Inside the Grassroots Fight Against Trump’s Deportation Machine

O
n the morning of June 7, a California State Assemblyman named José Luis Solache Jr. posted a video to his Instagram account of a phalanx of Customs and Border Patrol vehicles congregated across the street from a Home Depot in Paramount, California, a small city in Los Angeles County with a large Latino population. The video wasn’t particularly notable — just a shaky recording of a bunch of idling SUVs and pickup trucks — and, in fact, it was fairly staid compared to the countless videos flooding social media over the past few months depicting the interactions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal law-enforcement agencies with the communities they are ostensibly employed to serve. 

Most of these videos depict brawny, heavily armed, masked dudes in tactical gear, sunglasses, and backward baseball hats, chasing and tackling unarmed immigrants while yelling things like, “Get on the ground!” and “Do not resist!” Most also feature a cast of bystanders recording the action on their phones, reminding victims of their constitutional rights, demanding agents identify themselves or produce a warrant, and then showering abuse on them when they refuse.

So, if we’re judging these recordings on their dramatic tension and character development, the Paramount video was a dud. But its timing was pointed. A day earlier, hundreds protesting a recent ICE raid marched on the federal building downtown and were met by Department of Homeland Security agents and LAPD officers armed with batons and firing pepper-balls. By the following morning, Solache’s Paramount video was like a flare sent up to a community already on edge. 

Community members came out to voice their displeasure, wielding cameras and posting their own videos, as armed agents fired rubber bullets, tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and other so-called less lethal munitions at protesters. That batch of videos in turn brought out more protesters with more cameras.  

“We got the call so I was there the whole day and watched everything unfold,” says Francisco Romero. “I was on the front line monitoring the violence.”

Romero, 49, is a longtime community organizer with Unión del Barrio, a group which formed in San Diego in 1981 as a socialist political organization focused on the rights of immigrants from Latin America. They first began patrolling neighborhoods in Southern California in 1993 to keep watch over police who’d been a constant presence in Latino communities there, but during the early days of Donald Trump’s first administration, UdB began holding “Know Your Rights” workshops and conducting patrols to alert community members to ICE presence. 

UdB’s ICE Watch program became something of a model for other similarly inclined groups around the country, which have popped up in nearly every large city and many smaller municipalities over the past few years. Almost all are small, grassroots organizations. Many lean socialist or focus on workers’ rights. Their efforts, largely unconnected to the apparatus of the Democratic Party or mainstream progressive organizations, have formed the backbone of the public response to the shocking sight of masked government agents snatching people off American streets in broad daylight. 

“The waters are being tested around the militarization of our community,” says Romero, whose day job is in public health. “They’re trying to normalize this, and we’re saying, ‘No, this is not normal. This is unjust.’”

These small organizations, staffed almost entirely by volunteers, have begun to incur the wrath of congressional Republicans eager to curry favor with the Trump administration. In June, GOP members in both the House and the Senate launched investigations into non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that work on behalf of immigrants. California Republican Kevin Kiley also introduced the “No Tax Dollars for Riots” act, which aims to end tax-exempt status for nonprofits that participate in supposedly unlawful protests. (Trump enthusiastically endorsed the bill on Truth Social.) 

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will funnel tens of billions more dollars towards immigration enforcement, increasing ICE’s budget significantly. Faceoffs between ICE and these cash-strapped groups that have made it their mission to defend immigrants are likely just beginning.

NIKKI MARÍN BAENA CO-FOUNDED SIEMBRA NC in 2017 to protect Latino worker’s rights in North Carolina, but the mission was quickly recalibrated as the first Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies began to take hold. After the 2024 election, interest in this work was turbocharged. 

“The weekend after the inauguration, we had scheduled two ICE Watch trainings, one in Raleigh, one in Durham,” says Marín Baena, 40, of the sessions teaching community members strategies for confronting immigration agents in their neighborhoods. “We could not fit people in the places we’d booked. We had lines wrapping around the block, like a thousand people.”

Whereas the shock and horror of the family-separation policy during Trump’s first term eventually put the administration on the defensive, this time around, the intimidation seems to be the point, as agents have begun to scour places like Home Depot and 7-Eleven. The second iteration “is kind of a TV show about how cruel you can be to a group of people,” says Marín Baena. “In this moment, they’re going after immigrants regardless of their [immigration] status or what protections they had. The panic is significantly higher. You get the sense this could happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone.”

This has motivated more people to fight back, forming groups and alliances to defend immigrants. Across Southern California, UdB is part of a growing network of more than 60 organizations called the Community Self-Defense Coalition, which shares tools and resources. In other parts of the country, these sorts of coalitions emerged on the fly in the early days of Trump’s second term. 

“It has been a beautiful, messy process where we’re sort of learning and building it as we go along,” says Elsabel Rincon, who runs an immigrant advocacy nonprofit in Salem, Massachusetts, and is also part of LUCE, a Massachusetts-based network that runs its own ICE Watch programs and steers immigrants toward legal resources to defend against detention and deportation. 

In different parts of the country, more established organizations have lent their expertise to new ones. Siembra NC offered vital support to the LUCE Network. Unión del Barrio has helped groups nationwide. 

The question is, can these scrappy, grassroots organizations scattered around the country mount an effective response to the militarized might of the federal government? As the Trump administration directs more resources and more vitriol into this battle, as immigrant communities and their allies come under even more fire, what exactly would success even look like in this David-versus-Goliath battle?

IN LATE MAY, IN THE SANCTUARY of a small brick church in Antioch, Tennessee, a working-class neighborhood on Nashville’s outskirts, about 50 people are seated in the pews, listening to volunteers from a group called the ReMix TN explain strategies for countering immigration raids. 

The afternoon begins with group breathing exercises. “We know there’s a lot of tension that comes with the work we do and the season we’re going through,” says Lhoraine, a session leader, who asked to be identified only by her first name.

Although tense confrontations have become the most visible sign of resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics, the message this afternoon is that you don’t have to confront an agent in order to help. Some at the church plan to visit local workplaces to hand out “Know Your Rights” cards to workers. Others talk about legislative work and policy initiatives. And then there is a group in the lobby boxing up groceries to take to families that don’t feel safe leaving the house.

Music City Migra-Watch recently spun off from ReMix and keeps tabs on local ICE activity by responding to tips from community members. Migra-Watch sends out trained volunteers to verify that sightings submitted via social media or a telephone hotline are in fact ICE or other immigration-enforcement agents. If they are, the group alerts the community, reminds the raid’s target of their rights and records the episode on their phones. 

More and more, bystanders are already recording by the time the trained volunteers arrive. In trainings, groups like Migra-Watch emphasize not only the rights of the immigrants targeted, but the legal rights of those recording federal agents. 

“We tell people their role is never to escalate a situation,” says Rincon of the LUCE network. “We train people to ask agents what department they’re with and what they’re doing in the community. We encourage people to ask if the individuals have a warrant.”

There is a federal statute that makes it illegal to resist, interfere, or obstruct a law-enforcement agent carrying out their official duties, as well as a separate law that criminalizes knowingly harboring, concealing, or shielding someone from detection by immigration authorities. In the chaotic moments when many of these ICE raids go down, what constitutes obstruction gets murky fast. The application of these laws often comes down to exactly who is parsing the language. 

“This administration subscribes to the broadest interpretation of the statutes,” says John Sandweg, an immigration attorney who served during the Obama administration as general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, and later as ICE director. Bystanders recording an interaction with ICE, asking to see a warrant, or advising people of their rights “is not anything that during an Obama or Biden administration would’ve been prosecuted. But this is a time where that kind of activity is going to get much greater scrutiny from the Department of Justice, so those groups are operating with a greater degree of risk than ever before.”

Certainly this fact has been driven home by the sight of a number of public officials including New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, and Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan being arrested for allegedly interfering with ICE operations. 

Romero is confident that he and others from UdB have the law on their side. “We walk it up to the point just shy of them having an excuse to get us an obstruction charge,” he says. “We know the limit, and that’s where we stand.”

SHERMAN AUSTIN KNOWS WHAT IT’S like when they come for you. On Jan. 24, 2002, Austin was an 18-year-old webmaster, political activist, and budding rapper living with his mother in Sherman Oaks, California, when roughly two dozen federal agents raided and ransacked their home. Austin ran RaiseTheFist.com, an anarchist website and discussion forum, which, particularly in the months after the 9/11 attacks, had drawn the attention of the federal government. Among other things, a teenager had posted amateurish bomb-making instructions to RaiseTheFist.com, and although that teenager was never charged, Austin served nearly a year in federal prison for hosting the information on his site. The case made him a cause célèbre among left-wing activists, including Rage Against the Machine’s Zack de la Rocha, and free-speech advocates who claimed Austin was targeted for his political beliefs. 

Today, Austin runs StopICE.net, a crowdsourced, text-based alert system that notifies users of ICE sightings. When I first spoke to Austin in early May, the platform was still in its infancy, and had roughly 9,000 subscribers, mostly around the Southern California area. By the time we reconnect in mid-June, after the massive protests around L.A., more than 270,000 people from all over the country have signed up for StopICE’s notifications. The site’s Instagram page, which mostly shares videos of ICE raids and drives traffic toward the alert system, has more than 80,000 followers. 

“Things exploded with the platform,” he tells me. “Things happened so rapidly that I didn’t have the resources in place to keep everything functional, 24/7. The system was crashing a bit.” 

Austin has been coordinating more and more with the rapid-response teams from immigrant defense groups, helping to filter information to them about ICE raids in real time. 

His is not the only platform helping to knit together the nationwide raids and responses. The site People Over Papers solicits similar information from users and plots it onto a map of the U.S. An app called ICE Block that allows users to alert each other of ICE activity shot to the top of the iTunes app-store charts after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced it by name during a late June press briefing, claiming the app “is encouraging violence against law enforcement officers.”

Austin first had the idea for StopICE back in 2017, but it wasn’t until this February, after witnessing the new administration’s tactics and recognizing the echo of his own experiences, that he finally got the system up and running. 

“I’ve gone through all this shit before with the feds,” he says. “I know what it’s like to be snatched off the street by federal agents, thrown into a black van for a trip to a federal building, and have my family not know where I’m at for two weeks.”

Multiple people I spoke to while reporting this story were understandably reluctant to be named. Considering the Trump administration’s demonstrated thirst for retribution, many were concerned about putting a target on themselves or their organizations. Austin, despite his previous entanglements with the federal government, has no such reservations.

“I want to show that contrast,” he says. “We’re seeing these masked ICE agents who don’t want to reveal their identity snatching people off the streets. Here I am trying to counter that the best way I can, by providing the resources for people in real time to get organized and mobilized. But I’m not trying to hide myself. I don’t have to wear a mask. I don’t have to conceal my identity because I’m not breaking the law.”

IT CAN BE TRICKY TO MEASURE THE efficacy of these immigrant-defense operations. There aren’t statistics tallying detentions and deportations that don’t happen, or any real way to count the number of immigrants who feel safe enough to go to work, the supermarket, or their child’s parent-teacher conference because of these programs. But certainly the messages these organizations have repeated over the past six months — about constitutional rights, about community defense — have resonated widely. 

“People are holding the line,” Romero says. “People are maintaining their silence. People know the difference between an administrative and judicial warrant. It’s spreading.”

It’s clear deportation hardliners have taken notice, as well. In early June, the Republican chairmen of the House Committee on Homeland Security and the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability launched an investigation into more than 200 NGOs that work with immigrants, including Unión del Barrio and Siembra NC. As the letter these organizations received spells out, the probe hopes to discover whether these groups “used U.S. taxpayer money to … facilitate illegal immigration,” and whether “certain NGOs are now advising illegal aliens on strategies to avoid and impede law-enforcement officials.” 

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley launched an additional investigation into three groups — UdB, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights (CHIRLA) — accusing them of financing and providing material support for the recent protests in Paramount and around Los Angeles. “Bankrolling civil unrest is not protected speech,” Hawley wrote in a letter dated June 11. “It is aiding and abetting criminal conduct.” 

Early in the morning on June 12, the FBI raided a home in East L.A. and arrested Alejandro Orellana, who volunteers with one of the Unión del Barrio’s coalition partners. He’s accused of providing masks and face shields to L.A. protesters. 

When California Rep. Kiley introduced his “No Tax Dollars for Riots” bill the following day, he singled out CHIRLA as a potential target.  

According to Romero, UdB is “tripling down” on their work. “You’re asking us to voluntarily cease and desist. That’s not happening.” 

The weekend after receiving the letter, UdB got a tip that more than 200 federal agents were meeting up early on a Sunday morning in a parking lot in Bell, California, to plan raids for the day. The organization flooded the staging area with volunteers. “Some of us were able to monitor where they were headed,” Romero says. “We started alerting people to get into self-defense mode.” With each of these episodes, lessons are being learned and new strategies devised. 

At the June protests in Paramount, the situation on the streets escalated throughout the day and into the night. Federal agents called in the local police and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. The LASD has committed to not cooperating on immigration-enforcement operations, but Romero says the Sheriff’s deputies he encountered in Paramount were even more violent than the federal agents. 

CBP officers shot rubber bullets and soft pellets at protesters — ”I got hit a bunch of times,” Romero says — but when they fired tear gas canisters, they generally seemed to aim at the ground or over the heads of demonstrators. Not so for the sheriff’s deputies, according to Romero. 

“I witnessed a sheriff intentionally aim straight at the face of a person who was filming,” Romero says. “This youngster got laid out, his face got cracked open, just under his eye. I had to go provide first aid. That’s happened multiple times.” (In a statement, a spokesperson for the LASD writes that the crowd was “throwing objects and exhibiting violent behavior toward federal agents and deputy sheriffs.… When a protest is deemed an unlawful assembly and individuals resort to violence, intervention becomes necessary.”)

What didn’t happen in Paramount is also notable: It appeared that federal agents, engaged with raucous protesters, were largely unable to go out into the community in search of immigrants. The protests eventually spread to nearby Compton and downtown Los Angeles. In response, Trump sent the National Guard into Los Angeles and mobilized 700 U.S. Marines nearby, despite the fact that no local authorities — not the police chief, not the mayor, not the governor — thought it was warranted. 

Despite the violence and the draconian backlash, in some ways what happened in Paramount felt like a victory for Unión del Barrio and groups like it, proof of concept that the seeds they’re planting are taking root. 

“The community is watching out for their own block, and that’s exactly what needs to happen — community-level self-defense, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood,” Romero says. “There’s this trickle effect beginning where it’s no longer a feeling of being isolated. It’s a feeling of ‘Hey, there’s a resistance going on. I want to be part of it.’”