Some gente in activist circles have questioned Unión del Barrio’s February 2, 2025, position on the recent wave of youth-centered “spontaneous” protests. The most consistent criticisms are that “We have to stand with the youth” and “UdB shouldn’t try to police the movement.” Because we tend to agree with these points, some observations require more discussion. We feel the need to provide a more analytical explanation of our observations and concerns regarding this growing trend in anti-ICE protests and invite more feedback from comrades and allied movimiento organizations.
To begin, we don’t minimize the mass outpouring of youth coraje and militant protest – far from it. Youth are integral to every revolution, and we unequivocally believe they are correct to protest today. Unión del Barrio is proud to see barrio youth taking a public, combative stand to defend their families and communities, demonstrating their courage, anger, and pride – flags and all. In fact, UdB has had members attend most of these events because we must be with the people, even when things are disorganized and chaotic, maybe even more so when things are chaotic, and it involves gente del barrio.
Instead, we advise community members in general to maintain a critical eye on the current tidal wave of online protests and dis/misinformation regarding ICE/migra activities. Unión del Barrio’s principal concern has been the highly influential position that anonymous online flyers and dis/misinformation currently hold over this fragile social movement. Fear is rampant, while hundreds of event and protest flyers circulate online daily, many using AI-generated images that look like advertising for a Cinco de Mayo happy hour. On one day, February 3, 2025, there were four separate anonymous events in San Diego:
- one in San Ysidro,
- one in North County San Diego,
- the “day without immigrants” (first, we aren’t immigrants. And this call got traction because many students throughout Southern California didn’t go to school),
- and one in Chicano Park. The individual who did the Chicano Park flyer never communicated with the Chicano Park Steering Committee (CPSC) and didn’t identify themselves to CPSC board members during the event. By the announced 10:00 am start time, about 20-30 people had shown up at Chicano Park. The protest continued all day and was generally mellow until about 5:30 pm when 40 youth decided to repeat what they had seen on social media happening in Los Angeles. They marched onto the 5 freeway alone, without security, planning, or political agenda. It was a risky move, to say the least.
Recent events demonstrate how anonymous content on social media has far too much influence over the nature and direction of the movement and, at times, more influence than actual people on the ground. In this instance, the warning that “the medium is the message” is an observable reality. This fact alone is dangerous and unacceptable for those who care about the movimiento, and it is why we do not apologize for defending the principles of organized resistance. Anyone taking this question seriously only has to go back to Occupy Wall Street and BLM to examine the role of social media and spontaneity in their rapid rise and fall.
All social media platforms are instruments of behavior modification, plain and simple. Social media as a technology, in practical terms, is a tool of digital colonialism – not to conquer lands and displace people, but to conquer consciencias, displacing generational histories of struggle and barrio-based political agendas, to replace them with influencer culture in a perpetual contest to win more “likes.” As movimiento organizations, we are compelled to use this pig instrument, but we can’t forget that it remains a technology of decadent consumer culture and systemic oppression.
Trump’s government depends entirely on social media, and these technologies are the base of Trump’s cultural and political influence. With the “federal funding freezes,” tariff threats, and U.S. claim over Gaza, Trump’s government has established a social media-centered “three steps forward – one step back” pattern of political action to advance its reactionary agenda:
- Make outrageous, extreme public statements that directly threaten actual and potential oppositional forces.
- Impose radical “shock & awe” executive orders or policy changes.
- Observe and assess private and public reactions to these actions and adjust/postpone policies to neutralize oppositional forces and placate current and potential supporters.
This pattern is partly why we suspect the same is happening with the ongoing threat of “mass deportations.” As of February 6, 2025, Trump’s government has not mobilized the vast resources required to successfully execute “mass deportations of 22 million people.” A campaign of this scale would need tens of thousands of government agents to carry out the apprehensions, a network of empty detention centers near the U.S./Mexico border, a “legal” framework to legislate and fund this effort, etc. Trump’s administrators in charge of his fascist “immigration policies” don’t have a clue what the necessary legislative, technical, and logistical requirements are for conducting the “largest mass deportations in the history of the United States.” Homeland Security researchers and military analysts are actively studying how to implement these policies.
We suspect what is actually happening now is that the federal government is field-testing the cultural feasibility of its planned campaign for mass deportations. What we have experienced during the last two weeks is not a wave of mass deportations but a large number of small, precise, and highly mediatized (made for social media) “shock and awe” raids and policy statements (14th Amendment, Guantanamo Bay, concentration camps in El Salvador, etc.) designed to terrorize our most populated barrios in cities across the U.S. The current small-scale raids in large media markets allow the federal government to observe and assess our gente’s potential capacity to resist mass deportations. Furthermore, the current campaign is also being used to observe and evaluate U.S. citizen and corporate media acquiescence to a future mass deportation campaign. In other words, we are experiencing the “test run” or “dress rehearsal” for a genuine mass deportation campaign later down the line.
Working in partnership with every major social media company in the U.S., Trump’s government now has administrative control over the world’s most advanced predictive technologies and digital meta-data collection techniques, and they are deploying them against our barrios as we speak. Unión del Barrio is reasonably certain that the Trumpista state and its MAGA supporters are behind at least 1/3 of the anonymous calls for our communities to protest, boycott, walk out, etc. We observed similar patterns of online activity in 2016-2018 when the U.S. federal government accused the Russians of a mis/disinformation campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 elections. Furthermore, we can’t overlook the long history of the federal government circulating lies and creating fake events under COINTELPRO to distract, undermine, and exhaust social movements.
To some, this assessment may seem exaggerated, but it’s not. In recent years, U.S. spy and law enforcement agencies have partnered with social media companies to execute similar campaigns nationwide and worldwide. Some of the clearest examples of this type of counterinsurgent operation were used to undermine water protectors at Standing Rock and student protests in Chile, to contain democratic movements in the Philippines under Duterte and in India under Modi, and to win elections for Trump in 2016 and Brazil’s Bolsonaro in 2018.
Remember that while UdB has been on the streets with our community youth, we have also been conducting direct action patrols to defend our barrios from ICE/migra raids (see “Las Patrullas Comunitarias de UdB“). Doing these patrols has taken its toll on Unión del Bario’s limited resources, human and otherwise. Regardless, there has been a massive outpouring of support for our work throughout Southern California and beyond. If we describe the impact of our “in real life” work using influencer metrics, we have had over 2 million people “engage” with our barrio self-defense work during the last 2-3 weeks. The current Community Patrols model comes from decades of experiences going back to the early 90s when UdB conducted similar patrols after the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.
Unión del Barrio is certain that the ONLY WAY to stop what is happening now and to prepare for what is inevitably coming is to build a disciplined national organization capable of defending our barrios across the U.S. We have summarized our goals and objectives in our 2023 Congressional Report. Raza-oriented social media influencers still have a vital role to play; for example, circulating verified ICE/migra activities, amplifying the most effective instances of barrio-based self-defense, and, when the time comes for all to rally around a call for a unified national protest and general strike, ensuring that the information reaches every single one of the 70+ million Raza who currently live within the political borders of the U.S. It’s only at that point, when a unified movement for Raza self-determination is ready to stand at its full stature, will we be able to say to these marranos, NO PASARÁN.
Concientización, Organización, Acción y Liberación
