Donald Trump returned to office on January 20. He brought with him the wealthiest cabinet of all time, including 14 billionaires. The Left is spiraling in a confused and anxious mess. The Democrats have done precious little to counter the blitzkreig of revanchist reforms passed via executive order, a strategy Trump advisor Steve Bannon calls "flood the zone." For their weakness, the Democrats lost the favor and support of millions of their once-loyal voters. The Party for Socialism and Liberation coordinated hundreds of marches and rallies across the country. While this is more than most have managed, these demonstrations seem unlikely to provoke the necessary unrest.

Until thousands of people flooded the streets in Los Angeles on June 6, spreading riots and confrontations across the city and then country, the first five months of the administration advanced almost completely without resistance. Missing a serious grassroots movement, some Federal and state-level judges, a handful of lawyers, even directors of private universities, positioned themselves at the front of resistance to the administrations reactionary reforms. Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller (presidential advisor, former roommate of fascist organizer Richard Spencer), openly contested the right of the judicial branch to challenge or check the power of the Executive.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, fired 200,000 federal employees. By subcontracting the austerity measures to an unelected and powerful elite, the Oval Office hopes to insulate itself from the "administrative state" that it needs to gut in order to establish its unitary power over the government. The better to serve the faction of capital that has forced its way into the grants and contracts markets it has long envied: tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, et al.

In April, 2025, the administration initiated tariffs on every country in the world. For several days, global markets plunged. US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, founder of macro investment firm Key Square Group, assured Trump that the tariffs would lower the rates on Treasury Bonds, giving the White House greater ability to negotiate the federal debt. This is the opposite of what transpired. European markets, entire nations, sold their US bonds, plunging the Treasury market and spiking the interest rates, signifying a global collapse of confidence in the long term stability of the United States and its currency.

Just three months earlier, at Scott Bessents confirmation hearing with Congress on January 28, police arrested a woman named Riley English at the Capitol. English admitted that she was in possession of multiple Molotov cocktails and a firearm, and that it was her intention to assassinate the "nazi" appointees Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. There are many stories like English's.

If riots and rebellions against deportations, budget cuts, layoffs, imperialist wars, and police brutality will continue under the second Trump administration, which we think they will, then we need to understand what that means for the revolutionary process. To do so, we want to analyze some of the differences between resistance to Trump's first presidency and the cautious "wait and see" mentality of anarchists, abolitionists, radicals, and others in the present era. It is not the proper role of revolutionaries to wait for revolts to fall from heaven. Rather, it is our role to help precipitate and escalate them, bringing them to the heights of their potential, learning what we only can by taking our ideas to their logical conclusions.

08.20.2025 Editors Note: This essay took us longer to write than expected, because the chaotic events of the period in which it was authored failed to pause for us. For the sake of brevity, we decided not to include any events after mid-July 2025. Last week, Trump deployed National Guard to Washington DC. Texas Republicans placed their Democratic colleagues on watch, assigning them "security" escorts. Perhaps, hopefully, some of the analysis contained herein will seem outdated by the time it is published. We fear it will be helpful for comrades, nonetheless, at times and in places in the future, when a great many people inevitably fail to appreciate the importance of doing something concrete in the face of overwhelming circumstances.

Resistance to the First Trump Presidency

Pre-Election

Compared to the groundswell of resistance in 2016, ongoing efforts inspire little.

On March 11, 2016, 10,000 protesters converged on a Trump campaign event at the University of Chicago. Trump was still honing in on his central campaign message: "Build the Wall, Make American Great Again." This framing brought thousands of Chicago-area residents to his event, aiming to disrupt the gathering before it took place. It worked. Protesters blocked streets, fought with Trump supporters, and clashed with police. Images of bloody protesters, struck with police batons, spread virally online. Organizers cancelled the rally.

 

On April 23, hundreds of protesters assembled in Stone Mountain, GA under the moniker "All Out Atlanta." They aimed to halt a Klan rally and march at the historic park, which was deceptively organized under the banner "Heritage, Not Hate." The racists regrouped in preceding months in the context created by the Trump campaign. A gang truce brought hundreds of people to the park to fight them: Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Black P. Stone Rangers, Bloods, and Crips. Anarchists assembled a black bloc of around 150 people. The mobilization shut down the park by throwing stones and fireworks at riot police, burning tires and barricades on the roadways, and physically attacking Klansmen and their friends.

Five days later, April 28, hundreds of Chicano protesters gathered outside a Trump campaign event in Costa Mesa, California. They broke windows of police cruisers, threw stones at the convention center, briefly blocked an interstate highway, and fought Trump supporters in hand to hand combat. Police arrested 20 people. A month later, in Albuquerque, a large gathering of Chicanos once again attacked a campaign event. They smashed the glass doors of the convention center, threw stones at police, and set barricades alight.

On June 18, 2016, a British man named Michael Sanford reached for the gun of a police officer, hoping to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign event in Las Vegas.

Throughout his first campaign, Chicanos, students, anarchists, and leftists organized resistance with protests, disruptions, and even riots.  His first campaign sought to garner support from middle class whites with xenophobia, blaming Mexican immigrants for the collapse of living standards over the last 60 years.

He won. Protests erupted immediately. In Oakland, more than 5,000 people gathered three nights in a row, many wearing black hoodies and masks. They set cars on fire, broke windows at corporate retailers, and threw rocks at police. Similar unrest rocked the Pearl district of downtown Portland, where thousands of people broke windows and threw traffic flares at police, who responded with pepper balls and flash bang grenades. This was just the beginning.

Post-Election

On January 20, 2017, hundreds of black bloc protestors smashed storefronts before clashing with police in Washington D.C. at Trump's inauguration event. Police formed a kettle, eventually arresting 200 people, but not before a number of people escaped by charging directly into their lines behind an opened umbrella. Rioting continued through the afternoon and evening. Groups of anarchists and youth from the D.C. suburbs continued breaking windows, throwing rocks at police, and burning barricades. Flames billowed from the windows of a burning limousine. Canisters of tear gas bounced back and forth between lines of helmeted police and hooded rioters.

Nearby, thousands gathered for peaceful protests, setting up barricades, delaying the inauguration itself. Inside the actual ceremony, protesters shouted over the new President. At a protest in Seattle, a supporter of hard right troll Milo Yiannopoulos shot a leftist in the stomach.

The next day, January 21, the Women's March in D.C. brought hundreds of thousands of people to protest the misogynist platform of Donald Trump. Women's Marches spread across the country, catalyzing the participation of millions of people.

A week later, on January 28, the administration issued Stephen Miller's Executive Order 13769, the so called "Muslim Ban." This travel ban aimed to establish a universal ban on all travelers coming from six Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen. Within 24 hours, 375 people were trapped inside of international airport terminals, having been mid-travel when the order passed.

A group of thirty protesters rushed to the John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. They stood outside, holding cardboard signs, demanding the release of the detained travelers from police custody. Within a few hours, 2,000 people joined them. As news spread on social media, huge crowds descended at O'Hare International in Chicago, at Los Angeles International, San Francisco International. By the end of the day, blockades spread to Baltimore, Seattle, Detroit, Cleveland, Portland, Austin, Indianapolis, Boston, Denver, Albuquerque, Hartford, Newark, Albany, San Diego, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando, Greenville, Philadelphia, Raleigh. In some places, crowds breached the terminals, shoving police officers and throwing objects. In San Francisco, anarchists built a temporary encampment inside of the airport.

We defeated the Muslim Ban.

In August 2017, protesters rioted outside of a Trump speaking event in Phoenix, Arizona. Inside, Trump blamed the violence on "antifa." This was the first time he spoke the phrase, giving name to popular forces opposing his agenda.

Over the following months and years, antifascists, police, and hard right activists (including Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, anti-leftists, and misogynists) clashed in recurrent cycles of violence all over the country. In the Pacific Northwest, armed confrontations frequently transformed city centers into pitched battles.

In June 2018, anarchists and abolitionists in Portland built a large encampment outside of the ICE field office after news articles reported that over 1,300 immigrant children had gone missing. Millions of citizens recoiled in horror as footage and documents leaked to the public exposing the Obama-era family separation policy, which many wrongly credited to Trump. The following month, activists led demonstrations across the country to reject family separation. Pictures of children sleeping on floors in chainlink cages spread across the internet. Radicals set up occupations and blockades of ICE detention centers in Philadelphia, Tampa, Atlanta, Louisville, Detroit, in New York City, and elsewhere.

A year later, Trump vowed to initiate a blitzkrieg of ICE raids across the country. He claimed the agency would arrest hundreds of thousands of people in a concerted push. On July 13, 2019, just one day before the planned raids, an anarchist named Willem van Spronsen carried a a rifle, propane tank, and traffic flares to the ICE detention center in Tacoma, WA. Van Spronsen had been arrested at the "Occupy ICE" encampment a year prior while trying to de-arrest a fellow protester. The 69 year old antifascist determined he would keep fighting, even alone if need be. Police opened fire when Van Spronsen began lighting an incendiary device near some trucks at the facility. The ICE raids were cancelled, "for the safety of immigration enforcement agents."

After years of such confrontations, the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion destroyed social peace for months, opening up a new timeline in US history. As a result of the rebellion, in which millions looted stores, burned cars, fought police, and generally destroyed the status quo, law enforcement strategies changed. We do not yet know much about the current strategic paradigm of the ruling class; the specific watchwords, justifications, and wagers will emerge in the next few years in declassified reports conducted by the RAND corporation and other think-tanks. What we do know is that after the 2020 uprising, things changed.

New Order

All indicators point to a stronger response to protest movements after the George Floyd rebellion. The Biden presidency faced but one serious protest movement, the Defend the Forest/Stop Cop City movement. Police killed one person, and have charged over 100 people with felonies, including 61 people with racketeering. They accuse the bail fund of being a mafia. Just as the administration defunds its international "soft power" agencies such as USAID, they will continue mobilizing federal agencies to repress opposition domestically with brute force.

In the spring and summer of 2024, police across the US targeted pro-Palestine protests. They gassed, maced, and clubbed demonstrators. University authorities cracked down on activists, suspending anti-war groups and expelling their members. Campus authorities allowed zionists to intimidate and dox those opposing the US-backed invasion of Palestine.

On July 13, 20-year-old conservative Thomas Crooks shot Donald Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. He clipped only the ear. He was killed by Secret Service. Two months later, on September 15, police arrested a Trumpist-turned-Bernie Sanders-supporter in West Palm Beach, FL after a brief shoot-out with Secret Service. Authorities accuse him of carrying a Soviet-era SKS onto a golf course in order to kill Trump. He escaped the golf course, and the town. Local police arrested him on the highway, pulling him over on account of his erratic driving.

As trade unions, celebrities, media, and Democrats condemned the protesters and defended barbaric airstrikes on hospitals and schools in Gaza, they set the stage for a wider erosion of free speech in the US among 2020 Biden voters who abstained in 2024, the primary reason (29%) was the US-Israeli war on Palestine (YouGov). In November, Donald Trump won the presidential election. He won in the electoral college and the popular vote.

On January 1, ultra-rightist Matthew Livelsberger turned a Tesla Cybertruck into an IED. He detonated the car bomb outside of the Trump Hotel Las Vegas. In a written statement, he called on others to mobilize for paramilitary enthusiasm and support of incoming President Trump. The same day, a Houston man named Shamsud-Din Jabbar crashed a pickup truck into a crowd of pedestrians on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans. He killed 14 and was subsequently killed during a shootout with police. FBI discovered two coolers filled with homemade explosives on a sidewalk two blocks from the car attack. Jabbar affixed an Islamic State (ISIS) flag to his truck before the attack. Both he and Livelsberger fought for the US in the War in Afghanistan. Both of them were stationed at Fort Bragg.

If the events of the day indicate a broader trend, the months to come would be confusing, indeed.

In the days ahead of the inauguration, anarchists and their friends organized "Festivals of Resistance." The events coincided with the Day of the Forest Defender (January 18), which commemorates the killing of Tortuguita by Georgia State Patrolmen in the Weelaunee Forest, on January 18, 2023. Events in some two dozen locations brought together thousands of participants. In Olympia alone, over 1,000 people marched together downtown. In Richmond, 500 people participated in autonomous local assemblies, hoping to organize grassroots resistance to whatever was coming next. 600 people gathered in Sacramento to hear presentations and to attend workshops. In Oakland, 150 people broke into an abandoned municipal building, using the reclaimed space to host conversations and meetings. Impressive, but a far cry from the riots and unrest accompanying the first Trump election.

The incoming President began announcing appointments and staff for his new administration on social media. The bombast and arrogance of the government reached new highs. His deeply propagandized base celebrated fanatically, assembling at quasi-religious events, worshipping images of the man, sobbing hysterically. They prayed hopelessly to their false messiah.

In his first weeks in office, Trump signed executive orders rescinding anti-discrimination policies targeting LGBT people, women, and ethnic minorities in federal workplaces. He ended federal funding for elective abortions. He signed an order seeking to end birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution. Signing the order may have been more of a loyalty test of the new administration than anything else. It certainly frightened millions of people.

As the administration ramped up calls for "shock and awe" against immigrants, targeted communities worked hard to prepare themselves to defend one another, and to fight back.

Day Without Immigrants

There are around 62.5 million Latinos in the United States. More than 37 million of them are Mexican by ancestry. Although communities from all over the world are targeted by policing and regulations at the border, workers and refugees from Latin America are the primary targets. While those workers and refugees come from all over Central and South America and the Caribbean, it is the Mexicans who form by far the largest bloc. A considerable population in the Mexican-American communities possess US citizenship. While people of all legal status fight back against their own debasement, it is Chicanos specifically, perhaps on account of their unique stability afforded by their US passports, who have spearheaded militant resistance to the new administration. This should not surprise anyone who remembers the riots and clashes during the first Trump campaign in 2016.

On February 1, thousands of people gathered in National City, a San Diego suburb. They came responding to the call for a "Day Without Immigrants," coordinated online. They waived flags, and chanted slogans, while holding anti-ICE banners and signs. Corridos tumbados blared from car speakers, as hundreds blocked Highland Avenue. By nightfall, some shot fireworks while stunt-driving their cars. When police fired smoke canisters and teargas at the crowd; some threw items back. This was the first major confrontation in the new Trump era.

The following day, February 2, thousands of people converged in Downtown LA. They came waiving Mexican and Salvadoran flags, with signs denouncing the new administration. The crowd marched onto the 101 Freeway from the Alameda Street on-ramp. They blocked all lanes of traffic. Some used spray paint and markers to write anti-ICE graffiti on walls and buses. Traffic snarled for miles, bringing the entire city to a standstill for four hours. Lines of riot police eventually cleared the crowd, pushing it toward City Hall. Protesters smashed the windshield of a police cruiser. Around 10pm, officers formed a skirmish line and dispersed the crowd.

That same night, over 1,000 people, chiefly Chicanos, gathered in Glendale, Arizona. As police began to antagonize the crowd, youth fought back. Participants lobbed rocks, bottles, fireworks, and hunks of concrete at local police. Police fired pepper spray and tear gas at the crowd. Protesters burned a corporate storage container. They broke windows of five police cruisers. Police arrested two 16 year old boys, accusing them of stealing a cop car.

On February 4, a large crowd assembled in the north side of Austin, near the intersection of West Rundberg and North Lamar. They rallied for hours, sharing food and music, before riot police and Travis County sheriffs arrived. A few people in the crowd threw stones at the police, hoping to defend the crowd from their aggression. In response, authorities fired pepper balls. In the confrontation, only two people were arrested.

The same day, a large crowd gathered in Las Vegas at Charleston and Lamb Boulevards. As night fell, participants threw bottles and rocks at police officers as they attempted to arrest "disruptive individuals." SWAT joined local police to form a skirmish line. They arrested five people. Steve Grammas, President of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, told the Las Vegas Review Journal that the 2020 George Floyd rebellion taught them that "we as a police department cannot sit down and wait for something to happen."

Across the country, in the first weekend of February, Latinos staged work stoppages, sick-outs, strikes, rallies, and protests in dozens of US cities. The unruly clashes and disturbances in the southwest, where Latino immigrants live in great proportions, received little support or notoriety among the grassroots left. Even anarchists and other aspiring revolutionaries, for the most part, largely ignored these events. In the early weeks of February, students of at least 5 high schools in Los Angeles county walked out of classes for a week, enforcing a kind of strike with few recent precedents in US history.

Serious people cannot ignore these events. When marginalized and desperate people rise up, revolutionaries must react. That is, if we believe that it is the poor and angry who can bring the system to its knees.

Flood the Zone, Tesla Takedown, 50501

Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a private enterprise founded by Elon Musk, conducted sweeping audits of federal offices and departments. While Musk himself benefits directly from billions of dollars of federal contracts, he works with the administration to conjur the image of austerity and fiscal conservatism in order to appeal to right wing voters nostalgic for Reagan-era economic governance. He stands to gain many billions of dollars by replacing public services with private contracts for himself and for tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel. In short order, resistance to the new authoritarian arc of the administration, at least for some, took the form of resistance to DOGE, Elon Musk, and his car company Tesla.

In March, protesters gathered outside Tesla dealerships and showrooms in hundreds of locations, collectively know as "Tesla takedowns." The protests brought together dozens or hundreds of participants each. Most of those who assembled belonged to the class of white collar workers under direct threat of budget cuts and lay-offs in the public sector. Some turned to vandalism and arson. Anonymous people burned seven charging stations in Boston, four Cybertrucks in Seattle, and a dealership in Las Vegas. They burned a charging station in Charleston, two Cybertrucks in Kansas City, and placed unlit incendiary devices at a showroom in Austin. Opponents of the Musk-Trump agenda attacked a dealership in Loveland, CO repeatedly, firing bullets and throwing Molotovs at the facility. In Mesa, AZ, Lacey, WA; in Meridian, ID, Cascade, MI; in Bloomington, IN, Menlo, Park, CA, Gwinnett County, GA; in places large and small, the showrooms and dealerships have been trashed, busted up, shot at, and burned. Anonymous people vandalized 80 Teslas in Ontario and burned 16 cars in Rome. Those responsible do not release statements. They do not, by and large, seem to come from the subversive militant grassroots of anarchism, nihilism, or autonomous communism. Tesla stock lost half of its post-election gains.

The administration responded quickly to the groundswell of anti-elitist rage. Donald Trump tweeted that those caught could end up being sent to prisons in El Salvador. On March 11, he claimed that attacks on Tesla vehicles were a form of "domestic terrorism." On March 14, the FBI created a task-force to investigate the attacks.

The administration claims these saboteurs are foot soldiers in a broad conspiracy. We do not know if they actually believe this, or if they only hope to exploit the extensive privileges afforded to them against dissidents in conspiracy and racketeering cases. None of the individuals arrested so far in connection with any of these attacks apparently coordinated with one another. Radical groups and revolutionaries have not yet developed the kinds of networks capable of conducting this kind of action at a large scale, despite the claims of the authorities. Without a mass subversive context and real subversive infrastructure, individual attacks and actions will remain sporadic and ineffectual, justified and courageous as they may be.

Public opinion of Elon Musk's role in the administration fell quickly. Tensions between Musk's private interests and Trump's tariff and economic policy initiatives led to conflict between the two. On May 28, Tesla Takedown's "Global Day of Action against Tesla," Elon Musks birthday, and the end of his 130 day designation as a "special government employee," he announced that he was leaving the administration. Conflict between Donald Trump and Musk escalated in the following weeks. In early June, after a conflict between the two over a NASA appointee who worked with Elon, Trump threatened to cut billions of dollars in contracts to Musk's ventures. Musk said Donald Trump wouldn't have been elected without him. He pointed out that Trump was in the Epstein Files, and that the real reason the files couldn't be declassified is that it would prove the President was a pedophile. DOGE remains, without Musk. Without a hated figurehead, resistance to the agency wained.

The Students Meet the Border

In early February, Marco Rubio traveled to El Salvador where he met with President Nayib Bukele. In discussions there, Bukele suggested that El Salvador incarcerate deportees from the US, to "outsource part of the United States' prison system."

Bukele entered politics in 2011 as a member of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front party (FMLN). The FMLN formed in 1980 during the revolutionary armed struggle in El Salvador. In the 1990s, after peace accords marked an end to the armed struggle and the beginning of a new era of politics in the country, the FMLN became a legal political party. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, the FMLN suffered a number of splits due to shifting political lines and allegations of corruption. In 2017 while acting as the Mayor of San Salvador—a position he won with the help of gangs, as revealed in a recent El Faro video interview—the FMLN expelled Bukele. After his expulsion, his popularity grew and, in 2019, he was elected president of El Salvador.

Since Bukele took office, El Salvador has attained the highest incarceration rate on Earth, even higher than the United States. Across Latin America, people and politicians celebrate Bukele's draconian state of emergency, which brings austere safety to the streets of El Salvador. He has expanded executive powers over the military and police after this power was curtailed by the 1992 Peace Accords. In order to lower murder rates, Bukele collaborates with gangs, including with the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the Barrio 18 Revolucionarios, and the Barrio 18 Sureños.

On March 12, ICE arrested Kilmar Ábrego García. On March 15, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and García was put onto a plane along with many others, without due process. The flight headed to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, better known as the CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo) superprison. Kilmar's deportation to CECOT and the invocation of a rarely-used wartime act spread panic about what the implications for others might be. Judges challenged the arrests immediately. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to return Kilmar to the US. The administration defied the order, brazenly claiming they have no jurisdiction in El Salvador, despite paying Bukele $8 million to incarcerate deportees.

César Humberto López-Larios was deported on the same day as Kilmar García. César López is a high-ranking member of MS-13. Before deportation, he awaited trial at a jail in Brooklyn for charges related to his involvement in the street gang. The court expected him to cooperate with the state's attorney, revealing information about the relationship between top political officials in El Salvador and MS-13. Now that he is in El Salvador, he cannot testify. According to the US ambassador in El Salvador, William H. Duncan, Bukele requested that Duncan, Rubio, and other Trump officials return top MS-13 leaders to El Salvador as a part of their agreement to accept US deportees. The Bukele government seeks to eradicate all evidence of it's well-known and, thanks to El Faro, well-documented collusion and dependence on narcotics traffickers and street gangs. The US is happy to oblige.

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that he revoked the visas of over 300 students for criticizing or protesting against the US-backed genocide in Palestine. In the following weeks, federal agents arrested students in their dorms, on the street, on their way to migration hearings. Authorities quickly smuggled them to migrant detention facilities in Louisiana, where reactionary judges seem likely to rule in favor of deportation.

Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has taken aim at higher education. Since his first presidential term, his administration advocated the theory that universities and some high schools had become overrun with Marxists and radicals. In reality, these institutions form deeply reactionary bases of military research, teaching neoliberal ideology to millions of people while allowing military contractors to recruit openly on campuses. Now, the administration cynically claims that the institutions are governed by antisemites, or at least people willing to tolerate "antisemitism." The Biden administration laid the groundwork for this kind of cynical accusation.

Protests on campuses have shrunk, but they have not stopped. On May 5, at the University of Washington, students took over a university building in protest of the war. They hung banners, barricaded entrances, and renamed the building in honor of Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19 year old Palestinian killed in the bombing of a hospital in Gaza last year. Following the building take over, students in black bloc burned barricades outside the building. At Columbia University, students took over a library on campus and renamed it in honor of Bassel al-Araj. Police arrested 100 people.

As graduation ceremonies commenced across the country, graduating students spoke out against the war in Gaza, defending the actions of their fellow students. At Columbia, students chanted "free Mahmoud" over the university president's speech, in reference to Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia University arrested by federal agents in March. In late June, a judge ruled Khalil’s detention unconstitutional and he was released.

Also in June, Kilmar Abrego García was finally brought back to the US from El Salvador. A federal court charged him with "conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain and unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain." Court transcripts detail that while he was at CECOT, US-funded guards tortured him and others. When he arrived in El Salvador, he was greeted by a guard who told him, "Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn't leave." The Justice Department stated that, pending his immigration hearing, they plan to deport him again, "to a third country."

"Sanctuary" Means Attack: Rapid Response Riots

On May 30 in San Diego, CA, ICE agents entered two Italian restaurants, seeking to execute "search warrants of businesses that knowingly hired illegal aliens in San Diego..." In the process, a crowd of over 200 people gathered to document or physically stop and harass ICE agents from making any arrests. The federal agents made two arrests but when they tried to leave, the crowd blocked them in. Officers in military fatigues fired teargas on the crowd and clashes ensued.

A few days later in Minneapolis, MN, at least 11 federal agencies, including ICE, raided a Mexican restaurant. Other agencies involved included the US Attorney's Office, FBI, IRS-CI, DEA, ERO, ATF, USMS, DSS, US Border Patrol, US Coast Guard, and the TSA. These organizations together make up the Homeland Security Task Force, established by executive order the second day of Trump's second term. Hundreds responded, some as legal observers, others to stop any arrests that the agencies may have been trying to conduct. Federal agents shot pepper balls at the crowd. Several people threw objects back at police. Hand to hand fighting broke out. The raid ended as agents fled the area.

The next day, in Chicago, ICE sent alerts to dozens of people, urging them to respond to a federal monitoring system request. When respondents arrived to the designated office, as ordered, they were arrested by ICE. A crowd formed. Some came to document the officers and others to obstruct their vehicles from leaving. The crowd was small. Federal agents shoved people back and dispersed the crowd before leaving with 10 people who showed up to the check-in. Activists across the country sought out new tactics to respond to the shifting landscape, in which even law-abiding immigrants were subjected to cruel and unpredictable forms of intimidation and control.

On June 6, one week following the clashes in San Diego, ICE conducted raids across the city of Los Angeles. In one location, a crowd trapped ICE inside a building, refusing to let them leave, shouting legal advice to those detained inside. Federal agencies in armored trucks and riot gear intervened to break up the crowds, shooting pepper balls and flash bang grenades. By afternoon, ICE held dozens in detention from the days' raids.

That evening, protesters amassed at the Metro Dention Center downtown. They fought federal authorities for hours. Hooded people threw back tear-gas canisters at authorities. Some used traffic cones and water to trap and neutralize the canisters, a method popularized in the Hong Kong and Chilean insurrections of 2019. Masked rioters broke pieces of the sidewalk to throw at police.  Others used barricades to protect the crowd, while others still painted graffiti on the federal building.

When Los Angeles Police arrived, the crowd dispersed, overwhelmed by the forces assembled against them. New crowds regrouped later that evening, as information circulated that ICE was gathering in another part of the city. At 10:00pm, a new round of clashes broke out at a parking lot in Chinatown. This time, demonstrators forced the police to scatter, breaking their windows, lobbing fireworks at them as they retreated.

The next morning, June 7, ICE agents arrived at a Home Depot in Paramount, CA, a working class town in greater Los Angeles, east of Compton. Day laborers and community members fought back immediately. Area residents set about attacking ICE vehicles and agents with bricks, bottles, and fireworks. One person fired a handgun directly at agents. By early afternoon, federal agents left, replaced by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Thick black smoke, pluming out of burning Waymo cars, filled the sky. Riots spread to Compton. By nightfall, Molotovs and fireworks lit up the streets. Downtown, protesters gathered again at the Metro Detention Center. Trump announced plans to deploy the National Guard. This was the first time a president deployed National Guard without the request of a state governor since 1965, when president Lyndon B. Johnson deployed them to quell riots in Alabama.

On Sunday, June 8, National Guardsmen lined the perimeter of the Metro Detention Center. A crowd marched from Boyle Heights to meet them. Talk of ICE vehicles spotted at a hotel in Pasadena drew some people there.

Police fired teargas into the crowd at the Metro Detention Center, prompting thousands to block the US 101 across the street, just as they had in February. When police confronted the crowd there, protesters hurled stones, scooters, and anything else they could find from the highway overpass. The crowd trapped police on the interstate below. Organizers called for another protest at City Hall. Waymo cancelled service, claiming that many riders had summoned driverless vehicles only to burn them upon arrival. Outside City Hall, riot police confronted demonstrators, who defended themselves with makeshift barricades built from public park chairs and benches. The design firm behind the pink benches and chairs—featured prominently in viral online images—publicly admired the "versatility" of their design.

Amidst the rioting, ICE conducted at least 5 raids around the city. Rioting downtown failed to stop raids in the neighborhoods across town. The Department of Defense announced the mobilization of hundreds of US Marines.

Protests Spread

After several days of heroic street fighting, activists and community groups called for anti-ICE protests in New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, Sacramento, Washington D.C., New Orleans, Philadelphia, Tampa, and Pittsburgh. By mid-week, protests spread to dozens of cities.

Omaha

In Omaha, Nebraska, ICE conducted a raid at a meat processing plant called Glenn Valley Foods. During the raid, a crowd responded, fighting back against federal authorities. The crowd attempted to stop the detentions, blocking and then attacking ICE vehicles by throwing projectiles at them. Authorities detained 76 people.

San Francisco

Solidarity demonstrations in the Bay area started early. On Sunday, June 8, hundreds gathered at the ICE Field Office in San Francisco on Sansome Street. Demonstrators vandalized the building, drawing riot police to the scene. The crowd clashed with police before scattering to other parts of the city. Anarchists smashed windows out of SFPD cruisers, a Chase bank, a Fendi storefront, and at least one Waymo. Waymo cancelled their services to San Francisco. SFPD arrested 140 people.

The next day, 9,000 people gathered for a rally organized by the PSL at the 24th & Mission BART Plaza. The PSL led a march through the Mission District before circling back to starting point without clashing with police, or directly obstructing ICE operations.

New York

In New York, daily demonstrations in the second week of June led to cat and mouse skirmishes with the NYPD. Police aggressively fought to quell protests but demonstrators repeatedly broke police lines, spilling into the streets. Some threw bottles at officers, dragging trash cans and newspaper stands into the road. On June 12, protesters in Manhattan gathered outside of the Federal Immigration office and the NYC Immigration Court. That night, anarchists claimed responsibility for burning 11 NYPD cruisers in Brooklyn. Six days later, anarchists claimed to have burned another police car, this time in Williamsburg.

Austin

"These were no small pebbles," an Austin police officer said about the rocks thrown during the demonstration on the June 9. Hundreds gathered downtown that evening for a rally organized by the PSL. Marchers moved from the Texas Capitol to the J.J. Pickle Federal Building, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. There, the crowd started spray-painting slogans and smashing windows.

PSL organizers tried to steer the march back toward the Capitol but only partly succeeded. The crowd splintered. Police fired tear gas and tried to make arrests, pushing people back. The march regrouped, broke apart again, then returned to the federal building. Protesters smashed more windows, dragged makeshift barricades into the street, and clashed with police before finally dispersing. Four officers were reported injured.

Atlanta

In Atlanta, over a thousand demonstrators gathered for a PSL rally at a strip mall off Buford Highway. PSL organizers tried to keep the crowd on the sidewalk. When police moved to make an arrest, protesters rushed to stop it. PSL organizers stepped in between them and the cops.

By nightfall, the crowd thinned to a few hundred. Chants faded as lowriders rolled into the lot, music playing from open windows. Dozens danced in the parking lot while members of PSL announced the end of the march and told people to head home to avoid arrest.

Police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly and fired tear gas at those who stayed. Black, white, and Chicano youth fought back. They threw bricks and fireworks, soaked officers with water guns. Tear gas pushed the crowd deeper into the lot. Some smashed abandoned police cruisers as they fled. By night's end, police made several arrests.

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The riots have quieted down, but the Trump administration continued the mass deportations. On July 4, Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful” bill passed into law. The bill allocates over $170 billion to ICE, making it the largest law enforcement agency in the country. Indeed, ICE now controls more resources than most modern armies.

So far, only widespread rioting has shifted the administration’s position on ICE, and only briefly. If the current direction continues, activists will need to outmaneuver a better-funded, more militarized agency. It will take new tactics, greater resolve, and a scale of resistance not yet seen.

We don't know exactly what will bring angry crowds back into the streets. We believe the forces active in the past year will determine the texture and worldview of the coming confrontations, wherever and however they emerge.

Finding the Time

In the uncertainty and panic of Trump's re-election, many have embraced a _wait-and-see_ orientation. After the Stop Cop City and Palestine Solidarity movements, anarchists, abolitionists, and other autonomous groups have ceded the initiative to the state, waiting—hoping—for better conditions to arise. Some wait for others to spearhead militant resistance.

We don’t believe better conditions will arrive on their own. We don’t believe state overreach automatically produces revolt. We don't believe that economic immiseration, hunger, warfare, or any kind of deprivation lead directly to struggle, upheaval, or revolution. We believe that self-organized resistance helps shape the political landscape and conditions. Thus, passivity is a grave strategic danger.

Aspiring revolutionaries must take the necessary steps to build a mass movement despite heightening conditions of repression. Moreover, we must make the conditions we need, or try our best to do so.

This entails risks. Nothing worthwhile comes easy. Our sharpest insights and strategies were born beneath blankets of tear gas. Today’s repression reintroduces us to our weaknesses and blind spots. The state teaches us through baton charges, raids, and ambushes, all of our failures as a liberation movement. To advance, we must face those inadequacies soberly. The oasis recedes from those who shelter within it.

Inadequate Theory

During Trump’s first term, many anarchists and anti-fascists prioritized tactics over vision. They believed that escalating militancy and confronting the state directly would spark a broader inferno. From the experiences of resistance, an adequate theory and movement might emerge, many hoped. Alas, without a broader program, no sustained revolutionary movement took shape. Those who did draft programs had precious little influence among those who built barricades. Those who built barricades, who blocked airports, failed to substantially advance their theories or ideas.

Some groups built networks, infrastructures, survival programs. But few prepared to fight the army or hold ground. Few imagined how to feed a city or defend a neighborhood under siege. Few organized the labor or logistics any real rupture would demand. Without that rupture, ideas remain inert. Without ideas, action dissipates into mist.

Who thinks must act. Who acts must think. Revolutionaries must make clear to all angry people that the resolution of their particular suffering can only come about with the destruction of the central power structure (i.e. the state). If revolutionaries fail to articulate this principle in clear and convincing language, than reformers and opportunists will fill the void. They’ll wrap their frameworks in the language of struggles, praise grassroots efforts, and channel rage back into the institutions. In this way, opportunists replace the agency of everyday people with the alleged influence of think tanks, non-profit groups, humanitarian aid workers, and the Democratic Party. That this dynamic recurs continuously is the fault of aspiring revolutionaries, who have yet to take adequate responsibility for this essential task.

This names just one problem for those already fighting. Whatever problems they face—and there are more every day—they can still resolve political problems and dilemmas. They face the future directly. In contrast, many others seem to hold back simply because they don’t know what to do. Instead of seeking to resolve this confusion through concrete participation in the riots, assemblies, and protests underway, they wait. Day after day, month after month.

The waiting never ends. For the patient, cautious observation becomes its own pseudo-wisdom and reflex. Certainty becomes the prerequisite for action. Since nothing is certain, and everything changes, the world evaporates around them. The moment of real decision vanishes. The first of the month alone tethers their experience to concrete struggles.

Being Too Late

So how do our ideas impact our interventions? When do we use our ideas in practice? How do we learn from our practice to develop new theories?

The answer to these questions come to us more clearly from a more direct and practical question: Where does a revolutionary movement come from? The answer, we believe, is comedically intuitive: From both inside and outside of mass uprisings.

The organizations, networks, slogans, tactics, strategies, etc that emerge in the movements always seem to appear just a moment too late. They organize themselves, their resolve is sharp, but they stand alone. Consider the "frontliners" who fought boldly in June and July 2020—toppling monuments, trashing courthouses and police stations—just weeks after millions had already vacated the streets, scattered by tear gas and state-orchestrated conspiracy theories. Consider still the militant Black youth who coordinated car caravans, fighting police across the country (in Atlanta, Louisville, Kenosha, Lancaster, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, etc.) well into January 2021—a full half year after the murder of George Floyd. Committed to the fight that brought them together, they innovate a strategy for a moment that is already evaporating. The kind of people they have become are the first of a new breed, but the evolutionary context has already vanished. Consider finally the hundreds of young people who have spent the last year breaking windows, burning cars, breaking police lines, in the context of ongoing resistance to the war on Gaza. What would it have meant to burn a dozen police cruisers during the eviction of the Columbia encampment? Something else entirely.

These aspiring revolutionaries are like a trigger with no gun.

Being Too Early

On the other side, those who organize outside of mass uprisings often find themselves speaking into a different kind of void. They hesitate to risk the fragile chemistry of their internal culture, or the inertia of their long-term campaigns, in the chaos of spontaneous revolt. But the refusal to step into that chaos is a refusal to shape it. Their strategies grow sharper in the abstract, but dull in the real terrain of struggle. Detached from the unpredictable surges of mass resistance—the only force capable of cracking the foundations of capitalist life—they become spectators to the very history they claim to prepare for. Consider the hundreds, thousands, of groups and collectives across the country. Consider their indifference, their confusion, or their malevolence with respect to the heights of open struggle of just the past five years. How many of these circles—affinity groups, nonprofits, militias, "revolutionary parties"—actually oriented around the prospect of serious autonomous power in riots, occupations, encampments, blockades, etc.? Not enough.

Revolutionary groups of whatever size must learn to hold their shape in quiet seasons, but rush into the streets when the moment calls—staking everything to join the surging crowds who decide, for reasons no theory can fully explain, to fight back. These are the groups that don't just survive history. They bend it.

Revolt and Revolution

Rebellions erupt almost by accident, whenever two people declare that they've had enough, and two others agree with them. Revolutions do not quite work that way. They don’t emerge automatically from historical laws moving in the background. They also don't only emerge from the resoluteness and courage of a dedicated few. Still, at the present crossroads, it is that resoluteness and courage that is lacking.

The United States isn’t resolving its border crisis. It’s escalating it. More agents, more funding, more cages. The same is true across every frontline. In Washington DC, federal agents block the intersections in the Black areas of town, harassing pedestrians and motorists day and night. The administration jokes continuously about running Trump for a third term, and the Democrats have only themselves to blame after two centuries of helping to consolidate power into the hands of the executive branch.

60% of Americans struggle to pay for rent, food, healthcare, bills (according to the so-called "Minimal Quality of Life Index"). We have already detailed, at length, the difficulties facing our society today. The "objective" conditions seem overripe. We lack a plausible framework for abolishing those conditions. Why?

Many people hold correct ideas incorrectly. They see the challenges ahead but miss the openings. They confront the reality of defeat but fail to draw out its lessons. They record the brutality of the enemy, but not the panic that drives the state to trade legitimacy for short-term control. Many organizers mislead people when they say a powerful movement only grows by winning. This may be true for activist campaigns. But the kinds of movements capable of abolishing the system root-and-branch only grow in a sequence of defeats. Since the enemy is so strong, we must build our strength around our weaknesses. We cannot deal death-blows to the system. Not yet. But we can build the kinds of groups, communities, and movements capable of failing without dispersing, of losing without quitting, of taking heavy blows, one after another.

Revolutionary movements aren’t built by chasing easy victories. They’re built by refusing to disappear. That means learning to lose well, to fall back without falling apart, to regroup and strike again. Endurance, stamina, agility—not brute strength. The kinds of groups we need will know how to fight, how to retreat, and how to return. Again and again, until something gives. "Getting away with it" may be, for the moment, the most important task.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”