CHLS Solidarity Statement

Statement of Solidarity – January 2026

For the last six months, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have launched coordinated raids across Los Angeles and Orange County, detaining day laborers, stalking families, and tearing families apart. While dehumanizing raids and deportations are not new, the scale, intensity and violence enforcing these have accelerated to new heights in recent history. The recent murders of legal observers in Minneapolis and arrests of activists in Bell and other Los Angeles cities further remind the lengths the current federal government will go through to protect these projects of terror and suppression.

Through identifying immigrants as the enemy within, Donald Trump has expanded and amplified a xenophobic and white supremacist narrative that labels Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners and African-Americans as the cause of the nation's problems, including the rising cost of living, inadequate public services, and unemployment. Within days of his inauguration in January 2025, Trump held true to his racist promises, stripping Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Venezuelans and others of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), legally contesting 14th amendment birthright citizenship, and setting record- breaking deportation quotas. Working with DHS, and some local law enforcement agents such as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), while accessing tax, public benefits and other data, federal agents have hunted tens of thousands of migrants and disappeared hundreds into private prisons and detention centers. Detainees have been banished to penal colonies in El Salvador and to other sovereign countries, such as South Sudan, where they were not born. Migrants on marriage K-1/work H2A/student F1 visas and legal residency have been targeted for their political affiliations including for solidarity with Palestine and activism or for their physical characteristics (those with tattoos and gender non-conforming migrants). Most recently, confirmed data also shows that dozens of US citizens have been illegally exiled by ICE/US Customs Border Protection (CBP). Migrants and Indigenous communities are being rounded up in the streets, dorm rooms, traffic stops, court hallways, airports and other ports of entry.

Last June, the Trump administration chose Los Angeles for what appears to be a campaign of retribution against sanctuary cities and states that has since expanded from Portland to Chicago to Charlotte. This came in the wake of an apparent meeting by Stephen Miller, White House aide and notorious xenophobe who labelled Los Angeles

a “third world nation”, calling for an increase of deportation quotas and a targeting of any place, including Home Depot stores and 7-11 parking lots. All pretense was dropped of a supposed desire to deport those labeled “criminal,” once again proving that criminalizing anti-immigrant rhetoric is always a cover for a wider racial and economic project targeting non-white migrants, Indigenous people, and workers.

ICE and other federal agents have for months descended upon Los Angeles County court houses, day labor sites, car washes, and garment factories. Many have been transferred into squalid conditions in LA’s federal buildings, sleeping in basements and bathrooms and deprived of food and water. However, Trump's anti-immigrant policy have also met with reality: a spontaneous rebellion of Latina/o/xs and allies in the city of Los Angeles. Thousands of people have confronted federal agents to halt the illegal violence and stand up for their neighbors. Federal agents appeared often masked, in unmarked vehicles, in once-sensitive enforcement sites such as schools, clinics and churches, and with weapons, all while refusing to identify themselves and lying to gain access to locations. Much of what we know about raids comes from decentralized grassroots work witnessing and responding to raids across the US. Such organizing represented a new expansion in the diffuse movement to defend immigrants and Indigenous communities targeted by ICE. While National Guard and even Marines have been summarily (and perhaps illegally) called in to surround ICE operations, and police and sheriffs from across LA have obstructed protests with “less than lethal” munitions and aided in the arrests of observers, resistance grows, and new forms of solidarity are being generated.

As an instrument of U.S. elites and an expression of the most nefarious ideas of Yankee (male) supremacism, the political program headed by Trump seeks to recover the diminished imperial power of the United States, all while targeting decades of grassroots multi-racial, queer and feminist power built in labor, justice, higher education and other arenas. Its strategy: combine total political and economic war on a global scale against enemy populations, to exacerbate the submission of already subordinated countries and political-economic entities, and to construct and target an internal enemy for “war” at the national level. Under the Trump administration, this has come with the national scale looting of public coffers through federal job cuts and budget spending cuts for research grants and international aid programs for private entities - while handing billions in contracts to enrich private prison industries directly especially the GEO Group and tech giants such as Palantir, Google, and Meta.

Uprisings from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to New Orleans remind us that while this may be the project of a coalition of wealthy billionaires, collective power and solidarity

can transform the direction of this occupied land. The raids at worksites reflect the long history of “revolving door” migration that entails the production of “illegality” and “deportability” of migrant workers during times of economic uncertainty and war hysteria, including the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Mexican Repatriation (1930), Executive Order 9066 (1942), and Operation Wetback (1950). Finally, the contrast between the Trump Administration fast tracking of the resettlement of white South Africans while indefinitely suspending other US refugee programs harkens back to racial national origins quotas not seen since the Hart Celler Act was enacted in 1965.

As the Chicana/o/x and Latino Studies Department of California State University Long Beach and allied departments (noted below), we stand in full solidarity with all migrant and Indigenous communities under attack. We call on national, state and local policymakers to take action for:

• Enforce California and local bans on masking of ICE agents, stop the deputization of other agencies, and dismantle related bounty hunting programs such as the ICERAIDS.US site developed by Proud Boy and insurrectionist Enrique Tarrio.
• Halt the use of police and sheriffs to protect ICE operations and quell protests or legal observation, and drop the prosecution of protestors, activists and journalists in anti-ICE protests and community defense.
• Release all detainees kidnapped during raids and end expedited removals. Institute respect for due process and the writ of habeas corpus. This includes the protection and release of children and minors in ICE custody and other DOJ violations of the Flores Agreement (1997).
• Rescind the Travel Ban 2.0 and Mexican Protection Protocols (MPP) or Remain in Mexican policy, and restore the Humanitarian Parole programs and Temporary Protective Status (TPS).
• End the 287-G program and cooperations between local law enforcement with HSI nationwide. (To note, this is not active in California due to the TRUST Act.)
• Expand support and protection for ethnic studies curriculum within California and nationwide to combat disinformation about immigration and the role of activism in US society
• Invest in care-first social safety policies versus mass incarceration and surveillance, that only fuels the deportation machine.
• In the long term, institute a general amnesty for all undocumented migrants, with a path to citizenship. Repatriate deported citizens, Indigenous communities and US veterans.

In higher education, we can also take immediate action. We must, as educators and researchers, halt the divisive rhetoric of lumping immigrants and protesters into good vs. bad labels. We call upon our own university administration and local government to move beyond statements of concern to investing further in legal and social supports for students and workers (including increasing counseling) and further divesting from policing, supporting local rapid response to ICE and unequivocally standing up against state violence as a public university.

We stand squarely with migrant and Indigenous communities and with our students who bear the weight of this moment. As a collective we are both heartbroken by the terror and encouraged by the refusal to submit to this violent, divisive regime and standing for a global vision of rights and solidarity.