We Will Continue To Organize Because We Only Answer To Our Communities
Unión del Barrio received an email on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. Attached to it was a PDF letter from the Chair of the U.S. Senate “Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism,” Josh Hawley. The letter was directed to compañero Ron Gochez, identified as a “spokesman” of Unión del Barrio.
The content of Hawley’s letter focused on spontaneous protests in Los Angeles that increased in number and intensity until Friday, June 6, when some of these protests escalated into clashes between federal agents, local law enforcement agencies, and civilian residents of Los Angeles. Two of these confrontations are the sources of the many videos and images that circulated the country and the globe: on one side, federal agents and local law enforcement fired projectiles such as tear-gas canisters, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades while some protestors threw anything they could find at the agents. That day, there were dozens of arrests, various injuries, broken windows, multiple burning cars, and political graffiti, but no major injuries or deaths.
Mr. Hawley’s June 11th letter claims that Unión del Barrio provided “logistical and financial resources… aiding and abetting criminal conduct…” To be clear, Unión del Barrio has not organized, aided, abetted, financed, or engaged in any illegal activity, and we reject Mr. Hawley’s notion that we are somehow responsible for “lawless mob actions.” Clearly, the objective of Mr. Hawley’s letter was to intimidate us and compel Unión del Barrio to stop organizing the self-defense of our communities, to silence our communities into submission, and to rewrite history as to who are the actual violent criminals behind these events. Through our words and actions, we proudly say that he has failed.
Anyone who cares to pay attention has witnessed how these protests were rooted in a rapidly growing number of intentionally cruel, increasingly violent, militarized immigration operations across the United States. These Los Angeles protests took place as a direct response to the ongoing 159-day colonial reign of terror unleashed by the federal government of the United States against La Raza.(1) This campaign began on January 07, 2025, in Bakersfield, California, when 65 Border Patrol agents initiated “Operation Return to Sender” by violently detaining 80 Central Valley farmworkers.(2) Since that day, tens of thousands of federal agents from the Border Patrol, as well as ICE, HSI, ERO, DEA, FBI, USCIS, CBP, U.S. Marshals, ATF, USPSIS, TSA, and the IRS, have been deployed across the United States to harass and repress our barrios, workplaces, schools, churches, medical centers, restaurants, court proceedings, social gatherings, and public events.
During these 159 days, agents reassigned from positions across the entire U.S. federal government were redeployed to our communities with long weapons and orders to snatch our people off of streets, smash windows, kick down doors, overrun workplaces, imprison people without due process, separate families, and destroy entire communities. Many of these federal agents began wearing masks because they were well aware of the true nature of what they were doing to us. This is while local law enforcement agencies, as well as private for-profit organizations and civilian MAGA supporters, are invited to contribute to this reign of terror. For 159 days and counting, La Raza (con y sin papeles) is being attacked as the primary target of what is clearly a civilian army deployed against our communities.
This federalized national campaign to terrorize La Raza was set to enter its next phase during the first week of June 2025. White House officials announced that Los Angeles would be the largest of several cities subjected to a massive increase in immigration operations, aiming to achieve a daily quota of 3,000 deportations. This aggressive intervention into LA was also designed to redirect national attention away from the Musk/Epstein/Trump scandal and the increasingly unpopular “big beautiful” national spending bill. The repression in Los Angeles featured a dramatic increase in immigration raids throughout the city, organized as made-for-media spectacles to be used to satiate Trump, Miller, and MAGA supporters. Within days, a statewide labor leader was arrested, the Governor of the State and Mayor of LA were threatened with arrest, and a U.S. Senator was roughed up during a press conference.
This is the true story about the source of ongoing state violence that “abetted” the Los Angeles protests of June 2025. Another truth is that this war against La Raza suffered its first major setback as a consequence of the mass outpouring of people’s rage and resistance in Los Angeles. This setback is why the White House ordered the California National Guard and active-duty Marines to occupy Los Angeles, thereby formalizing the transition from a much-publicized “law-enforcement” campaign into a violent military action against a civilian population within the current borders of the United States.
Within this context, we take Mr. Hawley’s letter as a threat against our organization, our members, and the movement. In a related police action, during the morning of June 12, 2025, the FBI, National Guard, and other agencies raided the home and arrested a member of Centro CSO, Alejandro Orellana, claiming that he provided some form of “illegal” material support to protestors in LA. While commenting on this police action on social media, the U.S. attorney emphasized that Orellana’s arrest is the first of more to come. We understand that similar lies could be used as an initial step towards a more substantive legal/political intervention or other repressive measures against more of our compas. We call on our members and supporters to demand that all charges against Alejandro be dropped immediately.
Unión del Barrio is a disciplined organization with a politically united membership that acts collectively, not as individuals. Our members participated and continue to participate in protests throughout the LA area and Southern California. Furthermore, we intend to play a leading role in a national movement against ICE/migra attacks. Unión del Barrio has already provided an effective model for community self-defense, and we are putting our theories into practice. We have informed our members and supporters of the situation, and we have instructed them to remain on high alert in response to ongoing ICE/migra repression. However, we will remain steadfast. Unión del Barrio will continue to expand, strengthen, and increase our community-centered barrio-facing work, such as our Community Patrols and our youth, prisoner, worker, and mujer-centered projects to build dual and contending power. Unlike Mr. Hawley, Unión del Barrio has hundreds of thousands of supporters who express their admiration and support for what we are doing every day, and we will not run away nor abandon them. Nor will we be intimidated or shamed into silence. We will continue to organize in our barrios because we only answer to our communities, and we are accountable to the MOVIMIENTO and LA RAZA.
The colonizers have attempted to silence us for over 500 years, and they have failed. We are part of that legacy of struggle, and we will not stop organizing until the ICE kidnappings stop, until the deportations stop, and until we have self-determination and freedom here, in our historic homeland.
To the courageous gente of Los Angeles who are resisting every day; to nuestro pueblo from Chicago to New York City, Tejas y Arizona, the Northeast, and back to San Diego:
Unión del Barrio shares your anxiety about how many of our families are unaware of the whereabouts of their loved ones. We feel the pain they are inflicting on our most vulnerable community members, our elders, and our children. This physical and psychological terror against our gente is meant to not only squash our fighting spirit and turn back the self-defense of our barrios but also to erase the political clarity in knowing that we are Indigenous peoples and we have the universal right to migrate freely across our ancestral homelands. Our slogans of “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”, “¡Esta es mi tierra, esta es mi lucha!”, “Migra, policia! ¡La misma porqueria!”, “¡Somos un Pueblo, Sin Fronteras!” and “¡El Pueblo Unido, Jamás Será Vencido!” are crystal-clear political statements that these gringo settler-colonialists wish we would abandon from our basic principles.
We can’t accept living in eternal fear, and we do not ask permission or offer apologies for defending our communities and families. History is on our side. Today, more than ever, we have the moral authority and the universal right to defend our people. Los Angeles has become a real example of mass-based resistance to Trump’s anti-Raza agenda, and the eyes of the entire country and the world are on LA right now!
Trump, his lackeys, and the Poli-Migra state repression – in general, the colonial oppressors and the entire system – have as their primary goal to crush the bold spirit of resistance of our gente! We say ¡CHALE! We will continue advancing our struggle for self-defense in our barrios!
Barrio por barrio, cuadra por cuadra, ¡Organízate y Lucha! ¡Ni un paso atrás!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre – Venceremos
Unión del Barrio
June 15, 2025
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- La Raza to means “the people” and Unión del Barrio uses it as “an anti-colonial, working-class, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, transnational, gender/race-neutral term to identify all people within the United States and its colonies who are of Indigenous and Latin American heritage. La Raza is a sociocultural and political term describing the broadest possible collective identity that is organically comprehensible to working-class sectors across North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean.” See VII Final Congressional Report – Informe Central: https://uniondelbarrio.org/main/4-2/pe/final-congressional-report-informe-central/ & Political Program: https://uniondelbarrio.org/main/4-2/about-udb/political-program/
- Of course Unión del Barrio acknowledges the innumerable number of violent raids, detentions, and deportations that took place before January 07, 2025, including those that predate the current Trump presidency. Still, we identify the January 07, 2025 operation in Bakersfield as representative of a clear intensification of violent raids against our communities.
Follow us on our social media platforms and call us at our contact numbers to stay connected!
To report ICE/migra activity, contact our Community Patrols at:
1-213-444-6562 (Los Angeles, CA)
1-760-913-0306 (North County San Diego/ Escondido, CA)
1-805-296-1119 (Oxnard/Ventura, CA)
1-619-916-7215 (San Diego, CA)
To join Unión del Barrio’s campaign for barrio self-defense or request more information email or call:
comitecentral@uniondelbarrio.org
1-619-398-6648 (UdB National)
Información en español: https://uniondelbarrio.org/esp/patrullacomunitaria/
Information in English: https://uniondelbarrio.org/main/communitypatrols/
Donaciones/ Donate: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/QH3E47P2CBKRW
