5 Tactics History Suggests for Detention Center Campaigns

Protesters gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, facing down federal officers who deployed tear gas and pepper balls from the building’s rooftop. The confrontation—part of a nationwide “National Shutdown” on January 30-31—shows how detention tactics work that movements have used for decades, with varying degrees of success.

The action combined five distinct approaches that appear repeatedly throughout American protest history. These include staying put even when police use force, regrouping after dispersal to escalate pressure, bringing together different groups of people, connecting local problems to what’s happening nationwide, and deliberately getting authorities to use force where people can see it against peaceful demonstrators.

The Occupation That Wouldn’t Disperse

Thousands demonstrated at City Hall and Grand Park on Friday, January 30. Students carried signs reading “ICE out of L.A.” alongside families and workers calling for investigations into recent deaths during immigration raids in Minneapolis. When hundreds relocated to the Metropolitan Detention Center—a facility holding immigrants awaiting deportation—the confrontation intensified.

Around 5:45 p.m., approximately 200 demonstrators remained outside after police issued dispersal orders. They extended across Alameda Street, some positioning themselves between federal authorities and the entrance. This blocked people from getting in and out of the building.

Federal authorities responded by declaring the gathering illegal. From the rooftop, officers deployed weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets. At least five rounds of chemical irritants created large clouds of green and yellow gas. Sound cannons added disorienting high-frequency noise to the mix.

Yamilet Segundo, a 19-year-old protester, described the scene: “I told my friends we should come out after school to use our voice, but I wasn’t expecting to see this. It’s sad to see that it reached this point.”

Despite the chemical weapons, 200 to 400 demonstrators stayed. That’s the tactic—maintaining physical presence even when authorities respond with force. It’s a deliberate choice with roots in the Birmingham campaign of 1963, when civil rights activists under Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership filled Birmingham jails to demonstrate the movement’s ability to keep going despite crackdowns.

The next day, hundreds returned. Authorities deployed more tear gas after 9 p.m. on January 31 when crowds gathered again on Alameda Street. Police reported that demonstrators threw “bottles, rocks and industrial size fireworks”—claims organizers disputed. By the end of the weekend, LAPD reported eight arrests on January 30 and approximately 51 total people detained or cited across both days.

Who Built This Coalition

The protests didn’t emerge from a single organization. They represented a coalition spanning students, labor unions, immigrant communities, and allies across multiple racial and ethnic groups.

Students provided organizing support. Walkouts occurred at numerous Los Angeles Unified School District campuses as well as UCLA, USC, and Cal State L.A. Hart LippSmith, a junior at Sequoyah School in Pasadena, explained the rationale while holding a megaphone: “There are times when protesting is more necessary than going to the classroom.”

Labor union participation brought in construction workers, service industry employees, and public sector union members who recognized that immigration enforcement disrupted their industries and threatened workers’ safety. The involvement of organized labor linked immigrant confinement to workplace concerns. This positioned the system as a tool for worker exploitation rather than solely as immigration policy.

Community members with direct experience of immigration enforcement brought lived experience. Irene Alvarez, holding a sign reading “End ICE Brutality,” articulated this perspective: “I’m standing in solidarity with everything that’s going on in the world, standing here for my immigrant parents, standing here for my immigrant neighbors that came from nothing to something, that came for a better life. What’s this better life that we’re dealing with?”

Movements that encompass broad coalitions and employ multiple simultaneous tactics tend to achieve greater political impact than movements relying on narrow bases or single approaches.

Five Tactics and Their Historical Precedents

Tactic One: Sustained Occupation Despite Violence

The decision to remain after chemical weapons deployment has been used by many movements before. In Birmingham 1963, “Bull” Connor’s decision to deploy fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators hurt him politically. Images of the violence circulated nationally, turning international opinion against segregationist authorities.

The Standing Rock water protector encampment of 2016-2017 provides a more recent parallel. Water protectors maintained their encampment despite police deployment of water cannons in freezing weather, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades. Standing Rock developed infrastructure supporting continued presence: medical teams, legal support, food distribution, and training in nonviolent resistance.

Research shows that movements capable of setting up systems where protesters help each other can maintain presence far longer than movements relying on spontaneous participation.

While 200 demonstrators remained after the first night’s chemical weapons deployment, this represented a significant decline from the initial crowd. The absence of visible systems for protesters to help each other—medical teams treating chemical weapons injuries, legal observers documenting violations, organized food and water distribution—may have limited the movement’s ability to sustain occupation beyond two days.

By contrast, the 2018 Occupy ICE Portland action maintained a continuous encampment for three weeks. This suggests that better planning and support systems help protests last longer.

Tactic Two: Multi-Day Escalation and Regrouping

The movement’s decision to reconstitute crowds on January 31 after dispersal on January 30 represents the ability to bounce back and keep going after initial state suppression.

This tactic appears throughout American protest history, most notably in the wave of civil rights protests following the “Bloody Sunday” violence of March 7, 1965. State troopers brutally attacked voting rights marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Rather than abandoning the march after the violence, movement leaders organized additional marches on March 9 and again on March 21. The final march successfully reached Montgomery.

President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to address Congress and champion voting rights legislation came directly after the violence. This suggests that the multi-day escalation strategy, combined with political allies’ willingness to respond, created the conditions for policy victory.

The 2020 Minneapolis and national uprisings following George Floyd’s killing provide a contemporary model. Protests continued for several weeks despite police deployment of tear gas, rubber bullets, and aggressive crowd control tactics. Research on these protests shows that repeated police violence against demonstrators didn’t suppress movement continuation but rather had the opposite effect. Police tactics increased participation and strengthened movement solidarity.

The regrouping on January 31 occurred with knowledge that officers had deployed chemical weapons the previous evening, yet hundreds returned. This voluntary return despite anticipated state violence suggests this was planned, not spontaneous.

Without clear communication about escalated tactical options or strategic objectives for the second day, it’s unclear whether the regrouping represented intentional escalation or reacting and continuing. Historical success cases like Selma and the George Floyd uprisings benefited from explicit movement leadership decisions about how to escalate and what new demands to advance after initial confrontations.

Tactic Three: Broad Coalition Building

The protests mobilized an explicitly diverse coalition spanning students, unions, immigrant communities, and allies across multiple racial and ethnic groups. Research consistently shows that broad coalitions are more likely to achieve policy victories than groups focused on one issue.

The 2006 immigrant rights mega-marches provide the most directly parallel historical precedent. In March and April 2006, massive protests erupted in response to H.R. 4437, restrictive immigration legislation that would have criminalized undocumented immigrants and those providing them assistance.

Those 2006 protests explicitly mobilized student walkouts, with over 40,000 students walking out of schools and hundreds of thousands demonstrating across the country. Labor unions endorsed the actions, with some organizing work stoppages for May 1, 2006—the “Day Without Immigrants” nationwide economic boycott. Religious organizations participated prominently, with churches and faith leaders providing moral authority and sanctuary.

This diverse coalition likely contributed to the eventual Congressional failure to advance H.R. 4437, though experts disagree about whether the protests caused this.

Student participation in the January 2026 protests carried particular significance given the vulnerabilities of student participants. Students accepting disciplinary consequences, records, and potential impacts on college applications demonstrated serious political commitment. Studies of student activism show that student movements often achieve disproportionate political impact relative to their numbers. Politicians perceive student activism as representing future voters, and educational disruption got politicians’ attention.

The coalition’s effectiveness was limited by disagreements about how much risk different people could take and strategic objectives. Student participants, many undocumented or from undocumented families, carried legal risks from arrest records that documented workers with legal status might not face. Union members risking workplace discipline faced different calculations than unemployed community members with fewer employment consequences.

Tactic Four: Connecting to National Struggles

Organizers explicitly situated themselves as solidarity actions with Minneapolis, connecting the local struggle to national patterns of immigration enforcement violence. Organizers connected their protest to the recent fatal shootings of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on January 24, 2026, and Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, shot by an ICE agent on January 7, 2026, during enforcement operations in Minneapolis.

Both victims were U.S. citizens exercising their constitutional rights to peaceful assembly and observation, yet were killed by officers engaged in immigration enforcement operations. The government’s initial characterization of both victims as “domestic terrorists” or agents of violence, later contradicted by video evidence showing both victims posed no threat, made it clear whether enforcement meant protection or danger.

Historical precedent for connecting local protests to national issues appears throughout American activism. The Ferguson uprising of 2014 generated solidarity protests across the country as activists in cities without recent police violence deaths still participated in demonstrations. They connected local police killings to national patterns of racial violence.

This approach transforms what might otherwise seem like local disputes into struggles that matter to the whole country, potentially bringing more people to pressure elected officials and institutions for change.

The “National Shutdown” framework explicitly organized the January 30, 2026, actions as a nationwide coordinated response rather than isolated city-specific protests. Organizers called for simultaneous action across multiple cities, with participants “staying home from work and school and not go shopping” to create economic pressure and demonstrate numerical scale.

This approach potentially amplified impact beyond what the action alone could achieve, as media coverage emphasized that the protests occurred within a broader movement. This approach risks making the message less clear and allowing authorities to characterize protests as coordinated extremism rather than organic local response.

Tactic Five: Getting Authorities to Use Force on Camera

The final tactic—deliberately maintaining nonviolent presence while authorities deploy violence, with the expectation that resulting images will generate public sympathy—represents one of the most controversial strategic choices in modern protest.

This tactic emerged explicitly from civil rights strategy, wherein movement leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calculated that visible violence against clearly peaceful demonstrators would alienate American public opinion from authorities and change what politicians think they need to do. In the Birmingham campaign of 1963, movement leaders chose to demonstrate in Birmingham specifically because they expected “Bull” Connor to overreact violently. They anticipated images that would shock the conscience of the nation.

Photographs of police dogs attacking African American demonstrators and fire hoses knocking children to the ground circulated widely. These contributed to President John F. Kennedy’s decision to champion civil rights legislation.

Whether this tactic works depends on the situation. Studies examining media coverage of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 found that while dramatic images of police violence circulated widely, the framing of these images varied significantly based on what viewers already believed. For individuals already sympathetic to racial justice, images of police violence generated outrage and commitment. For individuals skeptical of protests, the same images confirmed concerns about unruly crowds requiring forceful police response.

Studies also demonstrate that framing matters significantly. If news coverage emphasizes police violence and portrays demonstrators as peaceful, public opinion shifts toward the movement. If coverage emphasizes protester property destruction or violence and downplays police tactics, public opinion shifts against them.

Officers’ deployment of tear gas and pepper balls from the rooftop, captured in photographs and video, created visual evidence of authorities using chemical agents against civilians.

The interpretation of this violence remained contested. Authorities characterized the use of force as necessary response to “violent agitators” who threw bottles and rocks. Organizers characterized the crowd as peaceful and the response as unprovoked. The presence of broken windows, a dumpster set on fire with graffiti, and reports of “industrial size fireworks” being thrown let authorities call them “violent agitators,” even as these incidents involved only a small percentage of the several-hundred-person crowd.

Research shows that seeing heavily armed police and militarized response tactics itself makes the public think there’s danger, regardless of protester behavior. When news coverage includes images of officers in riot gear, the armed police presence alone increases viewer perception that demonstrators are “out to cause trouble,” even when protests are clearly peaceful.

What Changed

The protests had immediate effects on media attention and public visibility. Coverage appeared in major news outlets as well as platforms nationwide. Images of officers deploying chemical agents from the rooftop created visual documentation of state violence that circulated widely through social media and news platforms.

The protests didn’t achieve their immediate stated goal of stopping facility operations or forcing the release of detainees. The facility continued functioning throughout the protest period. Law enforcement successfully prevented demonstrators from disrupting facility access for more than limited periods.

Federal facilities have strong security systems, legal authority to clear publicly accessible areas, and coordination between local, state, and federal police that makes sustained disruption difficult.

Courts in Minnesota, responding to Operation Metro Surge and related deportation enforcement actions, have begun blocking some practices, suggesting that lawsuits might work alongside or instead of protest-based pressure. California’s Democratic-controlled legislature has passed multiple bills in 2026 designed to restrict enforcement within state boundaries. These include requirements that schools and hospitals prohibit ICE agents without judicial warrants.

These legislative responses may reflect political response to sustained grassroots pressure, including the January 2026 protests, though it’s hard to prove the protests caused this.

Strategic Lessons for Future Campaigns

Historical precedent suggests several approaches that might make campaigns more effective beyond what the January 2026 protests achieved.

First, setting up legal support ahead of time matters. The Civil Rights Movement developed sophisticated legal strategies coordinated through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which provided attorneys to those facing charges. The Standing Rock water protector movement created networks of volunteer lawyers who documented police violence and provided legal support. This reduced fear of arrest and enabled people to remain longer. Advance legal support helps people know what will happen if they’re arrested, helping people decide whether to take the risk.

Second, setting up systems for protesters to help each other with medical response and supplies enables sustained presence. The Standing Rock encampment included trained medical teams, legal observers, and food distribution systems that enabled water protectors to remain despite freezing conditions and police violence. People exposed to chemical weapons experience disorientation and physical trauma that can only be addressed through immediate medical support, washing facilities, and psychological support.

Third, building relationships with supportive politicians before protests begin helps spread the message further. The Selma to Montgomery March succeeded partly because sympathetic officials, religious leaders, and media outlets amplified the movement’s message. This created pressure on authorities to permit protest and generated coverage nationwide. When elected allies commit ahead of time to supporting protesters, they’re more likely to speak out after police violence occurs, changing the official story.

Fourth, using a plan for recording video and photos creates evidence that stops authorities from controlling the story. The civil rights movement’s success depended substantially on journalists’ willingness to cover protests and circulate images of police violence. Professional-quality images and video have greater credibility and wider circulation than amateur documentation.

Fifth, creating multi-site simultaneous actions stretches law enforcement response capacity. The 2006 Day Without Immigrants created coordinated action across hundreds of cities simultaneously. This had a combined effect impossible to achieve through single-city action. Law enforcement has finite resources; dispersing protests across multiple locations stops police from focusing all their forces in one place and requires coordination across agencies.

Sixth, making clear demands with deadlines and plans to push harder gives something concrete to negotiate about. The civil rights movement’s use of clear demands—integration of specific businesses, voting rights legislation, intervention—provided targets for negotiation and clear measures of success. Clear demands enable measurement of success and keep the movement from becoming symbolic.

Finally, building longer-term campaigns around facility contracts and economic sustainability addresses the financial reasons detention continues. Facilities generate profit for private contractors and employment for government agencies, making institutions resist closing. The movement to divest from apartheid South Africa created economic pressure by targeting institutional investments in companies profiting from apartheid, ultimately contributing to the system’s fall. Going after these economic interests might work better than moral appeals alone.

The Broader Context

The January 2026 protests occurred as part of ongoing immigrant rights organizing, legal challenges, and political fights that continue. Organizers have signaled plans for continued and escalated action, with additional walkouts scheduled at area high schools and planning underway to expand the coalition.

Authorities haven’t responded to occupation protests with policy concessions, instead maintaining and defending immigration enforcement operations. President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan indicated plans for reduced operations in Minnesota, but characterized this as dependent on “common-sense cooperation” from state officials, not as response to protest pressure.

The broader political context shapes the campaign’s chances significantly. With Republican control of the Senate and Democratic control of the House, legislation addressing practices faces substantial obstacles unless both parties agree. Action by California and other states with Democratic legislatures might offer better chances for quick wins. However, federal control over immigration limits what states can do to limit deportations.

International human rights organizations have documented widespread facility abuses, including the deaths of multiple detainees, denial of medical care, and exploitative labor conditions. This creates ongoing opportunities for litigation and public pressure but not necessarily for rapid facility closure.

For immigrant rights movements seeking to advance facility closure and enforcement restriction objectives, the January 2026 protest shows what worked and what didn’t in dramatic protests that directly challenge authorities. The protests generated media attention nationwide, connected local problems to what’s happening across the country, brought together many different groups, and created video and photo evidence of how enforcement works.

They didn’t produce immediate facility closure, prevent further enforcement operations, or get authorities to change their policies. Historical precedent suggests that long-term campaigns that combine direct protests with lawsuits, legislative advocacy, economic pressure on private contractors, and long-term community organizing work better than using one approach in isolation.

The question of whether the January 2026 movement possesses the organization, political timing, and strategy to keep up these combined efforts for years remains to be seen as organizing and political fights continue.

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.