Respectfully: “No Kings” protests feel like a waste of time
The Trump Administration is intransigent. "No Kings Day" was a step in the wrong direction. This moment demands focused, organized civil disobedience.
“Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm and shrewdly relapsing into repose.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, “The Present Age”
Harrowing imagery of the Trump Administration’s crackdown on the immigrant community has reignited an old fervor. Though the United States has a sordid history of mistreating and dehumanizing immigrants, recent scenes of day laborers being thrown to the pavement and families being ripped apart by masked men emerging from unmarked vehicles have understandably stoked novel horror in people of conscience. Contrary to the musings of partisan hacks, the Biden Administration’s immigration policy was by no means an open border bonanza. Rather, the prior administration’s policy could best be described as a slowly escalating infarction against immigrants in an effort to placate Republican critics, to the point of resembling or in some cases even surpassing Trump’s first term in the end. Nonetheless, as if to have been woken up from a stupor, everyone slightly left of center and beyond have mobilized to counter the Trump Administration’s demonstrably more cruel posture this time around.
In some sense, the current protest movement is 2018 redux. The current slideshow of horror has renewed calls for the total dismantlement of ICE and DHS (relatively nascent agencies relative to the total lifespan of the United States), and sympathy for that sentiment seems to be more robust and more widespread than ever. And what better place for those feelings to boil over than in Los Angeles? A haven for immigrants of many stripes, LA is certainly one of the (if not the) urban centers most significantly impacted by the crackdown. That fact, paired with the city’s rich history of protest and progressive political posture relative to the current administration, made it the perfect hotbed for action.
And action was certainly had. In June this year, Trump’s expanded raids across the city and other sanctuaries across the country elicited an outpouring of people onto the street.
I was on the ground in both LA and the surrounding areas those months. After weeks of harrowing confrontations between grassroots groups seeking to undermine ICE and CBP activity across the region made their rounds online, a storm began to brew in the heart of Southern California. The weekend of June 6th-8th culminated in a massive confrontation at the Metropolitan Detention Center where, in the same spirit as the activities that inspired it, hordes of Angelinos joined a group of regulars and impeded ICE from bringing more captives to the building, if only for a short while. This was an act of civil disobedience done explicitly in service of the immigrant community actively being hounded and abducted by ICE. Paired with a freeway takeover, the disruptive nature of this event and the skirmishes that preceded it would become impossible to ignore.
Over the course of the week that followed, scenes of rubber bullets, tear gas, freeway occupation, and burning Waymos seemed to stir the nation from its stupor. Calls for “No Kings Day”, a nationwide rebuke of Trump’s expanding executive mandate, and a foil to his (ultimately meager) tinpot birthday military parade, quickly gained steam online. Compared to prior immigration-focused actions across the region, the turnout on No Kings Day was more jubilant, peaceful, and mainstream. The focus was broadened from the issue of immigration—there was no serious blockade at the detention center as we had seen the weekend prior—into a more mainstream critique of Trump’s distortion of political norms.
And yet, in spite of the comparatively broad, aimless, and non-confrontational nature of the No Kings protest, the police crackdown in LA was far more regimented this time around. A relatively small group of around a couple dozen people near the detention center were much more quickly dispersed. Explicit chants of “peaceful protest” and “non-violence” were met with excoriating force. Tear gas, flash bangs, horses, and flocks of vans shuttling officers clad in armor wielding disproportionate weapons against unarmed protestors saturated the streets. Beneath the amber glow of the late afternoon sun, a cacophony of detonations and screams rang out across the city’s urban core. It was complete mayhem, and the entire demonstration was quickly locked down and dispersed.
Just a week prior, people were mobilized to do real civil disobedience, throwing a wrench into the gears of ICE’s operations, if only for a short while. Even if demands were still somewhat broad, the focus of the protest at least remained squarely fixed on the issue of immigrant detention and deportation. But this time, the “resistance” largely extended to lots of aimless bodies in the streets, stickers satirizing Trump, calls for peace, and vague dissent against Trump’s excesses. Why, then, was the crackdown so much more sweeping and conclusive?
Earlier this year, I had read Vincent Bevins’ pensive book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, which chronicles the various protest movements of the 2010s around the world and seeks to probe why most of them led to very little positive substantive change. Now, I understand that I am just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone, but between what I saw with my own two eyes, and what has been happening since then, the ICE protests and their culmination in No Kings Day seem to fit the pattern Bevins lays out in his book. It appears that the energy of this movement was being sapped and co-opted in ways that are actively neutering the possibility for positive change. Without concrete demands, leverage, and messaging, all of which would be difficult to maintain without structure and leadership, ICE’s activity has continued to escalate unabated since that massive mobilization back on June 14th.
No Kings Day itself was almost paradoxical in nature. In invoking cliche American sentiments around the rejection of monarchy, it broadened its base beyond the narrower humanitarian focus on the mistreatment of immigrants, which simultaneously contributed to the unprecedented turnout whilst creating a coalition that was broad and and heterogeneous. In turn, voices which had been at the fore calling for the abolition of ICE became muffled by the discord of vague and philosophical sentiments wrought that day. Moreover, the almost celebratory atmosphere of the event and the diversion of focus away from material civil disobedience created a perverse sense of fecklessness, as though this was a performative feel-good charade for people who sought to cloak themselves in the aesthetics of radicalism without really doing all that much, a way to vent.
As a result, many of those folks who may have otherwise been compelled to heed a call to more concrete civil disobedience (if delivered by a more disciplined vanguard) were instead made to vent their pent up frustration toward Trump’s agenda writ large and then return to life as usual. This conveniently happened as the intransigent Trump Administration was escalating, not retracting, its displays of force. As roving helicopters droned over streets lined by National Guardsmen and Marines, when it was the time to brace and double-down, the message instead became muddled by pacifists who had very little to say or target beyond what we all already know and feel about the current administration.
No Kings Day was largely the product of somewhat institutionally aligned actors. Most prominently, Indivisible, an activist movement started by Democratic Party staffers whose primary stated goal is electing Democrats to office, was at the fore of orchestrating No Kings Day. The event received support even from major institutional figures, including those who don’t often support these sorts of grassroots actions, like Hillary Clinton. In broadening the scope of these actions, they (perhaps somewhat self-servingly) centered their own broad critiques of Donald Trump whilst negating or sidelining the anti-ICE sentiments that set the stage for No Kings Day in the first instance. To be clear, I take zero issue with broader critiques of Trump’s agenda, or even mobilizing people towards opposing it. It is the fact that this was done in contravention of more tangible short-term demands and action that I think deserves scrutiny.
But even before the arguable co-optation, from the very onset, messaging clarity around the anti-ICE movement was lackluster. The initial protests against ICE were organized by a loose network of progressive, leftist, and immigrants’ rights groups: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of L.A., Unión del Barrio, labor unions, Democratic Socialists of America, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and others. Their strength in numbers meant that their reach could be significant. But those numbers also meant that coordination was difficult. These disparate groups had unique priorities and messaging: some groups sought to link international issues, others centered the plights of individual families and victims. Thus, they could not seize the moment; this was a movement that was ripe to be hijacked.
Though the moment that climaxed with No Kings Day seems to have come and gone, moving forward, there is much that advocates for the immigrant community can do and are doing to bolster the movement. But that work lies not in bombastic and spontaneous displays of dissent. Rather, it’s about getting your feet wet with the drudgery, the day-to-day activities, the on-the-ground activism. We need to be lending our support to the ICE watchers, the rapid response networks; we need to be showing up to city council meetings and voicing our support for non-compliance ordinances, legal funds for victims of ICE brutality, and the like. Within those aforementioned groups and organizations, we need to bolster and support spokespeople: those charismatic potential leaders who could seek to capitalize on future groundswells by centering signage, graffiti, interviews, and monologues indicating specific demands. Abolish ICE; create a path to citizenship; stop producing refugee populations in the Global South through violent extraction of labor and resources. Focusing on local and incremental wins whilst centering long-term aims would simultaneously make this long-term vision less abstract in the minds of holdouts who fancy it a romantic fantasy whilst building material momentum towards said aims. Existing mutual aid and community organizing networks can serve as strong fundaments to a potential broad coalition. It would also provide willing activists a productive outlet to focus their energy. But it’s up to us to lend our time and energy towards building these groups and the infrastructure required to grow them.
spot on