#FeministsFightFascism: Statement on Rising Militarism and State Violence by AF³IRM Los Angeles
Since June 6th, ICE, the DEA and the FBI have escalated the violence in our communities at the behest of the fascist U.S. regime. They have seized our people from sidewalks and strawberry fields. They have taken mothers and children attending routine immigration appointments. They have corralled asylum-seeking families overnight into basements while denying them food, water, and basic human dignity.
Meanwhile, Trump tries to silence our resistance through increased surveillance, militarization, and brutality. Our streets are now overrun by ICE, FBI, LAPD, Sheriffs, National Guard, and Marines.
As transnational anti-imperialist feminists, we recognize these tactics as part of the long legacy of racialized, gendered state violence. We are not strangers to this kind of occupation.
The women of Los Angeles continue to hold the line against militarization, displacement, and family separation. Women are fearlessly standing up to police on the front lines of mobilizations. At nine months pregnant, Cary López Alvarado confronted CPB agents trying to kidnap her partner and father of her child. Fierce women resistors in Downey successfully blocked armed law enforcement from abducting an elder off the streets. Im/migrant mothers continue to defend their children, families, and homes, despite migrant women now facing an even higher risk of gender-based violence under the Trump regime’s xenophobic immigration policies.
These recent raids and attacks on our communities do not occur in a vacuum—they are deliberate and intended to destabilize our networks of care, resistance, and survival. However, our foremothers have survived militarized patriarchy from Hawai‘i, to Viet Nam, to Turtle Island, to the Philippines, and their resistance is still alive in our bones.
We affirm: We have always resisted. Through our resistance, we survive and raise new generations of resistance fighters. We stand in the tradition of the Zapatistas, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Southeast Asian garment workers, Black women organizers, and all those who have defied occupation through collective care, direct action, and political clarity.
We reject the illogic of borders that criminalize migration and deny our peoples’ right to move, to live, and to belong. This violence is inseparable from U.S. imperialism, capitalism, and White supremacy—systems that depend on the control of bodies, especially the bodies of Indigenous, Black, migrant, and working-class women.
There is no liberation without the dismantling of borders, prisons, and patriarchy.
Today and every day, the women of Los Angeles stand together to push ICE and all agents of fascism out of L.A.!
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