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mass protests
How a Newfound Love of Quotas Drove Trump's Military Invasion of Los Angeles
The administration's shock troops are not going over after criminals, but rather hard-working people nationwide simply going about their lives as valued members of their communities.
Jun 10, 2025
There’s a little-discussed word behind the escalating Gestapo-style abductions and deportations of ordinary working people, many longtime residents, that has produced increasing confrontations and mass protests across the U.S., most prominently in Los Angeles in recent days.
The term is quota. Yes, a word long viewed by the right as wicked as socialism or, more recently, woke.
From affirmative action to diversity, inclusion, and equity (DEI), and other social justice aims that sometimes include numeric percentages, quotas, are intended to redress centuries of racial, gender, and other discriminatory practices in employment, education, politics, and other sectors of society. Such quotas are designed to shift societal behaviors to create opportunities for historically marginalized people.
But those goals have repeatedly been a target for eradication by federal and state governments and the U.S. Supreme Court, and not just from conservatives. Under President Trump, purging any vestige of DEI has been the cover for wholesale assaults on federal employment, university practices, and elsewhere. It coincides with the white supremacist dream of reversing demographic changes in the U.S. and protecting white and far-right political, social, and economic control.
Yet a quota is no longer an anathema when it comes to their own right-wing policies, as is now playing out in the most draconian and inhumane perversion of immigration policy and “border security” in recent history.
Frustrated by what he viewed as a slow pace in deportations through the first four months of his reign, Trump pushed his top immigration staff to drastically ratchet up daily arrests of migrants to reach a flashy goal of one million deportations in his first year. That meant a steroid level explosion from an average of 660 arrests a day to a mandate–a quota–of 3,000 per day.
Marching orders in late May went to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Department of Homeland Security minister Kristi Noem, and Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement border czar Tom Homan.
All three are hardline Trump devotees who have relished carrying out their daily abductions in the most cruel manner possible–dispatching teams of masked agents roughly kidnapping lone individuals on the street, pulling parents away from their children, students on their way to school or volleyball practice, breaking windows in cars to drag out targets.
It all fit the demeanor for Trump’s secret police architects, especially the fanatical Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration policy guru. A man aptly described by ABC correspondent Terry Moran as “richly endowed by hate” whose “hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” fueled not by his brains but his “bile.” And when Moran’s tweet, following the heavy-handed mass raids in Los Angeles and Trump’s autocratic commandeering of the California National Guard to assault the mass protests, prompted Trump’s machine to demand ABC fire Moran, ABC predictably caved and suspended him. Because that’s what major media frequently do on the road to dictatorship.
Trump defended his Los Angeles militarized order as a response to the supposed “invasion” of that city by undocumented immigrants. The real invasion, of course, was the mass deportation arrests of ordinary working people and students, followed by the dispatch of federally commissioned troops, over the objection of state and city officials, to enforce it and quell dissent.
The high-profile Los Angeles showdown symbolizes a significant switch in Trump’s deportation tactics driven by his newfound affection for a quota. It would also require a full repudiation of who Trump had defined as the focus for his deportation plans, outlined in frequent racist demagogy, such as labeling legal Haitian immigrants as eating pet cats and dogs. In a rally in Dayton, Ohioh Trump insisted “I don’t know if you call them (immigrants) people,” Trump said. “In some cases, they’re not people.”
Trump’s campaign rhetoric led many voters into expecting he would focus on deporting immigrants accused of violent and other dangerous crimes, like murder, sexual assault, domestic violence, drunk driving, and child pornography, many of whom are often already in custody.
Over the past decade, reports the Texas Tribune, 70 percent of ICE arrests were “handoffs by local police or federal prisons, according to an analysis by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.” Even with passage of the repressive Laken Riley Act in January, with the votes of 48 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats, the category was stretched to include lesser crimes, such as burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting
But to meet Trump’s demanding quotas, Miller, Homan, and company had to reach far broader, to immigrants with no record, using larger teams of masked federal agents to raid workplaces like factories, restaurants, construction sites, as well as schools and housing centers. The use of unidentified, masked, heavily armed agents is intended to terrorize and intimidate not just the undocumented, but anyone who stands in their way, especially for people who have already witnessed the shredding of legal due process rights.
The New York Times reported how masked agents stormed a student housing complex under construction in Tallahassee, Fl. abducting dozens of migrants, and seizing 15 people working on a flood control project in New Orleans. Massive raids in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires sparked vehement local opposition. And when heavily armed, masked agents in tactical gear raided two San Diego restaurants putting 15 workers in handcuffs, scores of outraged neighborhood residents came out to confront them.
Suddenly, people who had been living and working peacefully for years or decades in the U.S.–janitors, housekeepers, dishwashers, factory, construction, nursing home, laundry, landscape and farm workers–were subject to large scale arrest by heavily armed swat teams in scenes conjuring up images from every dictatorship of the past century. The opposition messaging should clearly identify the everyday people who are being kidnapped and the tactics that are being employed to convey a message of unleashed, unaccountable autocratic power.
Trump’s brown shirt campaign has also sabotaged long-standing immigration system protections, such as courthouses, arresting non-citizens properly showing up for scheduled court hearings. And they were pressuring judges to quickly dismiss cases to more easily avoid due process procedures for quicker deportation, all of which ignores the long-term consequences of discouraging undocumented people from fulfilling their legal judicial expectations. Overall, the quotas remove any incentive to ensure all persons, whether documented or not, are guaranteed the legal rights stipulated by the Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments.
“They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where they [immigrants] are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “This administration came into office with the illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, and they are doubling down now on that agenda.”
“Public polling,” Gupta added, “is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies.”
That’s the danger Trump is creating for what for not only his signature issue, but also a longtime fundamental theme for Trumpism and the far right. Even in rural communities. One such example being a Missouri county that voted by 80 percent for Trump where Carol Mayorga, originally from Hong Kong, who had lived peacefully for 20 years, raising a family and making friends in a local pancake and waffle house. Her arrest sparked a vocal backlash and broad public support.
In red states and blue states, many Trump supporters watching neighbors and friends arrested, even deported, and their communities militarized and invaded by images they may have only seen on movie screens, are increasingly feeling betrayed.
“This is not what we voted for,” proclaimed Republican Florida State Sen. Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump. “As the state senator who represents her district and the daughter of Cuban refugees, who are now just as American, if not more so, than Stephen Miller, I am deeply disappointed by these actions…This is not what we voted for. I have always supported Trump through thick and thin. However, this is unacceptable and inhumane.”Keep ReadingShow Less
People Power Blunted Trump Before — Now We Must Do So Again
While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure.
Mar 23, 2025
Donald Trump’s first term as president saw some of the largest mass protests seen in the U.S. in over 50 years, from the 2017 Women’s March to the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder.
Things feel different this time around. Critics seem quieter. Some point to fear of retribution. But there’s also a sense that the protests of Trump’s first term were ultimately futile. This has contributed to a widespread mood of despair.
As The New York Times noted not long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.” That’s a common perspective these days.
But what if it’s wrong?
As a historian, I study how our narratives about the past shape our actions in the present. In this case, it’s particularly important to get the history right.
In fact, popular resistance in Trump’s first term accomplished more than many observers realize; it’s just that most wins happened outside the spotlight. In my view, the most visible tactics – petitions, hashtags, occasional marches in Washington – had less impact than the quieter work of organizing in communities and workplaces.
Understanding when movements succeeded during Trump’s first term is important for identifying how activists can effectively oppose Trump policy in his second administration.
Quiet victories of the sanctuary movement
Mass deportation has been a cornerstone of Trump’s agenda for more than a decade. Yet despite his early pledge to create a “deportation force” that would expel millions, Trump deported only half as many people in his first term as Barack Obama did in his first term.
Progressive activists were a key reason. By combining decentralized organizing and nationwide resource-sharing, they successfully pushed scores of state and local governments to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
When the sociologist Adam Safer examined thousands of cities and dozens of states, he found that a specific type of sanctuary law that activists supported – barring local jails and prisons from active cooperation with ICE – successfully reduced ICE arrests. A study by legal scholar David K. Hausman confirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what many politicians allege.
Another important influence on state and local officials was employers’ resistance to mass deportation. The E-Verify system requiring employers to verify workers’ legal status went virtually unenforced, since businesses quietly objected to it. As this example suggests, popular resistance to Trump’s agenda was most effective when it exploited tensions between the administration and capitalists.
The ‘rising tide’ against fossil fuels
In his effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry, Trump in his first term withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, weakened or eliminated over 100 environmental protections and pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy.
Researchers projected that these policies would kill tens of thousands of people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute to tens of millions of deaths, and untold other suffering, by century’s end.
That’s not the whole story, though. Trump’s first-term energy agenda was partly thwarted by a combination of environmental activism and market forces.
His failure to resuscitate the U.S. coal industry was especially stark. Coal-fired plant capacity declined faster during Trump’s first term than during any four-year period in any country, ever. Some of the same coal barons who celebrated Trump’s victory in 2016 soon went bankrupt.
CBS News covered the bankruptcy of coal firm Murray Energy, founded by Trump supporter Robert E. Murray.The most obvious reasons for coal’s decline were the U.S. natural gas boom and the falling cost of renewable energy. But its decline was hastened by the hundreds of local organizations that protested coal projects, filed lawsuits against regulators and pushed financial institutions to disinvest from the sector. The presence of strong local movements may help explain the regional variation in coal’s fortunes.
Environmentalists also won some important battles against oil and gas pipelines, power plants and drilling projects. In a surprising number of cases, organizers defeated polluters through a combination of litigation, civil disobedience and other protests, and by pressuring banks, insurers and big investors.
In 2018, one pipeline CEO lamented the “rising tide of protests, litigation and vandalism” facing his industry, saying “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”
Green energy also expanded much faster than Trump and his allies would have liked, albeit not fast enough to avert ecological collapse. The U.S. wind energy sector grew more in Trump’s first term than under any other president, while solar capacity more than doubled. Research shows that this progress was due in part to the environmental movement’s organizing, particularly at the state and local levels.
As with immigration, Trump’s energy agenda divided both political and business elites. Some investors became reluctant to keep their money in the sector, and some even subsidized environmental activism. Judges and regulators didn’t always share Trump’s commitment to propping up fossil fuels. These tensions between the White House and business leaders created openings that climate activists could exploit.
Worker victories in unlikely places
Despite Trump self-promoting as a man of the people, his policies hurt workers in numerous ways – from his attack on workers’ rights to his regressive tax policies, which accelerated the upward redistribution of wealth.
Nonetheless, workers’ direct action on the job won meaningful victories. For example, educators across the country organized dozens of major strikes for better pay, more school funding and even against ICE. Workers in hotels, supermarkets and other private-sector industries also walked out. Ultimately, more U.S. workers went on strike in 2018 than in any year since 1986.
This happened not just in progressive strongholds but also in conservative states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. At least 35 of the educators’ strikes defied state laws denying workers the right to strike.
In addition to winning gains for workers, the strike wave apparently also worked against Republicans at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is a common side effect of labor militancy and mass protest.
Quiet acts of worker defiance also constrained Trump. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic featured widespread resistance to policies that raised the risk of infection, particularly the lack of mask mandates.
Safety-conscious workers frequently disobeyed their employers, in ways seldom reflected in official strike data. Many customers steered clear of businesses where people were unmasked. These disruptions, and fears they might escalate, led businesses to lobby government for mask mandates.
This resistance surely saved many lives. With more coordination, it might have forced a decisive reorientation in how government and business responded to the virus.
Labor momentum could continue into Trump’s second term. Low unemployment, strong union finances and widespread support for unions offer opportunities for the labor movement.
Beyond marches
Progressive movements have no direct influence over Republicans in Washington. However, they have more potential influence over businesses, lower courts, regulators and state and local politicians.
Of these targets, business ultimately has the most power. Business will usually be able to constrain the administration if its profits are threatened. Trump and Elon Musk may be able to dismantle much of the federal government and ignore court orders, but it’s much harder for them to ignore major economic disruption.
While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure. Building the capacity for that disruption will require sustained organizing in workplaces and communities.
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