June 13, 2025
By Ron Gochez
Ron Gochez is a high school teacher and community organizer with Unión del Barrio, an organization active in the Los Angeles area community of people stemming mainly from Mexico and Central America. These are excerpts based on his June 9 interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! (democracynow.org)
RON GOCHEZ: This weekend was marked with absolute and total violence, brutal repression and attacks, coordinated attacks against our community. ICE agents have been around all over Southern California, kidnapping people, tearing apart families. And we see this as an attack against our people.
That’s why you see young people from the community coming out and resisting this repression. We are tired, sick and tired of these attacks that are dividing and separating our families. And so, that’s why, when we have these protests, they have been peaceful.
But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the Los Angeles Police Department or, on Saturday [June 7], for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence. They shot thousands of rounds of tear gas, flashbang grenades and used all kinds of repressive instruments against the community.
They didn’t think that the people would resist and fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours the people combated in the streets against the Border Patrol. And after eight-and-a-half hours of battle — and it was a battle, because there were people throwing back tear gas, people throwing anything that they could to defend themselves and to defend the workers that were being surrounded by over 100 Border Patrol agents.
After eight-and-a-half hours, the Border Patrol, the sheriffs had to retreat. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. Only the resistance allowed them to go home that night.
And so, that is one clear sign that if we organize ourselves, if we resist, we can defend our communities from ICE terror, from the Border Patrol or from any federal agency that wishes to separate our families.
While that resistance was happening, we saw President Trump give the order to use the National Guard. And so, for us as Indigenous people to these lands, to this continent, this is nothing new. The military going after us is nothing new. The United States in this part of the country is the result of a military invasion of Mexico.
We know more repression is coming. But they’re also going to face more resistance from the community. We don’t want to be violent, and we don’t advocate for violence, but when they use brutal violence against our people — and kidnapping mothers and fathers from children is violent — when they do things like that, we have every right, every historic right, to defend our communities by any ways that we can, and we’re going to continue to do so.
Trump now hitting workplaces
The fascist Trump administration is trying to lie and have the general public think that they’re going after criminals. But what’s painfully clear, is that the majority of these raids are going after workers, working-class people. They’re not going after criminals. They’re arresting people at Home Depots, at construction sites, at factories where people are working, where the workers are creating the resources necessary for this society to exist.
And so, I think everyone now knows that it’s a lie [that they go after criminals]. They’re going after anyone and everyone who has brown skin specifically. And they’re attacking pretty much anybody. The Asian community. Black immigrants. Anybody in this country who isn’t a white male, basically, is under attack.
I think working people everywhere should see this as an attack on working-class people, and they should all unite in solidarity to repel these attacks against our community. We’ve proven time and time again, when we organize ourselves, we can defend ourselves.
At this moment, it’s 5:00 in the morning in Los Angeles. We already have people all over Los Angeles right now patrolling the streets of Los Angeles, looking for any ICE activity. That’s the work that we do on a daily basis to protect our communities.
So, on one hand, there’s street protests, and those are important, but the other part is organized and coordinated resistance, by patrolling our streets, defending our streets. We can’t protect the entire city of Los Angeles, but in our neighborhoods, in our barrios, we can defend ourselves, and we are doing that.
Response of Governor Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass?
We understand that they’re against what’s happening. If Governor Newsom is against President Trump using them against us, well, he can order them to stand down. He has not done so.
Here in the city of Los Angeles, Karen Bass is saying that she’s against the raids that are happening. Well, why are her police officers aiding and collaborating with ICE, with the Border Patrol to attack the community? If they are really there to serve and protect, as it says on their vehicles, then those rubber bullets and that gas that they’re shooting right now, they’re aiming at the wrong people.
The weapons shouldn’t be aimed at us. They should be aimed at the agents who are trying to kidnap the people in our community.
But, obviously, we know we cannot expect help or support from the police, from the sheriffs here in Los Angeles. Even though we live in a state that’s run by a Democrat as the governor, we have a Democratic Party mayor, we have Democratic Party councilmembers, we cannot expect for them to defend the people. Only the people will organize and defend themselves, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
Could LAPD confront the National Guard?
No, we don’t anticipate [the LAPD will confront the Guard] at all. I have personally been physically removed from an ICE raid here in South Central Los Angeles by the LAPD. When the mayor says that the LAPD doesn’t collaborate with ICE or with federal agencies, it’s a total lie. While you may not have LAPD officers on the streets asking people for their citizenship or detaining people for immigration reasons, what you do have is the LAPD, the L.A. County sheriffs, the California Highway Patrol or any law enforcement agency that’s here locally, they are collaborating.
They are protecting the operations. They close down the streets around operations so that ICE can do their kidnappings of our people. And so, that is a direct collaboration. And here in Los Angeles, if it wasn’t for the repression of the LAPD, of the L.A. County sheriffs, you would have thousands of more people who would be resisting these ICE raids.
But it is the police, it is the sheriffs who are basically protecting the operations and protecting everything that’s happening against our community. So, do we anticipate, do we expect the police to join our side? No.
Unión del Barrio says don’t repress your people
What we can say is that a lot of those police officers here in Los Angeles, a lot of those sheriffs and a lot of those National Guardsmen and even Marines are Mexican, are Central American, are the sons and daughters of immigrants. In Los Angeles, hundreds of LAPD officers are undocumented as well. They have to see that they’re being used by the Trump administration to use violence against their own people.
So, we, as Unión del Barrio, do call on them to stand down. Do not raise your weapons against your own people. These are your — this is like your mother, your auntie, your father, that you’re repressing. So, we do call on them to join us. Stand on the right side of history.
Do not support the Trump administration. Support the people. Because what we’re doing is fighting for justice. We’re fighting for the right to live and to exist and to work and to feed our families. There’s nothing extreme about that. We just simply want to have a dignified life like anyone else deserves.
So, we’re seeing resistance right now, from the people in Gaza resisting and fighting for their lives, to us right here on our own historic homeland, our Indigenous land here. We’re fighting for our lives, as well.
And we’re going to continue to do so. We don’t want violence. But we also aren’t going to sit by and see our people be kidnapped and see our community be attacked by any federal agency or local law enforcement.
Those detained, beaten
There is no due process for the majority of the people. People who get detained, we have confirmed reports that people who get picked up in the morning in Los Angeles by the same day in the evening are already in Mexico City. That is confirmed. You cannot have due process in less than 24 hours. It’s absolutely impossible.
And so, people are just being shipped immediately, you know, across the border and to many places. We have confirmed cases of Mexican citizens, Mexican nationals, who have been deported to Guatemala and dumped into Guatemala, a country that they have never been to and don’t belong in. And so, that’s what’s happening on the ground here in Los Angeles.
Yesterday or Saturday, I don’t know, today — it’s just been one long day of resistance for us. Elected officials have gone to the detention center, where hundreds of our people are being kept. And they demanded to be allowed to enter so that they can view the conditions that the people are living in.
These are basements that have no restrooms, and they have no sanitary conditions for the people. There’s not enough food and water. They [officials] were denied entry. They were not allowed to see inside, to see how these people are being treated.
So, it’s a real crisis right now for our community, and that’s why we don’t want to wait until our people are kidnapped and taken into detention to take action. That’s why we do community patrols every day in the morning around our communities to try to prevent our people from being kidnapped.
When we say “kidnapped,” that is the exact word that we need to use, because the state is using brutal violence to separate us, to take us against our will from our families, from our homes, from our jobs, and to take us somewhere else. So, that, by definition, is a kidnapping. And that’s what we’re fighting against, because we know that our people are not going to have due process.
If lawyers and elected officials aren’t allowed to enter detention facilities to see their conditions that the people are living in, that makes us think that the people inside will have no type of human rights.
People seriously injured
We’ve seen people be seriously injured. On Saturday, in Compton, California, when we were there on the front lines of the resistance against the sheriffs and against the Border Patrol, we saw a guy standing in front of us who got hit in the face with a — I don’t know if it was a rubber bullet or what it was, but his face was completely split open, and he was just gushing blood everywhere. You know, these things can be lethal. If these rubber bullets hit you in the eye, if they hit you in the right place, they can absolutely be lethal.
And so, we understand that the violence that’s being used against us on a daily basis is lethal, whether it’s by the Border Patrol or the police. It’s violence against the community. And so, we have every right to defend ourselves, by any means necessary, because that is our — the livelihood, the well-being of our families is what’s at stake. Children have been gassed here in Los Angeles.
And so, whether it’s the National Guard, whether it’s local police, we have to resist this, because the Trump administration is trying to make an example of Los Angeles, which is the heart of the Mexican and Central American community here in the United States. They think that if they can break us, they can break anyone in the country.
We cannot afford to fail. The resistance will continue. Whether they keep threatening us or not, we will continue. We will be peaceful every time that we can. But if we face violence, where we have to defend ourselves, we have every human right to do so, as well.
