They Started Too Late, Now They’re Rushing

P

In Los Angeles, at the end of November 2024, I saw a guy hawking Trump merch under an E-Z Up that was illegally blocking the sidewalk. Trump had just won the election, and clearly his supporters were emboldened to celebrate, even in solid-blue LA (because us Americans believe we’re so unique and different, we’ve flipped our colours: red for conservative, blue for liberal). I was surprised at the man’s courage, given that Los Angeles was among the cities that would be hit the hardest by Trump’s promises and “Project 2025” and so presumably the least tolerant of his supporters and anti-immigrant (specifically anti-Mexican) rhetoric. Later, in March, I spotted ads for Andor Season Two plastered on billboards and the orange Metro buses on my way to the Fashion District, an area in LA filled with Latin American and Asian immigrants and not-entirely-above-board businesses. I remember thinking to myself, almost as a joke, that Season One’s success and quality and Trump’s victory will make the libs all over Season Two in a way that they weren’t for Season One.

In April, Andor Season Two finally began releasing, and while watching the first arc, I knew I was right. Illegal immigrant (“alien”) farm workers, who are a true part of the community, are nonetheless being forced out by an imperial power under the guise of security for not having visas? There was great satisfaction for liberals and leftists alike in watching Cassian airstrike a space Immigrations and Customs Enforcement van. But of course, the writing team didn’t need a crystal ball to ensure their story would be relevant to the moment; ICE has existed, alongside its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, since 2002.[1] Both national entities were created as part of a nationwide wave of jingoistic state activity in the wake of 9/11, and Democratic and Republican presidents alike have made extensive use of them.

As I see it, there have been two categories of opposition from non-politicians to ICE kidnappings: the first is protests, which are nothing new, but the largest wave of ICE-specific ones began in early June 2025 in Los Angeles, with solidarity protests in other cities shortly after. These made national, if not global, headlines, accompanied by inspiring shots of Waymos on fire[2] (for unfamiliar readers: Waymo is a self-driving taxi service owned by Alphabet/Google; think Uber but there aren’t even drivers to underpay), horrible videos of police firing rubber bullets directly at reporters,[3] and Trump and Governor Newsom’s fight over the deployment of the US military to LA.[4]

These protests were largely where the mainstream liberal discourse was focused, and at the time, if you asked someone what was happening in the US in response to ICE kidnappings, their answer would likely be about the demonstrations. And in many cases, these demonstrations were indeed incredible: exploded Waymos, cop cars crushed by rocks from the above freeway overpasses, cracked bank windows, and torched American flags all represent symbolic and/or material resistance to US technofascism that goes beyond simply “Trump bad.” Of course, much liberal discourse was focused on trying to push the protests back to just “Trump bad,” for example, people online admonishing people actually out on the streets for waving the wrong country’s flag or blocking traffic (buddy, you live in LA, blame the racist, car-centric city planning for the traffic). And indeed for every anarchic demo with property destruction/status quo disruption there were five glorified walks around the block featuring speeches by Democratic politicians and white people dunking on Trump/Elon Musk, possibly in fatphobic ways.[5]

On the online forum r/LosAngeles, which is generally liberal, reflecting LA and Reddit in general, many cited Andor (some showed off their Andor-themed signs), demonstrating that my prediction that liberals would be all over Andor Season Two was correct. I saw some signs referencing Andor at some of the more talk-and-walk-y protests I attended (because I would neeeever attend an event where something illegal happens or is supposed to happen). Most citations were comparing LA to Ghorman or Trump to Palpatine. The Trump-Palpatine one is obvious; Trump is Palpatine or Voldemort or whoever to those who primarily interface with politics through entertainment media. But the LA-Ghorman comparison was often being made, explicitly or implicitly, to discourage materially disruptive or destructive actions with the implication that those were playing into Trump’s hands, especially once news about the Marines/National Guard hit. (It’s all the same liberal fare when it comes to protests: “stop [disrupting the oppressive system], you’re just giving [the already-oppressive system] license to oppress.”)

But using Ghorman as an LA allegory to peace-police protests actually misses the point of the show: Ghorman was fucked long before Carro Rylanz “[got] off his comfortable ass to do something about it,” as Luthen said. Without the Ghorman Front, the planet gets obliterated by the Empire anyway. Rylanz is right when he scolds Cassian for leaving them: “So then what? … Let them persecute us for no reason and tighten the noose every time we cry out?” The Ghor have no choice but to fight back, even if all they wanted was to survive. The Ghorman senator’s reward for complying quietly with Palpatine is being arrested in the Senate building. Cassian might be right that escalating from bugging the Bureau of Standards office to stealing military weapons shipments is too tall an order for some Louis Vuitton designers, but he admits he’s making a soldier’s pragmatic choice instead of a moral one when he abandons them to their inevitable demise.

And this leads into what’s lost in all this coverage and discussion of the protesting. What’s happening here is a secret police force is invading our communities and stealing humans. It’s more tangible to many people than single policy decisions or funding a genocide in Palestine. It’ll definitely happen if we do nothing about it, and so, just like the Ghormans, the only choice is to fight back. But we’re different from Ghorman in that we aren’t pre-ordained by a canonical one-liner to be destroyed. The fight against ICE is a fight for self-defence, and it’s a fight we can still win.

But to win the fight, unlike the Ghormans, we must begin as soon as possible (“wake up early and [fight] these bastards from the start”). And this is the main point of this essay: LA has had it the worst so far out of any American city.[6] But LA has also developed tactics and infrastructure for resistance that can be applied to any American city. And with the passage of Trump’s bill, allocating $75 billion in additional funding for ICE alone ($170 billion for immigration enforcement and border militarization in general),[7] we can reasonably expect things to get much worse, not only for LA but for other cities as well.[8] And so this essay is part warning, part guide, for the rest of the United States: get started now, before it’s too late. What I’m about to outline did not and cannot come about overnight.

Ant-like ICE Raids

In LA, ICE has been raiding a bit like an ant colony: they’ll send a scout vehicle to an area to see if it’s safe to descend upon. It’s too expensive and noticeable to send the whole goon squad everywhere at once. If an area looks raid-able, many more vehicles will come to the scout’s location and begin snatching people. And while they use unmarked, mass-market vehicles, there are still some signs that a van is an ICE van:

(Image descriptions: the first image is a collage of photos of grey Ford trucks, including a couple taken of the insides of the trucks with ICE agents present. Bullet points highlight that ICE vehicles may or may not have regular license plates, but often feature police lights in the visor, front grill, bumpers, and rear window areas, they have dark tinted windows, sometimes you can spot a railing in the rear passenger area, and there is always an officer inside with the vehicle on and the air/heat running if needed. The second image highlights distinguishing features of police cars to contrast with ICE cars and has two photos of cop cars. Bullet points highlight that police cars have CA EXEMPT plates [in California], numeric-alpha series to distinguish the car beyond the plate, spotlights by the side view mirrors, and push bumpers. The last bullet point also notes that police officers are uniformed more often than ICE agents. Thank you to Unión del Barrio[9] for the images.)

Besides passively identifying ICE vehicles, for onlookers who feel safe enough, it can also be helpful to engage or at least approach close enough to see the people in/around the vehicle. Police officers/non-ICE fascists will sometimes respond to questions about who they are or what they’re doing, or will have logos or uniforms that explain who they work for. ICE agents are usually unwilling to speak to the public or people filming them.

With this in mind, spotting the scout and calling attention to it, broadcasting its location, and gathering a group to film/monitor it can often be dissuading to the schmuck in the car who was hoping for an easy day at the kidnapping factory, preventing a raid and wasting ICE’s time/resources.

ICE Car Patrols

In many cities, ICE sighting hotlines are springing up, where anyone can call in an ICE sighting. But while well-intentioned, ANYONE can call in, so the sighting must be verified by whatever group is running the hotline before being broadcast, causing a delay where time is of the essence. To counter this, LA has set up patrols that proactively look for ICE vehicles. Anyone can join a patrol shift, but they are circling a pre-defined area specifically to spot ICE, using the previous ways of identifying ICE vans, rather than calling a hotline from a Whole Foods while distracted by the sale on blueberries. This allows for a higher level of trust in a patrol’s report of an ICE sighting.

Community Self-Defence Hubs

Often, immigrants in LA congregate at Home Depots or other hardware stores looking for work as day labourers, offering assistance to shoppers with building their decks or whatever in exchange for possibly unreported or informal payment. This has made Home Depot a perhaps unlikely site of struggle, as ICE has identified Home Depots as target-rich environments. For many who would be targeted by ICE, it is more feasible to skip out on church or school or your immigration courthouse appointment than it is to essentially quit your job and not be able to pay rent or buy food.

The response has been to set up a permanent table in the Home Depot parking lot (and sometimes buy out the surrounding taco trucks). This serves four purposes: firstly, it provides witnesses to any would-be ICE raid; a deterrent making it safer for day labourers to continue showing up to work. It acts as a sort of watchtower to spot ICE cars, similar to the patrols. It enables know-your-rights work: distribution of multilingual cards that describe immigrant rights and have a script for encounters with ICE on it, colloquially “red cards.” And lastly, it acts as an outreach point. A banner advertising the table’s purpose or a generic “Fuck ICE” message (and possibly free food) gets people who are interested in fighting against ICE but maybe not sure where to start to come over and get plugged into the organising happening.

No Rest for ICE

Similar to the ISB in Andor Season One’s Ferrix arc, ICE has had difficulty finding accommodations for their agents because they don’t belong and aren’t welcome in the areas they invade. This may change as some of their budget may go toward constructing permanent facilities, similar to police stations, but as of writing,[10] ICE has often had to make do with hotel rooms like you and me or Dedra. Hotels aren’t designed with the security measures for operating the Gestapo, as Cassian proved, and so people have found it possible to identify which hotels are harbouring ICE agents and protest those hotels. In Pasadena, for example, ICE agents staying at the AC Hotel were aggressively questioning hotel workers about their immigration status (the very workers who were feeding them and changing their bedsheets), and a hotel staff member got the word out to the community. The community showed up and filled the hotel lobby with protestors and slashed some ICE van tyres sitting out in the hotel parking lot.[11]

ICE Out of Dodger Stadium

Currently, ICE also lacks areas to process the people it detains. The mundane bureaucracy of fascism needs to happen somewhere, and without a pyramidal ISB headquarters or complete control of the hotels they’re renting, ICE is left with only makeshift options. The site of the raid is usually too filled with angry people to do any pencil-pushing, so ICE needs to take the people they stole somewhere else. In one high-profile instance in LA, ICE (or technically Customs and Border Patrol, according to the DHS) took detainees to the Dodger Stadium (baseball venue) parking lot, where they had set up a makeshift base of operations. The community noticed, and protestors showed up, and eventually the stadium owners, the Dodgers, told ICE to fuck off.

De-arresting

There have been attempts to de-arrest those that ICE has grabbed by trying to restrain ICE agents or pull the person out from inside the van, but these have had mixed results. De-arresting can be difficult even in large protests, when police need to transport the arrestee behind the police line into a cop car out of vandalism range, but when the ICE van is right there, and the agents are focused on grabbing a single person instead of also holding a line against a mass of protestors, it becomes even harder. LA has found more success in preventing raids in the first place than in de-arresting those taken in raids.

PPE to Protests

Something that definitely surprised me was the redirection of personal protective equipment (PPE), widely distributed during the devastating LA wildfires in early 2025, to help fight ICE. Some mutual aid networks, finding themselves with lots of PPE like masks and gloves, began directing them to protestors as things heated up in early June and cops began tear-gassing the streets, in a sort of reverse swords-to-ploughshares moment. This particular example may not be directly applicable to other areas, but the general idea of putting mutual aid toward anti-ICE activities may be. Certainly, ICE activity is disruptive to normal life, and mutual aid will often be necessary in ways that aren’t directly confrontational like this example.

Stopping Vans

If a raid happens and someone is taken, the next logical step would be to prevent them from being driven off to who knows where. The typical way this would be done is by forming a human blockade of the van, but ICE vans have been known to keep driving even with people on their hoods or clinging to their side mirrors. And once the van is driving off, it’s difficult to follow or get ahead of it in a car of your own, because the drivers of ICE vans drive with the confidence of someone who knows they don’t need to worry about their insurance premiums.

There are, of course, other ways of stopping a car from being able to drive. I’ve already mentioned the slashed tyres of the ICE vans in the AC Hotel parking lot, but on social media and elsewhere, people are sharing instructions for homemade caltrops or tyre spikes. On TikTok of all places, I saw a tutorial using 2-inch nails, shoved through narrow rubber tubing in such a way that some nails are always sticking up when the tube is laid flat.

Dealing with Immigration Courthouses

Another site of struggle, maybe more predictably than Home Depot, is the immigration courthouse, since immigrants usually need to go multiple times in order to become legal US citizens or otherwise remain in the US long-term. Sometimes someone will find out they’ve been denied somewhere along the process at an in-person courthouse appointment, and then they will get towed away by ICE as soon as they’re told. This tactic is being used by the administration, especially against asylum seekers: a DHS attorney will move to dismiss the case, which doesn’t even require the judge to grant the motion, then ICE will abduct the person whose case hasn’t even been dismissed yet. As a result, people have taken on the role of accompanying immigrants to their courthouse appointments or monitoring courthouses daily, keeping a lookout for ICE vehicles near the building during hours the courthouse is open.

There have also been efforts to shut down the courthouses via protests, which can be both good and bad. On the one hand, if the court is forced to shut down and cancel all appointments that day, no one is likely to show up for ICE to grab. There’s also the more philosophical “bodies upon the gears” point; that we must make every effort to shut down the system, and the courthouse is part of the system. Some immigration courthouses are also used as ICE field offices in an effort to avoid another Dodger Stadium: anyone arrested at the courthouse will be shoved into a holding cell that is also in the courthouse and processed there before being shipped off to longer-term detention facilities.

On the other hand, some people need these appointments for their process to stay in the US to complete, and the longer they remain in limbo, the more at risk of ICE detention they might be. It’s important to note that ICE isn’t known for respecting the citizenship of people of color, nor should an arbitrary legal process determine when it’s okay to kidnap others (hint: it’s never okay), but a detained citizen or someone granted asylum will have a greater chance of fighting it out in the legal system post-detention or avoiding the long-term detention facilities or deportation.

To avoid the dangers of showing up in person while also continuing the naturalisation process, some people have been able to change their appointments to be virtual. But this only works on an individual case-by-case basis, since it’s up to the immigration judge to decide whether the request for a virtual appointment is granted. Some lawyers and non-profits have dedicated time and resources to helping people figure out how to request virtual appointments.

Coordination and Community

Everything I’ve discussed so far requires many people across the area to be ready to act and be on the same page about what to do, which requires trust, coordination, and adaptability. This is achieved in many ways: informal affinity groups, labour unions, non-profits, really anything that exists orthogonal to or in direct opposition against the racist capitalist system that has produced ICE. Neighbourhood assemblies are a great way to bring together these sometimes independent groups and begin to prepare for ICE raids by building trust and creating the infrastructure for coordination (usually, two to five Signal chats).

Many groups across the entire US have been organising such assemblies, but in LA, the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) has definitely directed its focus at fighting ICE. LATU is able to leverage its existing connections with tenants who are familiar with fighting against a capitalist system that seeks to displace. LATU also organises along geographical lines, positioning them well to build defences based on locale. Similarly, labour unions or worker networks like the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) that have membership that will be disproportionately affected have been active in spreading awareness and providing an effective middle ground in a neoliberal discourse that opposes ICE and supports labour unions, but also opposes property destruction and is scared of aggressive protests turning “violent.”

A key contributor to LA’s innovations in anti-freeze technology is the fact that everyone hates ICE. It sounds simple, and like a bit of an overstatement, and maybe it is, but broadly speaking, people view ICE as fascist invaders (and they are) in a way that those same people might not view cops or the US military. In some ways, ICE got unlucky that LA got hit by massive fires before ICE operations intensified: Angeleno unity and defiance was likely at a high point in the wake of the fires, and ICE was walking into this maelstrom of energy and care for others. People were fresh off hearing heartbreaking stories of people losing their homes due to the fires, and then BAM! more stories of people losing their homes due to ICE.

Mobilising such a surge of anger across the political spectrum (the political spectrum in LA skews left, or centre-left for my non-American readers) through a variety of effective tactics is, in my opinion, the real success story. Someone ready to throw down on the front lines with the cops can obtain masks and gloves to do so. Someone willing to be a body in the crowd can dissuade an ICE arrest by simply being present and loud about it. Legal experts can prepare know-your-rights materials disseminated by people able to hang out under a tent in a parking lot for a bit. There are countless ways to fight back, and people are motivated in ways that haven’t been seen for years.

What’s Next?

Trump’s bill has passed. No one with any real understanding of American politics would’ve guessed otherwise. So what will ICE do with billions more dollars? How will our tactics need to evolve?

For one thing, it’s becoming more and more apparent to people who didn’t already realise this that fascism isn’t contained to the secret police. It extends to the regular police and the military. Trump had already deployed the National Guard and Marines to LA during the height of the protests in early June, but another high-profile deployment happened in July in MacArthur Park, in a mostly brown neighbourhood. While mostly for spectacle and a show of force, I will not for a moment believe that a law from 1878 will stop the military from acting as cops or ICE. At most, it may give Democrats something to point to as they file lawsuits that will take too long to accomplish too little, if they even win.[12]

It may soon become even more dangerous to directly intervene against ICE agents in the field. ICE will also no doubt spend a significant amount on mitigating the infrastructure risks that have been exploited in LA. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, another left-wing (by US standards) area, ICE is looking at re-opening a former women’s prison shut down for rampant sexual abuse.[13] This would give them their first immigration detention facility near a target-rich environment that they would be free to install cameras on, patrol, and defend much more vigorously than the Dodger Stadium parking lot. It would take more than protestors and a popular sports team to shut that down, and protestors have preemptively appeared to hopefully prevent ICE from re-opening it at all.

Similarly, ICE has asked to use a naval base in Chicago as a base of operations.[14] In cases like these, often the military will say it will only be providing limited logistical support, facilities, and infrastructure, as opposed to actively helping hunt down brown people, but that is exactly what ICE needs. As mentioned, the actual abduction, once the infrastructure is in place and the person has been snatched, is fairly tough to stop. At the time of writing, the best ways to stop ICE are to target their infrastructure or prevent the raid in the first place.[15]

Takeaways (Not the ICE Kind)

Many of Andor’s themes are reflected in the resistance against ICE, because Andor is fundamentally a show about resistance, rebellion, and revolution: community self-defence, targeting imperialist infrastructure, crackdowns on resistance that some say are a result of such self-defence efforts, and the workings of the state’s violent apparatuses (prison, police, and military). But it can sometimes be difficult to apply those themes and lessons from a galaxy far, far away with space wizards and magic destiny to our real world. And even when the villain parallels are obvious – America as the Empire, in this case – it can be hard to see how to fight back. We can say we should steal navy equipment, pipe bomb the cop lines at protests, steal millions of dollars of military funds to finance organised armed insurgency, use our DIY-modded Toyota Camrys to blow up M1 Abrams tanks, and stage prison breaks. And indeed sometimes those things happen (well, maybe not a tank taken out by a civilian car), but for most of us, those things are far out of reach. Many of us haven’t even started an underground intelligence network with bugs in Syril Karn’s office.

But we can look to what other people are doing in the real world for the tactical inspiration that Andor might not give us. We can learn not only the lessons about Ferrix and the ISB, but also about Los Angeles and ICE. Even if ICE isn’t a direct issue for you (maybe you live in, I don’t know, anywhere else in the world), there are still valuable lessons about tactical diversity, focusing anger into rebellion, and infrastructural battles that can be applied to the struggle against colonial imperialism everywhere. I really do hope the galaxy is watching.

---

[1] For readers unfamiliar with how ICE works: ICE deploys its own heavily armed agents (administratively separate from police or military agents) who are largely unidentifiable – often no clear uniforms or badges displayed and almost always masked – that use unmarked vehicles. These agents snatch people of color – usually brown – from their street or their workplace or their immigration courthouse where they’re trying to become legal citizens to ship them off to wherever with no regard for the lives they’ve built or the communities they have.

[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-06-08/waymo-vehicles-set-on-fire-protesters-police-clash

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reporter-los-angeles-protests-rubber-bullet-lauren-tomasi-9news-australia/

[4] SS

[5] To be clear, I don’t necessarily have a problem with more tame protesting, as long as it exists in tandem with and not in opposition to more direct actions. Many people aren’t in a position to risk arrest or physical conflict, and amplifying messaging or splitting police forces are peaceful, low-risk activities (even if sometimes they achieve nothing). The problem is that within a liberal framework, where legal is more important than moral, protests that don’t disrupt the status quo are seen as the sole legitimate method of resistance. This vacuums up all the energy and transforms the peaceful protest from a mere alternative to a counterinsurgency.

[6] I wrote the first draft in 2025. Revising this in January 2026, this statement is no longer true by some measures. My point still stand that areas that have not had it as bad should learn from the areas that have. Rest in peace to all those killed by ICE, directly or indirectly, and I hope another Minneapolis police precinct burns in their honor.

[7] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-funding-big-beautiful-bill-trump-deportations/

[8] 2026 me checking in: yep, things have gotten worse. Who could’ve guessed? (Me and everyone else.)

[9] https://uniondelbarrio.org/eng/

[10] Luckily, they are still largely working with temporary accommodations as of early 2026.

[11] https://lamag.com/news-and-politics/pasadena-protestors-picket-ice-raids-at-citys-ac-hotel

[12] I wrote this then Trump deployed the National Guard to DC to “reduce crime” and take over the police department.

[13] https://www.kqed.org/news/12027154/ice-weighs-turning-fci-dublin-into-detention-center-union-leaders-say

[14] https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/chicago-area-naval-base-asked-to-potentially-support-ice-operation/3816092 

[15] Editing this in early 2026, I think this is still the case.