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PROTESTS COULD BREAK TRUMP’S DEPORTATION MACHINE  
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Jean Guerrero
June 13, 2025
The New York Times
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_ The videos coming out of LA and other cities reveal something
Trump's politics can’t touch: the fierce humanity of people willing
to risk everything for one another. They don’t just document
resistance: they ignite it. _

Masked ICE agents arrest a Tufts University student, screen grab

 

On June 6 in downtown Los Angeles, the day that sparked citywide
protests
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have captured the nation’s attention, a woman watched federal agents
lead her handcuffed father
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from a fast-fashion warehouse amid an ICE raid. In a TikTok video
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times, she sobs from behind a camera lens. “Papa, I love you,” she
cries.

Her father struggles to remain composed, telling her he loves her,
too. He assures her it’s going to be OK. In a final gesture of love,
he folds his hands in prayer and blows her a kiss as he’s placed in
an unmarked van. The TikTok video, which his daughter uploaded the
next day to the song “Fantasmas” by the Mexican singer Humbe, has
been re-uploaded and shared by countless other accounts across social
media platforms.

As videos like this reach millions, Los Angeles is becoming the
epicenter of a counternarrative to President Trump’s propaganda
about immigrants. Mr. Trump’s decisions to deploy the National Guard
and now the Marines appear calculated to provoke chaos that will
distract people from the damning optics of his immigration enforcement
operations. The protesters shouldn’t give him what he wants.
Although their rage is understandable, burning vehicles and hurtling
rocks divert attention from the fact that ICE is destroying families.
It’s those families’ stories that threaten Mr. Trump’s grip on
the public imagination.

A recent CBS News survey found that most Americans believe
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president’s crackdown is prioritizing “dangerous criminals.” But
videos out of Los Angeles and across the country paint a different
picture. They show ICE arresting mothers, fathers, co-workers and
friends of U.S. citizens. Not hardened criminals, but valued community
members. The videos show ICE snatching workers outside of a Home
Depot
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at a local carwash
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on the street
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They show parents on lockdown
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a school graduation because ICE was nearby. These videos, which are
going viral, have the power to destabilize Mr. Trump’s narrative
that his immigration operations are about law and order.

 

As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the highly visible raids
in Los Angeles resulted from a directive
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Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who urged agents
to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” including at
7-Elevens and Home Depots. It was never going to be possible for Mr.
Trump to keep his campaign promise of mass deportations without
rounding up innocent people, because the world he and Mr. Miller
created in which millions of undocumented gang members are running
wild doesn’t exist. Mr. Miller’s insatiability means that arrests
that once happened mostly in the shadows are now happening in broad
daylight, and that people are capturing evidence.

Each act of documentation chips away at the alternate reality that Mr.
Trump and Mr. Miller have constructed — one in which ICE is making
communities safer. In fact, the administration is diverting resources
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serious child trafficking and homeland security investigations to meet
quotas that will satisfy Mr. Miller’s appetite for detained human
beings.

The Trump administration’s escalating shows of force reveal the
president’s understanding of the optics. He knows most Americans
don’t have Mr. Miller’s stomach for the suffering of immigrants.
The president, a master manipulator of the media, is creating a
spectacle to reorient the news cycle. He wants people to see fire and
broken glass, not broken families.

But the movement to resist ICE and record the inhumanity of ICE is
rippling outward, and Americans are seeing it on their social media
feeds. In San Antonio, a video shows a woman pleading for her release
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agents in plain clothes detain her outside a courthouse. “Please, my
children are in school!” she screams. “My children!” Near that
same courthouse, a visibly shaken young boy tries to comfort
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mother during her arrest. “Mom, I’m here,” he says, fighting
tears as she collapses in distress.

The immigrant rights movement is taking cues from the Black Lives
Matter movement, in which Black Americans and allies spent years using
smartphones to expose police brutality and change the national
conversation about race.

“What we’re seeing is a continuation of the digital witnessing
tradition: using mobile devices not just to record harm, but to demand
accountability in real time,” said Allissa Richardson, an associate
professor of journalism at the University of Southern California who
has long studied how African Americans use mobile and social media to
change narratives. “Black witnessing laid the blueprint, and now
other communities are building upon it, adapting it and carrying it
forward.”

Many of the videos that are circulating online have been filmed
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Latinos, whose communities are disproportionately impacted by the
raids and who are severely underrepresented
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the traditional news media, where they have long been unable to
correct inaccurate and dehumanizing stereotypes about immigrants.
These community videos, a form of citizen journalism, may represent a
tipping point.

In the face of baldfaced authoritarianism, filming ICE arrests may
seem futile and even absurd. After all, in a world of echo chambers,
it’s easy to turn away from evidence that contradicts our beliefs.
Can these videos actually change people’s minds?

I believe they are the only thing that can. When I was a public media
reporter documenting the human cost of the first Trump
administration’s immigration policies, I had a Trump-supporting aunt
who sometimes commented on the links to my videos on Facebook,
expressing empathy for the immigrants I interviewed. She told me she
had no idea Mr. Trump was going to be targeting mothers and that it
was upsetting. Later, when I became an opinion columnist, she began to
write off my work as propaganda. It left me convinced that the most
powerful storytelling is not commentary, but human stories. Instead of
condemning and criticizing Mr. Trump, Democratic politicians should
use every opportunity to lift the stories of the families he has
harmed.

Such stories are what forced
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Trump to end his family separation policy during his first term. More
recently, the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland man
mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador — provoked so much
outrage that the administration was forced to find a pretext to bring
him back
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Earlier this month, the story of a 4-year-old Bakersfield, Calif.,
girl
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a rare and life-threatening medical condition who was facing
deportation mobilized people across the country and sparked a reversal
by immigration authorities — possibly saving her life.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller understand the power of human stories.
That’s why Mr. Miller has long combed the internet for anecdotes
about immigrant rapists and killers, writing them into the
president’s speeches and his own social posts
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he has long
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Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, whose story led to the passage of
the Laken Riley Act, which made it easier
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deport immigrants not yet convicted but accused of crimes. That is why
the Trump administration created an office devoted to spotlighting
such stories. That is why they would rather the headlines be about
rogue rioters and burned Waymo vehicles than be about torn-apart
families.

Make no mistake: Mr. Trump is not waging a war for the streets. He is
fighting a war for the hearts and minds of Americans. The most
formidable weapon on this battlefield is the human story. Not fire,
not fists, not bullets. The war will be won only through strategic and
relentless exposure.

In many of the videos coming out of Los Angeles and other cities, the
people recording can be heard helping immigrants to protect their
rights — telling people who have been arrested not to sign
documents
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shouting at neighbors not to open doors
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ICE agents unless they see a signed warrant. Other videos show
people putting their bodies
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ICE and their targets. In one viral video, a white man is partially
run over [[link removed]] by an ICE van
he was trying to stop. Another shows the labor leader David
Huerta shoved to the ground
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an agent while standing in front of a work site; he was arrested and
charged with conspiracy
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impede an officer.

These videos are particularly dangerous to Mr. Trump because they
expose something his politics can’t touch: the fierce humanity of
people willing to risk everything for one another. They don’t just
document resistance — they ignite it. They move people not just to
care, but to act, to intervene, to put their own bodies on the line.

For example, Abby King, a 25-year-old white resident of Los Angeles,
was moved to demonstrate, in part, by the video of Mr. Huerta’s
arrest. I met her on Sunday at Gloria Molina Grand Park in a crowd
of thousands
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gathered for a nonviolent protest of ICE raids and to demand the
release of Mr. Huerta, who was set free on a $50,000 bond later that
day. She brought her mother along to demand a stop to the arrests of
beloved community members. “We’re citizens,” Ms. King said.
“We’re white, and if people like us aren’t standing up for them,
then who is? You have to push through the fear.”

All around her were others moved by the same impulse: a white
grandmother worried about her immigrant neighbors, a Guatemalan father
who brought his 7-year-old child, and a Bolivian woman accompanied by
an entourage of elderly white friends who helped her feel safe.

It was human stories that motivated them to be there. Those stories
sparked their compassion and courage. Mr. Trump is vulnerable in the
face of those emotions. He depends on fear and hate. That is why he
will continue to try to goad the city into violence so that he can
regain the upper hand.

The people of Los Angeles can take the bait and lose the narrative
war. Or they can stay disciplined in their nonviolent protests and
production of human stories. Then Mr. Trump’s attempt to provoke
chaos will collapse under its own cruelty.

_Jean Guerrero is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York
Times. She is the author of “Hatemonger
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Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda” and
“Crux
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A Cross-Border Memoir,” which won a PEN Literary Award. She is a
senior journalism fellow at the U.C.L.A. Latina Futures 2050 Lab._

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