5 Escalation Tactics LA Protesters Could Borrow From History
Protesters surrounded federal detention centers across Los Angeles in early February, blocking entrances and clashing with riot police. They weren’t writing a new playbook—they were pulling pages from movements that came before.
The February 5-7 demonstrations against Trump’s National Guard deployment brought together labor unions, immigrant rights groups, and abolition activists. Organizers called it the largest coordinated action since the 2006 immigrant rights marches. But after three days of tear gas, 56 arrests, and wall-to-wall media coverage, the National Guard remained in place and ICE operations continued.
Five ways to increase pressure offer strategic paths forward. These approaches draw from successful campaigns spanning the 1960s sit-ins to the 2018 Occupy ICE encampments.
What Happened in Los Angeles
President Trump’s decision to federalize 4,000 California National Guard troops without Governor Gavin Newsom’s consent triggered the mobilization. The move marked a dramatic escalation from June 2025 enforcement actions. Those earlier actions had resulted in the federal arrest of David Huerta, president of SEIU California and one of the state’s most prominent labor leaders.
The protests hit multiple federal buildings at once—the downtown courthouse, ICE offices, and the Metropolitan Detention Center where immigrants awaited deportation. Protesters deliberately chose to spread out law enforcement thin while causing as much disruption as possible.
Protesters established sustained blockades at building entrances, preventing workers from entering. Marches filled downtown streets with tens of thousands at peak hours on February 6. Occupation attempts brought demonstrators directly to federal building entrances. Freeway disruptions, borrowing from Black Lives Matter tactics, temporarily shut down major transportation arteries.
Labor unions mobilized members on short notice despite arrest risks. Immigrant rights organizations activated phone trees and social media networks. Student groups brought younger participants. Faith leaders mobilized congregations.
Law enforcement responded with escalating force. Police in riot gear deployed tear gas, pepper spray, and less-lethal projectiles against crowds refusing to disperse. At the Metropolitan Detention Center, federal officers on rooftops fired chemical irritants down at demonstrators.
The Coalition Behind the Protests
Labor’s Institutional Muscle
SEIU played the central coordinating role. Locals representing janitors, healthcare workers, and public sector employees mobilized thousands. The union’s state council issued official statements calling for National Guard withdrawal. They positioned enforcement as a labor issue affecting working people directly.
This gave protests access to significant resources: communication networks reaching thousands of workers, legal defense infrastructure built through decades of labor conflict, and political relationships with sympathetic officials including the governor. Some locals found creative ways to let members get paid time for political action without violating no-strike clauses.
Immigrant Community Networks
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) provided the organizing networks and community trust needed to mobilize immigrant populations. With decades of organizing experience and deep relationships within LA’s large immigrant community, CHIRLA activists worked as on-ground coordinators.
The National Day Laborer Organizing Network activated its LA affiliates to mobilize day laborers and low-wage workers. These workers faced particular vulnerability to enforcement. This brought workers who had personally experienced raids and deportation threats into protest leadership positions.
The Radical Flank
Anti-ICE and abolition groups brought commitment to sustained confrontation and willingness to engage in tactics risking arrest. Organizations that want to abolish ICE challenged not merely specific enforcement tactics but the existence of enforcement institutions altogether.
Labor unions brought institutional resources and membership numbers but also caution about illegal tactics. Immigrant-led organizations brought legitimacy and community roots but recognized undocumented participants faced much bigger legal risks. Abolitionist groups brought willingness to sustain confrontation but sometimes clashed with more cautious constituencies over tactical intensity.
Did It Work?
Department of Homeland Security statements claimed federal enforcement operations continued uninterrupted despite protests. They reported no reduction in deportations during the protest period.
The protests succeeded in mobilizing thousands within days. The fact that protests sustained over three days and reconstituted after initial police dispersal suggests commitment beyond single-day mass mobilization.
Media coverage was extensive in national outlets. The combination of federal troops deployed without gubernatorial consent, a major labor leader’s arrest, thousands in the streets, and federal authorities using chemical weapons created compelling news narratives.
Disruptive tactics like freeway blockades generate high media volume. But coverage tends to emphasize the disruption itself rather than underlying grievances. News reports focus on traffic impacts and police response rather than enforcement policy concerns.
A survey conducted shortly after indicated 59% of voters described ICE as “too aggressive.” This represented a 10-point increase from July 2025 polling before protests intensified. But the same polling showed big differences between parties, with Republican-identified respondents more likely to support aggressive enforcement despite protests.
Governor Newsom’s decision to sue the Trump administration over National Guard federalization occurred amid the mobilizations. The lawsuit challenged Trump’s interpretation of Title 10 authority, arguing the constitutional framework requiring gubernatorial consent had been violated.
Five Escalation Tactics From History
1. Decentralized Blockade Networks at Hundreds of Locations
Rather than concentrating protest actions in Los Angeles, movements could systematically identify federal enforcement sites nationwide and coordinate near-simultaneous blockades at hundreds of locations.
The 1960 lunch counter sit-in movement demonstrated this approach’s viability. After the initial Greensboro sit-in on February 1, 1960, the tactic spread to dozens of cities within weeks. By April, sit-in protests were occurring simultaneously throughout the South with no central coordinating organization, yet using remarkably similar tactics.
The 50501 movement organized protests simultaneously at 67 state capitol buildings. Local organizers coordinated through social media and Reddit. By October 2025, organizers had scaled the approach to reach nearly 7 million participants at over 2,700 locations nationally. According to organizer claims, this was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.
Federal enforcement sites exist in nearly every major American city. A coordinated national action targeting ICE field offices, detention centers, and federal courts simultaneously would overwhelm federal law enforcement capacity to respond. If organizers could coordinate blockades at 100+ locations with even modest participation—50 to 200 people per location—the total disruption would be substantial.
The tactic would also spread the legal and physical risk over a much larger number of people. Rather than concentrating arrests in a single city where local prosecution resources might mount intensive cases, distributed nationwide action would scatter arrests throughout federal districts, potentially overwhelming prosecutors.
Coordinating without a central leader creates challenges for staying on message and keeping tactics consistent. The 50501 movement faced internal disagreements about tactics and messaging. Coordinating potentially thousands of autonomous local actions to stay nonviolent and send a clear message requires significant trust and communication infrastructure.
2. Supply Chain Disruption Targeting Detention Center Operations
Rather than attempting to physically disrupt ICE field operations, organizers could research and identify the supply chains supporting ICE detention centers. These include food vendors, transportation contractors, medical suppliers, and construction companies maintaining buildings. Organizers could then organize boycotts, strikes, and blockades of these contractors.
While federal authorities can suppress direct confrontations at ICE sites themselves, disrupting the supply chains that keep detention centers operational requires targeting private contractors less committed to federal enforcement missions.
The United Farm Workers’ campaigns under Cesar Chavez employed supply chain and consumer boycott tactics extensively. Rather than attempting direct confrontation with farm owners controlling vast agricultural territory, the UFW organized consumer boycotts of lettuce and grapes produced by non-union farms. Woolworth’s stores reported $200,000 in lost sales in Greensboro alone when boycott sympathizers avoided purchasing their products.
Detention centers depend on private contractors for multiple services—food provision, medical care, transportation, building maintenance, and security operations. These contractors are often subsidiary companies more vulnerable to public pressure and organized disruption than federal authorities themselves. A coordinated campaign targeting detention center supply chains would force federal authorities to address disruption indirectly through solving contractor participation problems rather than through direct confrontation with protesters.
Several detention center operators, particularly private corrections companies like Geo Group, are publicly traded corporations vulnerable to campaigns pressuring investors to divest and shareholder activism.
Targeting suppliers requires extensive research and strategic planning to identify vulnerabilities and develop plans for disruption. This is time-intensive work unlikely to be conducted through spontaneous protest mobilization. Contractor companies may respond by increasing security and making their operations less accessible to disruption attempts.
3. Sustained Multi-Location Encampment Networks
Rather than single-location encampments dependent on police tolerance, organizers could establish intentional networks of encampments at multiple federal sites connected through communication systems and material support networks. Each would function as a mostly independent community with its own decision-making structures.
Each encampment would operate with democratic decision-making, trained de-escalation teams, medical response systems, and fundraising mechanisms to sustain long-term presence. The network would be coordinated through regular communication but with each camp making its own decisions. This creates a system where removal of any individual encampment wouldn’t bring down the whole network.
The 2018-2019 Occupy ICE Portland encampment created a tent city surrounding the ICE building. It included kitchens, medical tents, legal observer stations, and childcare infrastructure enabling participation of families with children. The occupation sustained presence for weeks despite police threats and legal pressure.
The Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock camps of 2016-2017 created extended encampments with substantial infrastructure. They sustained thousands of people for months. The camps maintained water systems, food preparation, medical response, security protocols, and democratic decision-making processes throughout multi-month occupation.
Sustained encampment networks would serve multiple functions at once: disrupting federal operations through continuous presence, demonstrating that protest communities can govern themselves, providing visible resistance to detention and deportation, and offering support to detained immigrants including communication with legal advocates, witness testimony about conditions, and family contact.
Media coverage of sustained encampments with families, children, medical professionals, and faith leaders provides visual contrast to militarized federal enforcement operations.
Sustained encampment networks require substantial ongoing resources—food, shelter materials, fuel, and medical supplies. This consumes significant movement resources and volunteer time, particularly when federal authorities interfere with supply deliveries. Encampment governance structures often become sites of internal conflict, with different groups disagreeing about decision-making processes and resource allocation.
4. Labor Movement Work Stoppages in Strategic Economic Sectors
Rather than labor unions simply mobilizing members to march, organizers could coordinate work stoppages in strategic economic sectors including sectors with large immigrant workforces and vulnerable supply chains.
Union leadership in construction, hospitality, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare sectors could call work stoppages coordinated with anti-ICE protest actions. This creates economic disruption that pressures political decision-makers. Coordinating citywide strikes among hospitality workers in Los Angeles would disrupt a major economic sector during peak tourism periods.
The May 1, 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” general strike achieved massive economic disruption. Millions of immigrant workers boycotted work, school, and consumption on a single day. The tactic demonstrated immigrant workers’ economic power and put pressure on congressional representatives debating reform. Economic impacts were documented in agricultural regions, construction sites, food service establishments, and other sectors dependent on immigrant labor.
The 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, supported by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., demonstrated how strategic strikes in key services create political pressure in ways that marches alone can’t. The strike crippled the city’s ability to collect garbage, creating public health concerns and economic impacts that forced political attention.
Work stoppages create economic disruption that affects powerful groups with direct access to political decision-makers—business owners, chambers of commerce, and investors in corporations disrupted by strikes.
Work stoppages face severe legal constraints. Many unions have contracts containing no-strike clauses. Striking in violation of contract provisions means unions can be sued for damages. Federal labor law permits employers to fire striking workers under many circumstances, creating employment risk for union members. Enforcement operations themselves threaten immigrant workers’ participation in strikes through threat of arrest and deportation.
5. Coordinated Legal Strategy as Unified Pressure Campaign
Rather than treating individual arrests as isolated criminal proceedings, organizers could develop a coordinated legal approach treating prosecution of arrested protesters as part of a broader political campaign challenging federal authority.
Legal teams would use the legal process to obtain documents and expose federal prosecutors’ and law enforcement tactics, win acquittals through jury trials demonstrating government overreach, file civil rights lawsuits against individual officers and federal agencies, and coordinate with administrative law specialists filing complaints with government watchdog offices and agency oversight bodies.
The strategy would involve identifying patterns of government abuse—fabricated charges, targeting specific people for prosecution, improper use of force, and illegal searches. Individual criminal cases would build evidence for broader civil rights litigation and administrative investigations.
The Newsom v. Trump lawsuit challenging Trump’s National Guard federalization provided sophisticated legal precedent for mounting federal constitutional challenges to enforcement actions. California’s Attorney General and Governor filed suit arguing that Title 10 deployment without gubernatorial consent violated constitutional provisions reserving state control of National Guard, that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibited military engagement in domestic law enforcement, and that the deployment constituted abuse of executive authority.
The Civil Rights Movement’s legal strategy combined street protest with litigation attacking segregation laws directly through federal courts. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed cases challenging segregation in multiple legal domains—housing, education, employment, and voting. They built legal victories that eventually culminated in major Supreme Court decisions.
ACT UP’s legal defense strategy during the 1980s-1990s AIDS crisis involved careful documentation of arrests, development of specialized legal defenses, and coordinating criminal defense with media strategy. The combination of dramatic direct action, documented arrests generating media coverage, and successful legal defenses put pressure on federal authorities from all sides. Many ACT UP activists were acquitted or charges were dismissed.
Coordinated legal strategy would turn prosecutions into political opportunities rather than simple criminal proceedings. Each arrested protester becomes a witness to government abuse. Each trial becomes opportunity to publicize federal authorities’ actions. Each acquittal sets precedent for future cases and demonstrates jurors’ sympathy for anti-ICE organizing. Civil litigation means federal agencies can be forced to pay damages and face limits on their operations.
Sophisticated legal strategy requires experienced attorneys willing to coordinate defense over hundreds of cases—a substantial resource commitment. Federal prosecutors and judges sympathetic to Trump administration enforcement priorities might resist efforts to use courts as forums for challenging enforcement policies. Individual defendants faced with criminal charges and potential jail time may not be able to treat trials as political opportunities when facing jail time matters more than movement strategy.
What History Teaches
Research on movement effectiveness shows that nonviolent movements succeed roughly twice as often as violent movements. Erica Chenoweth’s research on civil resistance campaigns between 1900-2006 found that nonviolent campaigns achieved their objectives approximately 53% of the time, while violent campaigns succeeded approximately 26% of the time.
Chenoweth’s research also identifies the “3.5% rule,” suggesting that when 3.5% of a population participates in nonviolent resistance, the campaign rarely fails. The number becomes too large for authorities to suppress without cracking down so hard they lose legitimacy.
Research on disruptive protest tactics shows complicated connections between disruption and effectiveness. While disruptive protests generate more media attention than non-disruptive protests, effects on public opinion are mixed. Some research finds that disruptive protests decrease public support for the movement’s goals. Other research finds neutral or positive effects depending on how media covers the disruption.
The 2006 immigrant rights movement revealed both the power and limitations of general strikes. Disruption proved effective at generating political pressure and forced politicians to engage with the movement’s demands. However, when the targeted legislative threat was defeated, the movement faced difficulty maintaining momentum toward passing new laws.
The Wisconsin Capitol occupation ultimately didn’t prevent passage of the anti-union law. However, the occupation mobilized broad labor movement opposition, generated sustained media coverage, and kept the issue at center of public consciousness for months.
These historical lessons suggest that contemporary anti-ICE protests can draw on many different tactical approaches with documented records of effectiveness: sustained occupation and sit-in tactics, strategic use of arrest and jailing as mobilization tools, boycotts and economic disruption, coalition building across labor and immigrant constituencies, and careful media strategy to turn disruption into political pressure.
The effectiveness of anti-ICE and anti-militarization efforts will depend on maintaining momentum despite political opposition, building lasting alliances across labor and immigrant constituencies, maintaining public support despite arrests and prosecutions, and turning protests and media attention into policy victories.
This article analyzes protest and activism tactics for educational purposes. We aim to contribute to effective and ethical efforts across the political spectrum, and we present diverse viewpoints and ideas without endorsement.