Los Angeles is erupting in protests—not over distant wars, but a local one — ICE raids that sweep through neighborhoods, tearing families apart, abducting people in the streets, during graduations, from schools and from work, detaining them without due process. This is not just intimidation and cruelty—it’s a form of state-sanctioned violence that mirrors the same tactics used by the Israeli military in Palestine.

ICE’s settlements on Turtle Island

In Fiscal Year 2024, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations arrested over 113,000 people, many in “at‑large” operations, with a staggering 60% subjected to mandatory detention—meaning no right to bond or legal process (immigrantjustice.org). ICE’s mass arrests forcibly rip people from their homes, incarcerate them indefinitely, and deport them—practices that violate both international human rights law and fundamental due-process rights.

The training loop: LAPD → IDF → ICE

LAPD, like many U.S. agencies, trains with the IDF—absorbing military tactics of surveillance, racial profiling, and riot control (theguardian.com). ICE agents have participated in the same “Deadly Exchange” programs, learning from Israeli forces how to suppress dissent and control marginalized communities. This is not coincidence—it’s systemic warfare.

Shared abuse: abduction and family separation

In Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli forces routinely detain Palestinians—often children—without charge, for indefinite periods. Around 700 Palestinian minors are arrested annually, up to 7,000 between 2003–2013, frequently blindfolded, interrogated without counsel, and held without trial (therealnews.com, minorityrights.org, en.wikipedia.org). U.S. ICE follows the same algorithm: raid homes, abduct parents, separate families, hold them without hearing, and deport—while prosecutors and judges justify this cruelty as national security.

Both are apartheid in practice

Human Rights Watch defines apartheid as a system privileging one group over another through legal discrimination, land dispossession, movement restrictions, and systemic violence. That’s precisely what unfolds daily in both contexts: ICE targets Indigenous, Arab, Latinx, Black, and Muslim communities—while the IDF enforces Israel’s control through occupation, walls, checkpoints, and settlements. Neither operates under rule of law—they both operate under rule of dispossession, with soldiers operating with complete impunity in their violent treatment of victims and anyone who stands in their way.

From rising protests to transnational solidarity

Just as Palestinians resist, Indigenous and Latinx communities in LA are rising up against ICE raids—calling for border abolition and community care. Protesters are blockading ICE facilities, forming human chains, and demanding no deportations. These acts are not separate—they’re echoes of the same struggle for dignity, freedom, and sovereignty.

So what needs to happen?

• End the exchange: Defund and shut down programs that militarize Western police through Israeli training.

• Abolish ICE: Replace mass, xenophobic enforcement with community-led immigration solutions rooted in justice and transnational solidarity.

• Global accountability: Demand U.S. leverage be used to end apartheid—not fund it. No military aid or training until Palestinians and migrants are free.

• Center solidarity: Support Indigenous land reclamation here and Palestinian return there—as innately connected struggles, rooted in decolonial imagination.

In both L.A. and Gaza, people are fighting to dismantle the same system: a carceral, colonial logic that justifies abduction, erasure, and occupation. When ICE abducts a Palestinian-American mother in East L.A., and the IDF abducts her cousin from Jenin, we must understand: this is not a separate policy—it is one global system of injustice.

If we are serious about “justice for all,” let’s end the apartheid here and the apartheid there. Let’s stop training militarized police in foreign scripts. Let’s open our hearts, and let our communities live, breathe, and cross borders freely. Because abolition is not a theory—it’s a horizon we build together.