No matter what the facts are; no matter how many community members ICE deports; no matter how much it costs, Trump will claim victory in the siege of Los Angeles.
The siege of Los Angeles will have come by force, but the administration gambled its moral authority. And lost. With all Los Angeles as witness.
The memory of their defeat will be intertwined with their violence, intimidation, harm and family separations as well as the realization of mutual aid and self-defense among Los Angeles’ residents, neighborhoods and communities.
This is the lesson federal agents and masked vigilantes have yet to learn: we will still be in Los Angeles when they leave.
We will remain in Los Angeles, united and organized by the memory of the siege and the disappearance of our neighbors, friends and family.
This is a call to honesty.
This is a call for an honest assessment of the Trump administration’s stated and actual objectives with quantitative and qualitative evidence.
Given the escalation of harm and tactics by both federal agencies and masked vigilantes; and the immediate needs of communities under siege, this work will be haphazard initially but can help build the foundation for later efforts by historians, investigative reporters, community organizations and government officials.
An objective assessment is necessary to articulate our experience amidst the siege of Los Angeles and counter the false narrative and blatant lies about the siege: this is guerrilla narrative.
This is our story.
We are witness.
Since Friday, June 6th, Los Angeles, its surrounding cities and the greater county, have been forced to endure raids by federal agencies and abductions, kidnappings and disappearances in broad daylight by masked, unidentified men with weapons.
This is not a warzone. These are no riots. This is a siege.
Residents are unable to distinguish between federal authority, like Border Patrol and ICE agents and masked men with no identifying badges. Residents now call them bounty hunters, kidnappers and secuestradores.
Without masked men revealing their names, agencies or a badge, there’s no way to truly know who they are.
Stated Objective: Deportation of convicted criminals.
The initial stated objective from the federal government was to arrest undocumented individuals with criminal convictions.
That is a data point that can easily be obtained, a number that can be easily produced. One thing American bureaucracy does (or did) really well is keep receipts. (When it wants to: as many as 1,360 children have not been reunited with their families after being separated in 2018, according to Human Rights Watch).
But the stated and actual objective are clearly different.
What has played out has been what law enforcement calls “at-large arrests” where they basically grab anybody, immigrant and citizen alike. The common denominator is darker skin; Latinx – or as I say, Raza.
All of this goes back to an emotional meeting in Washington, D.C. on May 20, 2025 when former Santa Monica resident Stephen Miller became enraged at immigration officials who weren’t detaining and deporting the amount of people he wants gone.
Actual Results
By the second week of this siege, there had been 330 arrests, according to various federal officials, including the White House.
By June 22, that number was reported to be 1,618 people, according to the Los Angeles Times. As of July 8th, the amount of arrests had risen to 2,792, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Arrests presume due process – judicial warrants, attorneys, evidence, representation and judgement. That is not happening. These are kidnappings, abductions and deportations.
It is unclear – or at least has not been made public and transparent – how many federal agents have been assigned from the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. But somewhere that number is available.
We have no idea how many masked vigilantes, kidnappers and bounty hunters have also been deputized to assist. Given the arrest of a man impersonating border patrol this exact number may not be known.
Local law enforcement, including the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriffs have assisted.
In addition, 4,000 active-duty National Guards and 700 Marines have been sent to Los Angeles.
An estimate on the cost to clean up the first few weeks of demonstrations and protests against ICE, is upwards of $30 million; but the collective cost of this siege is well beyond that number, though without transparency, we don’t yet know.
But, we need to document the numbers and the cost; we need to report; we need to publish.
What the administration has achieved in Los Angeles is fear and intimidation. Patients are afraid to see their doctors; students and parents are afraid for their children to attend classes; and workers in construction, clothing factories, farm fields and restaurants are afraid to go to work. All of this needs to be documented.
This fear extends beyond the target of immigrants and is felt by many residents.
If the federal government’s goal was to demonstrate strength through violence and intimidation, also a qualifiable measure, that has failed. Instead, the federal government has demonstrated brutality which Los Angeles residents will not ignore nor tolerate. Repeatedly we have seen federal agents run off by crowds of residents; demands of accountability by residents and bystanders; fearlessness to document and record abuses of power. Neighbors have joined rapid response networks and newsrooms have shifted their coverage. What we see is solidarity, radical interdependence and support not based on ideology, party affiliation, race, ethnicity or language but on a common good and love for one another. Far from Miller’s description of block-by-block balkanization, residents have stood up for one another, warning neighborhoods of raids, interrupting kidnappings and directly questioning authorities who would take away our neighbors.
Week 5
At the time of writing, we are five weeks into what officials have warned would be a 30-day siege
If you pay attention, unmasked, uniformed law enforcement with badges are distancing themselves from the vigilantes. Wait for the phrase: “I’m not ICE.” While this has yet to materialize into outward opposition among uniformed law enforcement, it is hard not to imagine growing unease and distrust of the masked vigilantes.
As a result, this has also dissolved trust in certain public institutions, specifically local law enforcement, the judicial system, or at least those in the courthouse, and local elected officials who are entrusted to serve community.
And every day more and more residents have come to aid their neighbors and strangers in ways creative, kind, altruistic and newsworthy. “No Sleep” events at nearby hotels; attendance at city halls demanding elected officials halt local support of federal agencies and vigilantes; peaceful protest; marches, demonstrations; delivering food, medicine and community-centered neighborhood watches.
Theory and Praxis
A generation of elementary, middle, high school and college students have collectively witnessed an embodied intersectionality — people of different backgrounds, different experiences finding a common interest in bonding together to protect one another; the value of critical thinking and how critical race theory articulates all they have seen from porches, sidewalks, streets and screens. Given this experience of masked vigilantes aided by local law enforcement and military, there is more to distrust of those posing as the state than right-wing fear mongering about theory or reading in high school and university classrooms.
Every young person will go back to their classrooms, work and be forever changed by the events of this summer. They will ask questions and articulate their own answers. We will have offered tools to help them towards their own statements of fact and experience.
Residents have demonstrated they will not allow people to be kidnapped, abducted and disappeared in broad daylight. Otherwise, the vigilantes would not have to use flash bang grenades and gas to disperse the crowds that regularly surround them. Otherwise, federal agencies wouldn’t be abducting people and quickly leaving the scene of their crime to avoid detection.
Even outside Los Angeles city boundaries, residents are questioning law enforcement and its stated mission of protect and serve.
At a moment when the rising cost of rent, mortgage, food, gas, school, childcare and entertainment is strangling working families, the waste of military deployment and law enforcement overtime has come into clear relief as schools have been forced to lay off teachers and staff; food aid is disrupted and social services are at risk.
Federal recruitment hype videos will be entered as evidence when future federal officials abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And we are all walking through a collective trauma on the scale that require formal, years-long inquiries and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
A call for an objective assessment will reveal the waste of resources, erosion of trust in civic institutions and may likely accelerate social changes towards a better future which MAGA forces are attempting to abort.
Removed from the fear and constant attacks on the daily, an objective assessment is necessary to examine the broad federal strategy, its implementation and failure as well to demonstrate the strength of Los Angeles communities to withstand and repel this siege.
We are all witness. We are all powerful.
Love hard on one another.
Defend Los Angeles.
Con Safos.
George B. Sánchez-Tello is from Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley and lives in East L.A.. He currently writes the California Uncovered column for Capital & Main. Sánchez-Tello teaches in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.