The Road to Hell Is Paved with ICE

ways to support, links, we live in a surveillance state

Greetings from Los Angeles, a city that has had an extremely calm and normal six months. To follow for updates and resources: 

• Democracy Now

• Union del Bario 

• Community Self Defense Coalition 

• Radio Jornalera

• National Day Laborer Organizing Network

Donate: Urgent Aid for 14 Families Detained by ICE

Dear Community, we are reeling from the recent detentions of fourteen of our beloved fathers, sons, brothers, uncles: Tomas, Juan Fernando, Jose Paulino, Jacob, Miguel, Oscar, Uriel, Lazaro, Felimon, Ismael, Reynaldo, Luiz, Mario, and Jorge. Ranging in ages from 24 to 56.

What was a normal workday for them became a nightmare when ICE raided the Ambiance warehouse in Downtown LA and enacted unlawful mass collateral arrests where our relatives were unjustly arrested and kidnapped.

In our most dire moment of need, we turn to our chosen family and community for support as our family is facing urgent need for financial support. The kidnapping of 14 of our loved ones in one swoop is leaving fifteen families with young children, elders who rely on their caretaking, without their primary breadwinners and exacerbating existing struggles to make ends meet.

Sadly one of our fourteen are now in San Isidro (we will still fight for their return), and are now securing legal representation for the others who we hope can be released on bond soon. We anticipate bond to be set between $1,500-$5K per person!! While we support them through this process, their families are left without their primary breadwinner and need financial support for daily childcare, food and bill expenses while they are detained.

We are thankful for any amount that will go a long way for us right now.

Jail Support Los Angeles

Helpful slide show about surveillance technology and protesting

• Related: why turn Face ID off? Biometrics can be exploited by police and other government agencies to force you to give access to your phone, data, etc. From Quartz: “In many cases, especially if you think you might interact with the police (at a protest, for example), you should seriously consider turning off biometrics on your phone entirely.”

If you have any other links you need boosted (Go Fund Me’s, bail funds, strike funds, etc) please feel free to email me or comment under this post so I can include in next newsletter.

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The Road to Hell is Paved With ICE

Yesterday I turned on the local news just in time to hear an interview with a police officer talking about how the cops were planning to amp up arrests in Los Angeles and make sure the protestors “felt the consequences” of their actions. The streets of downtown L.A. are filled with people protesting the coordinated raids by I.C.E. across Southern California, raids that have been helped by our local law enforcement and Trump, who has now sent in the National Guard. If you see the protests, you see thousands of neighbors supporting what makes our city so beautiful (not to mention function at all) – immigrants. If you read about the protests, here's what you see, from the Los Angeles Times and Fox News respectively: 

Vandals! Criminals! Oh my! Please, heavily militarized gestapo, save me from the scary (not white!) men trying to get day work at the Home Depot! I’m terrified!

On top of the insanity of the situation itself, we are driven further insane by the failure of mainstream media to accurately describe the situation. We have seen this for…ever (NYT Iraq war, etc) and have watched “manufactured consent” on overdrive in Gaza, where every New York Times headline is a masterclass in juggling the passive tense to–voila–disappear the genocidal agitators. This is much the same: we are watching in real time a city determined to protect each other and the media continuing to fan the flames of fear and give credence to the narrative that more police presence is needed to “protect” – what? The gorgeous architectural wonder that is the Crytpo.Com arena? Not to mention that while news outlets decry the horror of burning cars, this is a tactical strategy and a gift to the city. The only cars I’ve seen on fire have been the autonomous vehicles Waymos, which are not only “uber for people who have been so socially alienated that they can’t interact with their hired servant for a day” but data mining and surveillance machines. Police have already been using footage from Waymo to surveil and prosecute the public. 

For anyone with eyes and a conscience, it is quite clear that the people here illegally, causing trouble, setting the city on edge, and undermining order are the agents of the police state themselves, not our immigrant neighbors. The ominous voice of the police chief decries “violent protests” as we see footage of police in fully militarized riot gear tear gassing crowds of people chanting for their basic rights, as we see members of the media with clearly marked tags shot by rubber bullets, as mounted policemen literally trample people in the streets. And we are told that we who resist are the problem. The optics are so obvious that it is hard to wrap your head around how someone could think otherwise, how someone could see hundreds of millions of dollars spent in outfitting these cowardly G.I. Joes to be ready for a warzone, how fucking pathetic they are “just following orders,” who are often shown gleefully kicking, gassing, punching anyone in the vicinity. It is made even more overt when these techno-fascist officers (with access to data and surveillance all over the city, a technique honed in partnership with our sister ethnostate, Israel) are stomping right by some of the largest populations of homeless people in the city. You can imagine the price tags on their guns, their rubber bullets, their dumbass shielded vehicles. It could be so much better spent. Obvious, but true. 

This sight is now frighteningly familiar in America: the full weight of the police state apparatus (and the capital that demands it) versus people simply wanting dignity. All while the mainstream news, right wing hawks, pearl-clutching liberals will condemn them as being violent hooligans. These are people just trying to exist, work for a probably meager wage without healthcare because our country is sick. People trying to live a better life, a life promised for them here, only to be used as a scapegoat in ramping up hostilities, ushering in a fascist rule, and attempting to quell solidarity by stoking ethnic division and hatred. These are our neighbors – and what would this country – what would Los Angeles – be without immigrants? Absolutely nothing! It would come to a stand still! Our food would suck! Stores would shutter! Nothing would get made. And yet these, among many contradictions, are not the point and have never been the point. As many have repeated, the “cruelty is the point” with Trump, but this was happening before Trump, too.

It is perhaps trite at this point to spell out how everything is connected. But it is, deeply. Gaza is not simply a war zone, it is a practice ground for a highly militarized, technologically sophisticated colonial power to exert the full force of their might. Does killing 50,000 children in Gaza make anyone safer? No, it does not. It is cruelty, the point is cruelty. They are able to continue their extermination campaign with resources (material and symbolic, the narrative matters greatly) from the United States. The U.S. police have exchanged training methods with the IDF for years. From Al Jazeera in 2020:

Following the killing of George Floyd, as US riot police fired rubber-coated bullets, tear gas canisters, pepper spray and stun grenades at protesters, Palestinians shared tips on social media on how to best deal with the assaults.Many in the Palestinian territories are well experienced with such tactics by security forces while living under a decades-long occupation by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip. According to the organisations Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), one common theme shared between United States and Israel is the exchange of tactics and expertise in state violence, which has been ongoing for 18 years.

The “deadly exchange” between the IDF and US law enforcement amped up after 9/11, which is further connected to the threads of blatant islamophobia and xenophobia that loosely justify spending ungodly sums of money to pursue a police state, both here and in Israel. “It is not uncommon for police to drive around with their lights flashing in Black and working-class neighborhoods in Atlanta. This is a tactic used to intimidate and make their presence known; for residents of these neighborhoods, it can feel like psychological warfare. US law enforcement learned this strategy from Israeli forces,” the Real News reported earlier this year. Think about how crazy that is. The tactics used in our cities to terrorize the poor, to harass and detain Black and brown communities, are learned in tandem with Israel—that’s not simply aligning ideologies but big business. Check out Track AIPAC to see how monetarily beneficial it can be to endorse the genocide of an entire people. This is not simply about belief, about hatred, but about capitalism—the business of hating, the business of war, the business of colonialism, and the populations deemed as surplus or “disposable.”

Real image from an article in the NYT

While the media was distracted by “riots” in Los Angeles (a city historically never prone to riots for justice, I’m kidding, we’ve got a long and incredible history of that, Mike Davis has some great books about it) the Madleen Freedom Flotilla, carrying humanitarians and aid to Gaza has been intercepted by Israel. Because the optics of the Freedom Flotilla are largely unimpeachable, some brain rotted people, including the official Israel Foreign Ministry account, have labeled the boat “selfie yacht” or called the journey “performative.” I am sorry for those people, who cannot look at bravery in the face and recognize it for what it is. I am sorry for those who are still prey to such blatant propaganda, such cynical twisting of the truth. How hollow and corruptible, how easily bought, one must be to look at anyone’s attempts to stop the starvation and demolition of an entire population as “performative.” Gaza is starving, decimated, in ruins. Any attempt to get them aid is human. Any outcry about the deeply fucked up world we live in is human. To label such responses as “performative” is a deeply antisocial and unhelpful framework, not to mention solipsistic—it is a metric borne of the addled recesses of the internet, and though it may seem a useful tool it is further alienating us from each other, and from comrades who think similarly as us.

I’m writing this quickly, so apologies for the ranting. It seems the Marines will be deployed here on the weekend. Trump is fanning the flames, trying to incite chaos, so that more police can be seen as the answer. I feel immense sorrow, a hollowness in my very being, when I think about what the world could be. And I feel immensely heartened by glimpses of the world that we can make ourselves, with our neighbors, with our friends, with likeminded people who simply want to exist without fear.

Stay safe out there, wherever you are. More soon xo