There’s a narrative this country loves to tell about itself. It’s tidy and self-congratulatory: protest is a right, democracy is a process, and justice is the promise.
But that story begins to glitch when you watch the National Guard roll into your city in response to people chanting for dignity. When you watch peaceful protests met with military force, you realize that the story was written by the people who’ve never had to fight for the plot to include them.
I grew up in Los Angeles, and I still live here. The people protesting are not asking for chaos–we’re calling for care. We’re rising up against the relentless violence of ICE raids and an immigration system built to punish people for existing outside a line they were never allowed to stand in. These protests are about family, safety, and the right to simply survive. And yet, the government responds with soldiers, tear gas, and violence.
Let’s be clear: what’s happening isn’t just policy–it’s performance at the expense of human lives. An authoritarian regime flexing its power not because it has to, but because it can. Because it’s easier to try to crush dissent than to confront the truth it reveals. Actions like ICE raids and militarized crackdowns are state sponsored terror, meant to instill fear, not safety. Despite these terror tactics, our communities are showing up and fighting for our families, neighbors, coworkers, friends.
What does it mean when the peaceful expression of pain is met with tanks and tear gas? What are we saying about who gets to speak, who gets to belong, and who the state exists to protect?
Here’s the thing: protest is not the problem. Protest is the pulse. It’s what keeps democracy alive when institutions fail, when policy drags behind justice, when the law is used more to control than to liberate. The problem is what happens when power hears protest and responds with panic. When a system built on exclusion feels threatened by inclusion and reacts accordingly.
The people protesting ICE are imagining a different kind of future—one that sees undocumented people not as threats to be removed, but as neighbors, coworkers, parents, and children with dreams worth protecting. One where being human is enough to deserve safety. Where the response to suffering isn’t surveillance, but solidarity.
We should be telling that story. We should be living that story. Because the one we’re in right now—the one where peaceful protest is treated like war and military presence is passed off as peacekeeping—is exhausting, dystopian, and fundamentally broken.
There’s no moral equivalence between the oppressed and the systems that harm them. Peaceful resistance is not only justified, it’s necessary.
So here’s what we do:
We show up in solidarity with migrants, with their families, and with everyone in the streets defending their communities.
We equip ourselves with tools and mobilize rapid response networks to protect each other.
We contribute to community bailouts.
We amplify legal defense funds.
We move with the people already building the world we need–those doing the work invisibly and against all odds.
We support and fund organizations like:
These groups, in Los Angeles and in communities across California, are protecting our people and reshaping the systems that harm us. The National Guard may leave the streets. But we’re staying here—organizing, donating, showing up, and speaking out—until no one has to protest for the right to be safe, to be free, to belong.