Angeles. This will necessitate higher levels of organisation, planning, and involvement. To build a mass movement capable of defeating ICE, it is also necessary to understand, strategize, and organise for the complete abolition of the agency. Acts of mass disruption can weaken ICE operations, and with radical organisation and orientation, can potentially inspire more sectors to join in the resistance. Most importantly, a mass movement against ICE can spread into the workplaces with strikes that can disrupt the capitalist economy and thereby its very capacity to function. Working-class power to shut down capitalist production is its greatest potential power. A threatened general strike in the airline industry in 2019 forced Trump to back down and cave during a federal government shutdown to force congressional funding for the expansion of the border wall.
As an instrumentalised weapon of class war used openly against the working class, the very existence and ongoing terror operations of ICE are directly connected to the needs of the capitalist class to subjugate the most resistant segments of the working class and make them vulnerable to super-exploitation to enrich the capitalists. ICE is also a weapon that is increasingly used to repress political dissidents and outspoken critics of the sitting regime, so it can continue in its imperialist war efforts and to conduct the genocide in Gaza. If we can unite and build movements of mass resistance to ICE, we will not only realise our potential to disrupt and stop ICE but can also become aware of our potential and ability to defeat and overturn the capitalist system itself—that which has spawned the monstrosities of ICE terror, Trump, US imperialism, endless war, and genocide.
