USA | An attempt to stop the state of emergency

When President Donald Trump announced the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles on Saturday evening, the narrative spread on social media that the protesters had done the authoritarian president a favor by escalating the conflict with the immigration enforcement agency ICE. "Los Angeles – violence is never the answer. Attacking police officers is never okay," wrote Democratic Senator Adam Schiff (California) on Sunday. "Such attacks only play into the hands of those who seek to polarize and exploit the situation for their own benefit. Don't let that happen." But would the situation be less violent if ICE could continue to arrest and disappear people unhindered?

"It's the confrontation President Trump has been waiting for," began the New York Times op-ed on Monday morning. "Trump and his closest allies sought conflict with California authorities on Sunday by portraying the demonstration as a threat to the entire country."

Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders joined the chorus. "Martin Luther King defeated racist government officials and ended segregation through disciplined nonviolent resistance," Sanders wrote, omitting the militant elements of the civil rights movement. "Violent protests are counterproductive and serve Trump's agenda."

After more than a decade of reporting on police violence, fascistization, and resistance, such categorizations no longer surprise me—even when they come from people further to the left like Bernie Sanders. Behind their statements lies a refusal to accurately identify those responsible for the violence.

The demonstrators who have thrown stones at heavily armed security forces or damaged the vehicles used to kidnap their migrant neighbors in recent days have not instigated violence. No, they have resolutely defended their community.

Does Democratic Senator Schiff from California believe that his statements or those of his party colleagues will stop the deportations of our neighbors?

It is ridiculous to believe that the president and his supporters will become more moderate if protesters hold back.

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The "situation" Schiff cited, which he believes plays into Trump's hands, was already a state of intolerable violence. Militarized immigration officials conducted raids throughout Los Angeles to tear immigrants from their lives and families—with the goal of "whitening" America.

Contrary to the New York Times' portrayal, Trump hadn't waited for an opportunity for confrontation, which subsequently arose thanks to the protests in Los Angeles. His border regime, which the Democratic Party also helped to create over three decades, had already led to a state of war across the country.

The first six months of Trump's second term were marked by draconian measures: Venezuelans were sent to a gulag in El Salvador for their tattoos. Students and academics were arrested and threatened with deportation for expressing their opinions. Judges and members of Congress were prosecuted for doing their jobs. It's ludicrous to believe that the president and his supporters will become more moderate if protesters restrain themselves.

The Los Angeles Police Department itself described last Friday's demonstrations as "peaceful." But Trump's Chief of Staff, the demented white nationalist Stephen Miller, had already declared on "X" earlier that day that the protests represented "an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States." His post was posted above a video showing a slow-moving demonstration of a few hundred people outside the detention center in Los Angeles.

It should be abundantly clear by now that the Trump administration is creating its own reality and treating any opposition as an enemy to be destroyed. "One side is for enforcing the law and protecting Americans," Newt Gingrich, former congressional Republican spokesman and Trump ally, told the New York Times. "The other wants to defend illegal immigrants and is on the side of those who break the law." Gingrich omits to mention that for Republicans , what Trump says is law .

The old refrain of “good” and “bad protesters,” which has always served to divide movements, is completely absurd in the face of a government that enforces “law and order” solely along ideological lines: the participants in the January 2021 storming of the Capitol are free, while the Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil is imprisoned .

A reference to Martin Luther King might actually be useful—though not in Bernie Sanders' watered-down reimagining of the civil rights movement. Instead, we should remember the letter King wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963. In it, he criticized "the white moderate who is committed to order rather than justice; who prefers a false peace, limited to the absence of tension, to a positive peace based on justice. Who repeatedly emphasizes, 'I agree with you in goals, but I disagree with your methods of direct action.'"

Natasha Lennard was born in Great Britain and lives as a freelance writer in New York. This text is a translated text from the online magazine The Intercept.