Last month, the streets of Los Angeles were awash with militant protests against ICE’s kidnapping and deportation of immigrant workers. Working-class Angelenos mobilized against Trump’s surge in anti-immigrant repression, battling police in riot gear firing teargas, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades.

Trump sent in federalized National Guards and Marines, but the main force attacking protesters was the hated LAPD. Meanwhile, Democrats like Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen “Ruthless” Ruth Bass were standing at their podiums striking sympathetic poses. Make no mistake: these people are not our friends. They are enemies of the working class, enemies of migrants, and enemies of any genuine resistance to the capitalist state machinery that brutalizes us.

Shameless hypocrisy 

Bass appointed Jim McDonnell to take over the notorious LAPD last year. McDonnell—who once described his over $450,000 a year salary as “midrange”—is one of the highest-paid police chiefs in the country. The mayor called him “a leader, an innovator, and a change maker.” But not much has changed for the LAPD. It continues to be one of the most bloated and violent police forces in America.

Upon his appointment as LAPD Chief, McDonnell told the press, “I want to be unequivocal. LAPD will protect LA’s immigrant community. We will not cooperate with mass deportations, and on an individual level, officers will not take action to determine a person’s immigration status and will not arrest them for that status . . . Los Angeles is a city of immigrants, and my job is to protect this city. That’s exactly what I’ll do.”

How did this great protector of immigrants respond to anti-ICE protests? By blasting tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at demonstrators in an attempt to ensure ICE’s continued ability to raid schools, hospitals, and workplaces.

This is no surprise. When he was LA County Sheriff, McDonnell opened the doors for federal immigration authorities, quietly maintaining information-sharing pipelines with ICE, while publicly promising the opposite.

For her part, Bass cried crocodile tears, “As mayor of a proud city of immigrants . . . I am deeply angered by what has taken place.” Meanwhile, her hand-picked henchman was taking the lead in repressing the protests. The shameless hypocrisy of the Democrats—their willingness to tell bald-faced lies to secure votes—cannot be overstated.

Two-faced liberalism

Gavin Newsom, like his protege Bass, embodies this two-faced liberalism. Newsom is feted in the capitalists press as a “pragmatist” and “technocratic centrist.” In plain English, this means he will always side with capital.

As mayor of San Francisco, he scored points with residents by authorizing same-sex marriages. He used the resulting goodwill as political cover to slash welfare programs for the homeless. Today, he talks big about resisting Trump’s “authoritarianism” while gutting Medi-Cal for immigrants, intensifying sweeps of the homeless, and cynically flirting with rightwing culture warriors like Charlie Kirk.

Newsom, who’s positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run, is a perfect portrait of liberalism in the era of capitalist decay: hollow and narrowly poll-tested, with arms crossed in utter contempt for the working class.

While immigrants face the threat of deportation and workers fill the streets in protest, what are the “progressives” in Washington doing? AOC and Bernie Sanders have done nothing but ramp up their fundraising and reissue tired warnings about Trump. Their so-called “resistance” amounts to funneling working-class energy into the same party that runs the LAPD, the same party that cuts healthcare for immigrants, and the same party that hires ICE collaborators and calls them protectors of immigrants.

Fight back with class struggle

The Democrats are not the “lesser evil”—they are a party of deporters, strike-breakers, and incarcerators. They cloak themselves in symbolic gestures and “progressive” phrases only to wield the same batons, build the same cages, and serve the same capitalist bosses.

The fight against anti-immigrant terror demands class independence—a movement rooted, not in the needs of lobbyists and their donors, but in the power of organized workers. The brutal attacks being waged on immigrants are not aberrations—they are a necessary part of the rotten capitalist system that both Republicans and Democrats maintain.

With US imperialism in crisis and the economy saddled by debt, the two capitalist parties will only intensify their attacks on the working class. A lasting end to their offensive against immigrants and all workers will not come from city hall press conferences—it will come from strike committees, mass assemblies, and class-independent communist organizing under the banner of the RCA.