The Brooklyn Rail

For Joshua

Late on the night of June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent out a triumphant post on X that summed up the volatile situation in the city, at least from her vantage point. At the end of a long nine days that had seen fierce clashes between demonstrators and both federal forces and local police, then the mobilization of National Guard troops and even active-duty Marines from nearby Twentynine Palms, Bass, a longtime local Democratic Party fixture (with a respectable pedigree in the social movements of the 1970s) made it known that she had taken back control of her city. “30,000 people showed up across our city to exercise their constitutional right to peaceful protest today,” she declared, with the emphasis less on how many made it out that perfect-weather day than on the codeword “peaceful.” As if to underline this point, and likely with a keen sense of the irony juxtaposing these two statements required, she concluded with a reminder that “a curfew is in effect in Downtown Los Angeles to stop bad actors who do not care about immigrants rights.”

The so-called “No Kings” protests on June 14 took place across the country and had been organized long before the unrest in Los Angeles was set off, initially by a series of aggressive ICE immigration enforcement raids in the city. Scanning the list of organizations and entities involved in planning, supporting, and promoting these protests is dizzying: a jumble of progressive organizations and a few key labor unions, all under the umbrella of something called “the 50501 Movement,” not to mention a full-page ad in the New York Times paid for by a Walmart heiress. But the timing could not have been more favorable for the city’s embattled mayor, the target of intense criticisms from left and right since taking office in late 2022, and for California’s Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had been squaring off against Trump in the media and online over the president’s legally dubious decision to commandeer the state’s National Guard without his consent.

The thirty thousand or so that did turn up on that day made for a much larger crowd than those present for the much more combative demonstrations of the previous week, a point the mayor and local Democratic Party leaders underscored. But in light of the events that preceded them, which featured masked, heavily-armed federal officers rounding up suspected undocumented immigrants at workplaces across the county, followed by the Trump administration’s bid to humiliate the local authorities and make a show of seizing control of the city, the size of the protest might seem modest after all. City leaders had anticipated a turnout that could be “unprecedented,” a bold claim given that a 2006 demonstration against Bush-era immigration reforms—the so-called “Day without an Immigrant” march—brought out what city officials pegged at 500,000, and organizers at well over a million in Los Angeles alone.¹

The No Kings march began in front of City Hall and the mayor’s office, which was guarded by a thin line of Sheriff’s deputies. The choice of this site seemed less a gesture of confronting local authorities than an offer of “mass” support in their skirmish with federal authorities and the Trump administration. The short march through downtown was to end by 2 p.m.—long before the 8 p.m. curfew Bass had imposed days earlier. One thing that stood out for this participant was the sheer number of American flags in the crowd, clearly meant to drown out the Mexican flags brandished in the more volatile confrontations earlier in the week, and maybe even to out-patriot the president’s pathetic military parade in DC the same day. So, too, the almost total lack of any police presence, with only a handful of National Guard troops stationed in front of federal buildings such as the US Courthouse just a few blocks from City Hall. But the march’s most notable feature was its studious avoidance of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), just a few blocks away. It was there that dozens of workers swept up in ICE raids the previous week and a half were being held; it was there that the most dynamic clashes between anti-ICE demonstrators and police from a variety of federal agencies and, eventually, the LAPD, had taken place on the night of June 6, setting in motion the summoning of military detachments to stand in front of federal buildings. The last thing the organizers of the march and the mayor would have wanted is thirty thousand peaceful protestors approaching those sites and being drawn into skirmishes with federal officers or the newly-installed National Guardsmen.

The sequence of events culminating in the June 14 march is complex and can only be cursorily sketched here. Though federal immigration agencies had been ramping up their activities in Los Angeles in the weeks prior, the triggering event was the June 6 surprise raid on a clothing manufacturer, Ambiance Apparel, in downtown’s Fashion District. Federal agents were soon confronted by a group of activists and neighbors attempting to prevent the detention and transport of dozens of workers from the facility. These clashes resulted in a prominent labor leader, David Huerta—the president of California’s SEIU division—being assaulted and charged with impeding federal law enforcement operations. His arrest was met with outrage not only from some in the labor movement, but from key Democratic politicians across the region as well. When word got out that he and the other detainees were being held at Los Angeles’s downtown Metropolitan Detention Center—a federal facility close to the US Courthouse and City Hall—groups of demonstrators converged on the building in solidarity with them. They were soon countered by federal officers, who “defended” its entrance with volleys of tear gas and other munitions. Because the federal agencies involved did not coordinate their activities with local police—since 1979, the LAPD has had a policy of not participating in federal immigration enforcement actions—they were left to their own devices for hours, with the LAPD turning up only around 7 p.m., at which point riot police were able to clear the area.

The Fashion District raid was followed the day after by an ICE raid on a Home Depot parking lot in the largely Latino and working-class city of Paramount in south LA, separated from Compton by a freeway and policed not by the LAPD but the Sheriff’s Department. Here the confrontation was especially heated, as community members aggressively confronted both federal agents and the sheriff’s deputies alike, and well-prepared locals—accustomed to harassment from local law enforcement—lobbed rocks and fireworks at police vehicles attempting to flee the area, images of which were widely seen online and on television. It was these scenes that gave the Trump administration the pretext to mobilize the California National Guard without Newsom’s, authorization: a gesture that infuriated state and local politicians alike, who considered the move both a provocation and illegal. As these troops poured into the city on June 8, ostensibly to “protect” federal facilities and federal agents, a new day of explosive demonstrations was set off downtown, as outraged groups once again converged on the area around the courthouse and detention center, only this time met by the LAPD’s riot police, eager to join the fray. This resulted in still more vivid images from these three days of clashes, notably of five Waymo robotaxis—they had been attacked, graffitied, and set on fire by demonstrators—burning for hours on Los Angeles Street, just around the corner from the detention center. One LAPD captain was even able to describe the events of that day as “the busiest, most volatile incident that I’ve seen in my 29 years.”² Translation: since the Rodney King riots in 1992.

The timing of the June 14 “No Kings” event was therefore fortuitous for Bass, Newsom, and the Democratic Party in California, for whom it amounted to a “peaceful” show of force, and a rebuke of the Trump administration’s challenging of their control over the city through the dispatch of military troops. Ideologically, the march was focused on the broader authoritarian drift of the administration, and it was pointedly well-behaved, backstopping the mayor’s and governor’s claim that no federal intervention was needed, and amounted to a power play meant to humiliate Trump’s political opponents. Though the chant “ICE out of LA!” surfaced repeatedly throughout the demonstration, the event was colored by this standoff between local and federal authorities, and participants were not wrong to feel as though they had been conscripted into a kind of political theater, cast in the role of responsible protestor. Indeed, the protests of June 14 might, in hindsight, be read as a counter-demonstration against the much more combative exchanges set off by the raids of June 6th and 7th, a rebuke as much to the militant response to the ICE raids as to the federal government’s bullying and lawlessness. Democratic politicians were eager to rewrite the conflict as one between federal and state authorities, to be adjudicated in the courts and then in elections, rather than between resident workers—and those willing to defend them—and groups of masked men attempting to arrest and deport them.

The conflict between state and federal authorities, and that between the largely docile protests sponsored by progressive organizations and the desperate fight to prevent the abduction of Los Angeles residents by masked men in vans, were not the only tensions structuring the events of the second week of June. In a bizarre twist that only the shambolic Trump could script, the president announced on June 12 that the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing “very good, long time workers … with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” as a result of ICE’s campaign; shortly after, senior ICE officials placed an immediate hold “on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” That certain employers were finding it impossible to carry out their operations as a result of these actions surprised no one, save Trump himself.

The earlier demand of Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation campaign, that federal agents triple the number of arrests they make—up to three thousand per day, with a goal of one million in the administration’s first year—necessitated the workplace roundups that Trump, under pressure from business owners that backed him in 2024, summarily suspended (only to cave a few days later, as if overruled by his subordinate). What the president’s jittery about-face highlights is that a large part of the undocumented labor force he and his underlings seek to drive out of the country plays an essential role in the production of food, the maintenance of hotels and restaurants, and the building of houses. If undocumented workers make up a small fraction of the total US workforce, they are critical not only to farming (including meatpacking) and leisure services, but for construction as well. Nearly three of four farmworkers in California are undocumented, and the threat of ICE raids in the Central Valley, growers lamented, resulted in up to sixty percent of laborers failing to report to work, effectively shutting down many time-sensitive farm operations.³

If the most dramatic and widely-viewed roundups have occurred in urban public spaces like parks, swap meets, and Home Depot parking lots, threatening the most vulnerable immigrants working in the informal sector (street vendors, day laborers, etc.), the raids on meatpacking plants, strawberry farms, and construction sites have yielded larger, but far more economically perilous, results.⁴ The divergent effects produced through the targeting of precarious workers on the edges of the labor market and those essential to the operations of medium-to-large businesses underscore, in turn, an important divide in Trump’s fragile political “coalition.” This divide became starkly evident in the president’s oddly timed reversal. If the nasty rhetoric and the brutal images of the administration’s lawless and indiscriminate deportation efforts are produced for his petit bourgeois MAGA base, these actions run directly counter to the interests of big capital, which opportunistically signed on to the Trump 2.0 bandwagon betting on lower corporate taxes and the wholesale deregulation of their industries. If his base is made up of retirees, self-employed workers, and entrepreneurs who do not depend on a steady and ample supply of cheap labor to carry out their operations, labor-intensive industries like agriculture, hospitality, and construction cannot function without one. The images of masked men in unmarked vans kidnapping defenseless people in parking lots, or rounding up workers in factories, are fodder for a fraction of the population that has little directly at stake in the broader fallout these arrests are sure to have. If the alliance between the state and the capitalist class has historically been rooted in the former’s willingness to ensure the functioning of labor markets—disciplining labor-power while also assisting in its reproduction—the administration’s monomaniacal and punitive campaign against immigrant workers not only threatens to irrevocably damage putatively allied industries, it imperils the fragile and even improbable political coalition the president assembled in his successful campaign in 2024.

That winning combination—it will be lost on no one in the era of the Department of Government Efficiency—is completed by Silicon Valley’s tech barons, who sided with Trump 2.0 late in the game but with a clear sense of what was to be gained from the arrangement. What differentiates the tech industry from the older agriculture and construction sectors is not simply its massive market caps or these companies’ exploitation of network effects to dominate particular segments of the economy, but also the fact that it does not rely on large flows of cheap foreign labor.⁵ What the tech industry does depend on is access to exploitable consumer data, much of it generated by users of its platforms.⁶ Its canny alliance with the Trump clique has suddenly given it access to the mother lode of information collected by the federal government, data once zealously guarded and held in siloed (and aging) systems maintained by particular agencies (Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Deparment of Homeland Security, etc.). These data pools include financial and employment records, voting records, and medical histories, but also citizenship status and biometric data; until now, they have been kept separate due not only to privacy concerns encoded in legal statutes, but because access to such information depends on the assumption that it will not be used by other agencies against those who “voluntarily” supply it. The first three months of the current administration’s tenure were defined in large part by Elon Musk’s DOGE, a scorched-earth campaign whose object was not simply to render the targeted agencies dysfunctional—whence the wood chipper and the chainsaw—but above all to plunder these reserves of data, and dynamite the firewalls separating them. Musk’s campaign, seemingly authorized but not overseen by the president and his staff, was an unbelievable bonanza for his Silicon Valley complices: a kind of twenty-first century primitive accumulation of state-collected and -maintained data that could now be consolidated and processed by artificial intelligence engines, then repackaged for sale to other private companies or fed back into specialized apps designed for law enforcement and military uses.

Data plundered by the DOGE campaign have been used to create a database that allows immigration authorities at ICE and other agencies “to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.”⁷ Recent reporting on Trump’s mass deportation campaign has revealed that immigration enforcement agencies are using a new mapping system that relies on the consolidation of data stripped out of the siloed systems DOGE penetrated in the first weeks of the new administration. This software, originally given the codename “Atrac”—short for “Alien Tracker”—and whose initial development relied heavily on DOGE employees, generates what the head of the Miami ICE office refers to as a cellphone-accessible “heat map,” which shows “where there are executable final orders of removal around the nation.”⁸ In April 2025, ICE also tendered a contract to Palantir Technologies—co-founded by the ghoulish Peter Thiel and currently headed by the sinister Alex Karp—to develop a complementary surveillance platform called “ImmigrationOS,” which would further consolidate this data and render these mapping apps user-friendly for field agents. Palantir’s crucial role in data mapping for immigration purposes does not date from yesterday, or even from the beginning of the second Trump administration. Its critical collaboration with ICE began as early as 2011, under the Obama administration, when it was commissioned to create a consolidated depository of records for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division. And while the mapping software it is currently refining is for the moment being used to zero in on immigrant workers, we can be sure it is being expanded to create a vast domestic surveillance net. It will be used against critics of the current administration or against those who have publicly expressed misgivings about the genocide being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (one of Palantir’s key clients), whose use of AI-generated heat maps in Gaza has been described by one observer as resembling a “mass assassination factory.”⁹ The tradeoff for the tech overlords’ allies in the MAGA movement, many of whom rely on the government services targeted by DOGE, seems clear: more circuses, less cake. The thrill of seeing a stranger abducted in real time on social media will be paid for by unsent Social Security checks or denied medical services sooner than they might suspect.

This increasing integration of the tech barons’ surveillance platforms and the immigration enforcement policing that the mass deportation campaign in Los Angeles makes salient might explain the special satisfaction some observers took in those images of the Waymo robotaxis burning downtown on Sunday, June 8. Indeed, what distinguishes those plumes of greasy black smoke from some of the most vibrant (and searing) images thrown off by the George Floyd rebellion is that the cars that were torched were not police cruisers, but driverless taxis of the sort the tech giants have been threatening cities with for a decade now. You don’t have to be an all-in-black anarchist or even pay much attention to politics to feel enraged by the presence of Waymos on our streets: a fact made evident by repeated vandalizing of these vehicles in San Francisco, cars which themselves have been described by the California DMV as “an unreasonable threat to public safety.”¹⁰ But beyond the physical danger posed by these vehicles on public streets, they are perceived by many as a more general, and pernicious, threat to civic life in American cities. Described by one critic as “essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” self-driving taxis like Waymos are sensor-encrusted robots, outfitted with radar, laser detection devices, and dozens of cameras, providing real-time three-dimensional depictions of their environment. The information they gather has been used by law enforcement agencies—among them, the LAPD—to gather evidence in criminal cases. It is no wonder, then, that the incinerated robot cars hit a special nerve: they are cop cars after all, and treated as such. It might be that these smart cars did not have the intelligence to avoid the flare-ups downtown that day, and became targets of opportunity, victims of circumstance. But it is more likely that those willing to brave the slings and arrows of the combined forces of local and federal law enforcement that afternoon saw in them emblems of the algorithmic “governance” that is the faceless face of this century’s rebooted fascism, more sinister still than the jowled scowl of a mob boss manqué from Queens.¹¹