Today’s guests give an on-the-ground perspective on the ongoing ICE raids in Los Angeles. Bill Gallegos and Aquilina Soriano Versoza highlight the work of immigrant rights activists and protesters who have taken to the streets to oppose Trump’s sending of 200 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines to LA. 

Soriano Versoza describes how the raids are being executed without warrants and how ICE is showing up in places where they know immigrants live and work and making arrests without probable cause. As of Wednesday, there were over 300 confirmed disappearances, and legal advocates are being denied requests to contact missing persons. That means that some people who have been abducted aren’t locatable. 

Gallegos says that none of this should catch us by surprise. Trump has been very clear about his goal to launch an ethnic cleansing campaign which has now taken the form of a domestic military campaign as troops with assault rifles enter LA and tanks fill the port. The message the administration is sending is bigger than undocumented immigrants, says Gallego. The message is “don’t stand up to this neofascist administration, or this could happen to you; better not try to organize a cooperative or push for honest history curriculum, you better step back.” Soriano Versoza adds that people in LA know that they’re being treated as the test case for how far the federal government can go in criminalizing immigrants. 

They also discuss the growing number of women leaders in the resistance movement, many of whom are also leading the labor movement, how the wealth of LA is built on the backs of black and brown communities who don’t get to share in the city’s wealth, and how the fight for immigrants’ rights overlaps with support for Palestinians. 

Bill Gallegos lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the Mexico Solidarity Project and a longtime Chicano Liberation and environmental justice activist.   He is the author of “The Historical and Political Significance of the US Annexation of Mexico’s Northern Territories”, and “The Sunbelt Strategy and Chicano Liberation”.

Aquilina Soriano Versoza is Executive Director of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, a nonprofit serving and organizing the low-wage Pilipino immigrant community in Los Angeles. Aquilina is a leader in the domestic worker movement in California and nationally through policy, worker organizing, workforce development and worker-owned cooperative strategies. She is Board Chair of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a fellow at Rutgers University for the Build the Base program of the Workplace Justice Lab, a member of the LA Rapid Response Network, a Commissioner on the LA County Commission for Women, and a co-founder of COURAGE/Vivid Life Homecare worker-owned cooperative agency.

Featured image of the skyline of Los Angeles via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The post LA Stands Up for Immigrants’ Rights appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.