Trump’s Race War Sets Los Angeles Ablaze, and the Police Are Holding the Torches

The police have never been on the right side of American history, and Los Angeles is their latest battlefield.

American mythology paints police as the line between order and chaos. The badge is presented as a symbol of sacrifice, justice, and safety. But when examined through the lens of history, not through cinematic propaganda or campaign slogans, it becomes undeniable: American police have, time and again, stood on the wrong side of justice, especially during moments when oppressed people dared to speak, march, and demand change.

From the crushing of labor strikes in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the beatings of Civil Rights protesters in the 1960s, to the militarized response to Black Lives Matter protests just a few summers ago (also under dictator Trump), police have not been neutral arbiters. They are the enforcers of elite interests. They protect property before people, power before principle. They have, for generations, served not as guardians of peace, but as domestic sentinels of a violent status quo.

When abolitionists marched, they were met with truncheons. When workers organized for fair wages, they were gunned down in massacres like Ludlow and Haymarket. When Martin Luther King Jr. walked across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, it was police, many deputized just for the day, who attacked unarmed protesters with tear gas and clubs. In 1969, it was the Chicago Police Department that raided Fred Hampton’s apartment and murdered him in his sleep because the idea of Black empowerment was perceived as a threat to the system they served.

The narrative is unbroken. At every pivotal moment when America was challenged to be better, the police chose to defend its ugliest truths instead.

And now, history repeats again.

In Los Angeles, and now spreading across cities nationwide, people are once again taking to the streets, not in chaos, but in defiance and moral clarity. These protests aren’t random or diffuse; they are laser-focused on ICE and its reign of terror against immigrant communities. Activists are calling out the dehumanization of migrants, the state-sanctioned kidnappings labeled as “detention,” and the calculated cruelty of a system designed to criminalize existence. Beneath the myriad acronyms ICE, DHS, LAPD lies a coordinated structure of oppression, deployed to enforce the racial hierarchies and nationalist hysteria fueling Trump’s manufactured race war.

This isn’t just resistance; it’s a reckoning.

The response has been as predictable as it is brutal. In Los Angeles, peaceful protesters opposing ICE raids and the systemic targeting of immigrant communities were surrounded by militarized police, doused in pepper spray, and shoved into vans as if they were enemy combatants. The message was clear: challenge the apparatus of state terror, especially the one hiding behind ICE’s sterile acronym, and you will be met with violence. Across the country, solidarity protests have triggered similar crackdowns, where riot cops outnumber demonstrators, and journalists report more on shattered glass than shattered lives.

This is not law enforcement. This is ideological enforcement.

A Gestapo-like theater of intimidation where opposition to cruelty is rebranded as extremism and speaking out against racialized detentions becomes a national security risk. The media frames these protesters as agitators. Politicians dismiss them as radicals. But their true offense is moral clarity. They expose the uncomfortable truth that legality often masks injustice and that what is deemed "unlawful" is often just inconvenient for those in power.

Let’s be honest about what American policing really is. It did not grow from some neutral desire to maintain public safety. It was built to protect property, preserve hierarchy, and suppress the unruly masses. From slave patrols in the South to strikebreakers in the North, police have always answered to capital, not conscience. So when students, immigrants, and working-class people rise up to challenge a system that cages children and terrorizes families, the police do not hesitate. They do what they have always done:

Protect the system, punish the dissent.

What we are seeing in LA is not an overreaction. It is the intended function of policing in America. It is not a bug in the system. It is the system. And while the slogans and uniforms might change, the violence remains the same. But so does the resistance.

The police have always been on the wrong side of history. The only thing left to decide is how many more times we will let them write it.