Los Angeles Indymedia : Activist News

(LOS ANGELES) Immigration activist Roberto Lovato was there when the Los Angeles Police Department launched its brutal assault on a park full of migrant families with children last week in LA, and this is what he saw and understood. "I saw the LAPD," he wrote "dragging the immigrants and the entire country into dangerous terrain, a new threshold in the immigration war raging around the country."

What he saw was more than an Iraq-style surge; this was an all out escalation, a new strategic plateau in the U.S. government’s War on Migrants.

Javier Rodriguez, an immigration activist with L.A’s March 25th Coalition, called it a "political decision" to "dismantle this [immigrant rights] movement."

Last year, in 2006, millions of migrant and their allies – their familia – took the streets, giving birth to the most powerful mass movement in the U.S. since the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 70s.

The new movement stunned the US ruling class, drove the deepest of wedges straight into the heart of a seemingly unstoppable neo–con drive toward fascism, exposed the essential brutality and racism at the core of the Republican, neo–con agenda, began the public unraveling of the Bush regime, and opened the door to the stunning exposure, repudiation and defeat of the neo-cons in the House and Senate, who had led the racist charge to make felons of all undocumented migrants – and of anyone who so much as gave a ride to someone undocumented.

And like their counterparts in the 60s era, the reactionaries of today saw the unmistakable outlines of the threat presented by brown resistance to their power and their drive toward a fascistic state. Like the reactionaries of that era, they moved to kill the movement with mass arrests and state intimidation. Only this time, it wasn’t the FBI, COINTELPRO, the murders or imprisonment of Black leaders, or the mass incarceration of Black and other peoples of color that the State relied on. This time, it was the department of Homeland Security, ICE, and a strategy of direct vengeance – the deliberate terrorization of the millions who had taken the streets and who had precipitated the collapse of the neo-fascist juggernaut.
More: Public Terror: Escalating the War on Migrants by Juan Santos and Leslie Radford
From the newswire: IMMIGRATION DEBATES UP IN THE US SENATE, NEW SANCTUARY MOVEMENT LAUNCHED IN THE U.S. by AJLPP | | AJLPP / CDIR Rejects New Immigration Proposals as Anti-Immigrant, Anti- Family Reunificat by Coalition In Defense of Immigrant Rights .