The Empire Trembles: What L.A.’s Uprising Means for Kansas City’s Future

Los Angeles is ablaze—literally and politically. What began with pre-dawn militarized ICE raids and kidnappings on June 6th has now escalated into open street warfare: 2,000 federally-controlled National Guard troops already occupy key intersections, and as of Monday evening 700 active-duty Marines were deployed into the city.

If this sounds like warfare being waged upon a population of people by state actors, that’s because it is.

“This is the next big moment for people to be out in the streets. The police state is real. Cop Nation is real. The Marines, National Guard, ICE, and local cops are all tools of the state to be used against the people. We should be ungovernable in the face of fascism.”
— Kamau Franklin, movement attorney & founder of Community Movement Builders

The June 2025 raids in Boyle Heights, Paramount and across LA – deploying armored vehicles, flash-bang grenades, and multi-agency strike teams – are not immigration enforcement. They are domestic warfare using the identical infrastructure, tactics, and personnel that enforce U.S. domination globally. – Black Alliance for Peace – So Cal

The rebellion sparked over the weekend when unidentifiable federal agents kicked in the doors of garment shops, kidnapped and held captive a fourth grader, stalked Home Depot parking lots, disappearing at least forty-four workers. By nightfall, Olympic Boulevard was choking on tear gas, self-driving taxis burned on the 101, and human rights protectors turned the freeway into a mile-long barricade.

A beloved union leader, David Huerta, was snatched during the sweep, triggering solidarity walk-outs that spread from the docks at San Pedro to Paramount’s warehouses.

The state aims to make the current crisis a crushing show of force and to intimidate the people, but at this they have miserably failed. While it’s true that these tactics serve as a preview of what may unfold across the country, we are also witnessing a growing, emboldened fearlessness among the people and a steadfast refusal to back down.

Here in the Midwest, we can see the latest opposition development. CoreCivic—a for-profit prison empire with a history soaked in torture and abuse—is pushing to reopen its defunct Leavenworth facility as a full-scale ICE concentration camp. They’re claiming they don’t need local approval, because the federal government will cover the cost and shield them from oversight. City leaders are fighting back in court—but while they file motions, CoreCivic is sharpening the razors.

If they win, Kansas City will become a pipeline: from elementary schools to homes and places of work, from traffic stops to human trafficking flights. Our neighbors, our coworkers, Black & brown immigrants and asylum-seeking families who’ve called this place home for years (and even those who are indigenous to it)—will be under threat of human trafficking to unknown concentration camps.

Already dozens of people have been kidnapped by ICE throughout the Kansas City metro and broader Missouri-Kansas region, including a single mother of 3 U.S. children (one who is severely autistic) who was violently kidnapped and is now scheduled for human trafficking to an unknown location.

What we know is this: when they come—because they will—everything will already be wired for our disappearance. Los Angeles is the beta-site: one of the largest migrant hubs in the country, the perfect laboratory to perfect raids, detentions, and media spin.

That’s why L.A. is the frontline—and why its militant resistance matters: they are blocking, rewiring, and jamming the very machinery that otherwise aims to swallow the rest of us whole.

Amid the chemical fog and military siege, heroic Angelenos are teaching the country what real courage looks like. They are fighting. Not simply marching in circles or holding signs for the sake of optics, but throwing their bodies between ICE vans and families, barricading detention buses with dumpsters, de-arresting their people from riot lines in real time.

This is resistance, raw and unapologetic. And yes, some are peaceful—if by “peaceful” you mean locked arm-in-arm singing freedom songs while choking on gas. But others understand that freedom has never been handed out for good behavior.

It was Malcolm—whose centennial passed just weeks ago—who told us plainly: “By any means necessary.” Not as a threat. As a moral equation. Because when your community is being abducted, when your food sources are being intentionally starved by the state and your street corners occupied by fascist agents; ultimately, when the state no longer respects life—the word “peaceful” itself must be far more intimately scrutinized.

“We’re non-violent with people who are non-violent with us. But we are not non-violent with anyone who is violent with us.” (Malcolm X 1964 speech)

At the very same moment, a parallel battle is being waged on television crawls and algorithmic feeds. Right-wing outlets blast headlines about “violent mobs” and “professional agitators,” recycling a trope first sharpened by the Ku Klux Klan and segregationist sheriffs to discredit the Civil-Rights Movement (MLK Jr. himself was disparaged as an “outside agitator”). The lie that “insurrectionists” are stacking bricks near protest sites that circulated in 2020 (including here in KC) has already resurfaced.

Kwame Ture warned: “In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” And Dr. King reminded white moderates clutching pearls about “riots”: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Today’s uprising is the sound of millions refusing silent abduction.

Why Black Kansas Citians Must Take This Personally

Black immigrants are 5.8x more likely to be kidnapped and trafficked by the state (what some refer to as “deportation”). And as Black Alliance for Peace notes, “the same forces that kidnapped Africans into slavery now kidnap immigrants into detention.” And despite being 7% of non-citizens, Black immigrants comprise 20% facing deportation. The Border Patrol emerged directly from slave patrols.

Not only does this matter to Black immigrants but to Black Americans as well. If a green card won’t save you in Albuquerque, what shield does a poor Black Kansas Citian have when we already receive literally zero justice for the decades of brutalization and lynchings by KCPD? State sanctioned terror is not partitioned to one department. When we normalize it with ICE, we normalize it for KCPD, KCKPD, and any other state agency that will be able to operate with impunity.

The “Not Our Fight” Narrative Is Strategic Suicide.
There has been a common refrain from many Black folks since the loss of Kamala Harris, that “we should stay on the couch and let them deal with it,” in reference to Latino and hispanic communities because some Black folks decry anti-Blackness within their communities, and see non-Black folks as being complicit in bringing this reality about. While anti-Blackness is indeed present in other folks’ communities (including our own) this logic is both strategic suicide and morally abject.

This line of thinking only serves the fascists, and no one else. When fascism tests its hardware on brown folks and immigrants, it is sharpening its weapons to next use on us; indeed the data-sharing fusion centers that surveil Black people in Kansas City are the same servers powering ICE facial-recognition tools in South L.A.

In other words solidarity is not charity but self-defense.

Courage on the Front Line

The uprising is also a study in collective bravery. Videos show masked crews “de-arresting” comrades—locking arms to peel detainees away from riot cops—while others douse red-hot tear-gas canisters, then launch them back with lacrosse sticks. A wheelchair bloc rammed police skirmish lines so human rights protectors on foot could escape. “Stretch them thin,” organizers repeat on every megaphone, urging simultaneous marches to drown federal forces in logistics chaos.

“Hey everyone, a mass-scale revolt is occurring in Los Angeles and it’s only growing… Get to contributing—we need all of us. The struggle is just beginning to intensify!”
— @PalmTreesnGz (retweeted by People’s City Council – L.A.)

“If your main problem is ‘optics,’ pluck your own eyes out. The bad optics are the concentration camps, not the streets full of fighters.”
— @unityoffields

George Jackson foresaw moments like this:

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation… fascism is already here… people are already dying who could be saved… generations more will live poor, butchered half-lives if you fail to act.”

What’s unfolding in Los Angeles is a testament to the power of radical collective resistance: ordinary people stepping into the streets, risking arrest and violence to defend their communities against state repression. These human rights defenders, in the face of militarized crackdowns, embody a courage that reverberates far beyond city limits.

We do yet not know what the coming days will bring to our own city. But LA’s example is a warning and an invitation: the forces that seek to divide and intimidate are not confined to the coasts. As raids and repression escalate nationwide, Kansas City’s future will be shaped by the choices we make now—whether we remain spectators or step forward in defense of our neighbors.

The path ahead is uncertain, but the courage and solidarity shown elsewhere remind us that resistance will happen here, too. The question for Kansas City is not if the struggle will come, but how we will rise to meet it.

ABOUT DEFENDER EDITORIALS

This article is part of The Defender Editorial Series, our official opinion section.

At The Kansas City Defender, we distinguish between reporting and editorial writing:

• Our reporting is rooted in data, documentation, and on-the-ground sourcing. It exposes injustice, centers Black voices, and holds power accountable.
• Our editorials and opinion columns are explicitly framed pieces. They go beyond the what/where/when to offer cultural context, political analysis, and movement-grounded perspective. They’re written not from above or outside—but from within our communities, our struggles, and our visions for liberation.

We proudly acknowledge that our editorial and opinion writers are often the same people who report our stories. We believe there is no contradiction between rigorous journalism and unapologetic moral clarity.

We are not neutral. We are with the people.

The post The Empire Trembles: What L.A.’s Uprising Means for Kansas City’s Future appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.