On June 27, in Huntington Park, California, federal agents from Customs and Border Protection (CPB) carried out a violent raid on the home of a working class family while Jenny Ramirez was caring for her two children, aged six and one.
In a scene of militarized terror more typical of a war zone than a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, agents used an explosive device to blast the front door off its hinges—without warning or announcement—before storming the premises.
Home surveillance footage of the raid shows eight heavily armed agents, guns drawn, storming the home after blowing the door off its hinges. Later in the video, Ramirez and her children are seen being escorted out by the agents.

The target of this pre-dawn assault was Ramirez’s boyfriend, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, a US citizen. His alleged “crime” was a minor collision with a Border Patrol vehicle the previous week. Federal agents claim Sierra-Hernandez intentionally rammed their vehicle and assaulted officers.
This unsubstantiated allegation was seized upon to justify a full-scale paramilitary operation, replete with a SWAT truck, automatic rifles, drones and a dozen heavily armed agents—mobilized not to apprehend a violent felon, but to send a political message.
The community had already responded to the original traffic stop with visible outrage. A viral video taken in the nearby city of Bell showed residents confronting and chasing federal agents from the area, pelting their vehicles with objects. The state’s violent response had nothing to do with public safety. Each incident is seized upon by the capitalist state as a pretext to intensify its repressive machinery against the working class.
The facts surrounding the Huntington Park raid reveal an operation in blatant violation of constitutional protections. Under the Fourth Amendment, federal agents may only forcibly enter a private home with a judicial warrant—signed by a judge and specifying the person or property to be seized. Administrative warrants, which are issued internally by DHS or ICE, do not authorize home entry without the resident’s consent.
Yet according to a visibly traumatized Ramirez and consistent with security videos originally broadcast by NBC, agents did not knock, announce themselves or identify as law enforcement before detonating the device that shattered the door and blew out a window. As of this writing, there is no indication that agents presented or executed a judicial warrant at the scene before storming a home filled with US citizens.
That such extreme and dangerous tactics were used in a home with young children is especially criminal. The trauma inflicted on Ramirez’s family—whose only “offense” was to reside with a man accused of embarrassing the Border Patrol—speaks to the brutal, repressive nature of the state apparatus now directed against the working class, immigrant and citizen alike.
Sierra-Hernandez, for his part, turned himself in peacefully the following morning. The massive operation, then, was unnecessary even on its own legal terms. Its real purpose was not law enforcement, but intimidation.
This lawlessness is no aberration. Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting arrests in front of courthouses and other public spaces, circumventing legal norms with increasing impunity. The sight of immigration agents waiting outside courtrooms to detain immigrants has become routine, a hallmark of an emerging police state.
These tactics bear an unmistakable resemblance to those employed by Latin American fascist regimes in the 1970s, where activists were routinely disappeared. Now, those methods have come home to roost in American cities like Los Angeles.
In the past, many immigrants were permitted to remain in the country under a tenuous arrangement that allowed them to stay so long as they continued to check in at immigration hearings. These cases, left pending in the courts, provided an unofficial but functioning stay of removal for hundreds of thousands of people. That system has now been gutted by the Trump administration, which has instructed immigration judges to dismiss such cases outright, clearing the way for “expedited removal” orders and eliminating any pretense of due process.
This maneuver has transformed immigration courts into traps. ICE agents now lie in wait to arrest immigrants immediately after their hearings. If they fail to appear, they are in violation. If they do appear, they are seized.
Advocates have responded by escorting immigrants to their court appearances, hoping to shield them through public visibility and solidarity. But ICE has not hesitated to escalate. In one infamous incident, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was violently arrested by ICE agents while linking arms with an immigrant defendant outside a courthouse.
In some cases, immigrants have begun suing the federal government, asserting that it is a violation of due process to deport individuals for complying with court proceedings.
Among the most horrific examples is the case of a Honduran family with two children, aged nine and six, who fled violence and legally entered the US via the Biden administration’s much-touted CBP One app. The younger child, a leukemia patient undergoing chemotherapy, has already missed vital medical appointments while in ICE custody—his life threatened by bureaucratic cruelty.
The family was granted temporary parole in the US under the condition they check in with immigration authorities. But instead of being protected, they were arrested by plainclothes ICE agents immediately after their case was dismissed. The Biden administration’s “promise” of a “humane” asylum process has thus proven to be nothing more than a digital trap.
With Trump’s return to power, the CBP One app has been repurposed into a tool of sadistic mockery, stripped of its original asylum scheduling functionality and reduced to a device encouraging “self-deportation.” The very data collected from asylum seekers under Biden is now being used to target them under Trump.
None of these abuses are being curbed by the courts. On the contrary, the recent Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA has further eroded constitutional protections and given the executive branch sweeping new powers over immigration enforcement. The judiciary, far from acting as a check on tyranny, has actively enabled it.
But the working class is beginning to fight back. On June 14, an extraordinary and unprecedented development occurred: 11 million people across the United States took part in the “No Kings” protests to oppose attacks on immigrants and democratic rights. The scale and energy of this mass movement has shaken the political establishment. It has revealed a deep reservoir of opposition to authoritarian rule and laid bare the class character of the struggle for democratic rights.
The way forward lies not in appeals to the courts or to the Democratic Party—both of which are fully complicit in the bipartisan war on immigrants—but in the development of an independent, international movement of the working class. Immigrant and native-born workers alike must unite in a common struggle against the capitalist system, which fuels war abroad and dictatorship at home.
The Huntington Park raid, like the deportation of cancer-stricken children and the mass arrests outside courtrooms, is a sign of where the ruling class is headed: dictatorship, repression and war. The only force capable of halting this descent into barbarism is the organized power of the international working class, fighting for socialism and the defense of all democratic and social rights.
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