On June 6 in downtown Los Angeles, the day that sparked citywide protests that have captured the nation’s attention, a woman watched federal agents lead her handcuffed father away from a fast-fashion warehouse amid an ICE raid. In a TikTok video viewed more than nine million times, she sobs from behind a camera lens. “Papa, I love you,” she cries.
Her father struggles to remain composed, telling her he loves her, too. He assures her it’s going to be OK. In a final gesture of love, he folds his hands in prayer and blows her a kiss as he’s placed in an unmarked van. The TikTok video, which his daughter uploaded the next day to the song “Fantasmas” by the Mexican singer Humbe, has been re-uploaded and shared by countless other accounts across social media platforms.
As videos like this reach millions, Los Angeles is becoming the epicenter of a counternarrative to President Trump’s propaganda about immigrants. Mr. Trump’s decisions to deploy the National Guard and now the Marines appear calculated to provoke chaos that will distract people from the damning optics of his immigration enforcement operations. The protesters shouldn’t give him what he wants. Although their rage is understandable, burning vehicles and hurtling rocks divert attention from the fact that ICE is destroying families. It’s those families’ stories that threaten Mr. Trump’s grip on the public imagination.
A recent CBS News survey found that most Americans believe the president’s crackdown is prioritizing “dangerous criminals.” But videos out of Los Angeles and across the country paint a different picture. They show ICE arresting mothers, fathers, co-workers and friends of U.S. citizens. Not hardened criminals, but valued community members. The videos show ICE snatching workers outside of a Home Depot, at a local carwash, on the street. They show parents on lockdown at a school graduation because ICE was nearby. These videos, which are going viral, have the power to destabilize Mr. Trump’s narrative that his immigration operations are about law and order.
As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the highly visible raids in Los Angeles resulted from a directive from Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who urged agents to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” including at 7-Elevens and Home Depots. It was never going to be possible for Mr. Trump to keep his campaign promise of mass deportations without rounding up innocent people, because the world he and Mr. Miller created in which millions of undocumented gang members are running wild doesn’t exist. Mr. Miller’s insatiability means that arrests that once happened mostly in the shadows are now happening in broad daylight, and that people are capturing evidence.
Each act of documentation chips away at the alternate reality that Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have constructed — one in which ICE is making communities safer. In fact, the administration is diverting resources from serious child trafficking and homeland security investigations to meet quotas that will satisfy Mr. Miller’s appetite for detained human beings.
The Trump administration’s escalating shows of force reveal the president’s understanding of the optics. He knows most Americans don’t have Mr. Miller’s stomach for the suffering of immigrants. The president, a master manipulator of the media, is creating a spectacle to reorient the news cycle. He wants people to see fire and broken glass, not broken families.
But the movement to resist ICE and record the inhumanity of ICE is rippling outward, and Americans are seeing it on their social media feeds. In San Antonio, a video shows a woman pleading for her release as agents in plain clothes detain her outside a courthouse. “Please, my children are in school!” she screams. “My children!” Near that same courthouse, a visibly shaken young boy tries to comfort his mother during her arrest. “Mom, I’m here,” he says, fighting tears as she collapses in distress.
The immigrant rights movement is taking cues from the Black Lives Matter movement, in which Black Americans and allies spent years using smartphones to expose police brutality and change the national conversation about race.
“What we’re seeing is a continuation of the digital witnessing tradition: using mobile devices not just to record harm, but to demand accountability in real time,” said Allissa Richardson, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California who has long studied how African Americans use mobile and social media to change narratives. “Black witnessing laid the blueprint, and now other communities are building upon it, adapting it and carrying it forward.”
Many of the videos that are circulating online have been filmed by Latinos, whose communities are disproportionately impacted by the raids and who are severely underrepresented in the traditional news media, where they have long been unable to correct inaccurate and dehumanizing stereotypes about immigrants. These community videos, a form of citizen journalism, may represent a tipping point.
In the face of boldfaced authoritarianism, filming ICE arrests may seem futile and even absurd. After all, in a world of echo chambers, it’s easy to turn away from evidence that contradicts our beliefs. Can these videos actually change people’s minds?
I believe they are the only thing that can. When I was a public media reporter documenting the human cost of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies, I had a Trump-supporting aunt who sometimes commented on the links to my videos on Facebook, expressing empathy for the immigrants I interviewed. She told me she had no idea Trump was going to be targeting mothers and that it was upsetting. Later, when I became an opinion columnist, she began to write off my work as propaganda. It left me convinced that the most powerful storytelling is not commentary, but human stories. Instead of condemning and criticizing Mr. Trump, Democratic politicians should use every opportunity to lift the stories of the families he has harmed.
Such stories are what forced Mr. Trump to end his family separation policy during his first term. More recently, the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the Maryland man mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador — provoked so much outrage that the administration was forced to find a pretext to bring him back. Earlier this month, the story of a 4-year-old Bakersfield, Calif., girl with a rare and life-threatening medical condition who was facing deportation mobilized people across the country and sparked a reversal by immigration authorities — possibly saving her life.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller understand the power of human stories. That’s why Mr. Miller has long combed the internet for anecdotes about immigrant rapists and killers, writing them into the president’s speeches and his own social posts. That is also why he has long invoked the murder of the Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, whose story led to the passage of the Laken Riley Act, which made it easier to deport immigrants not yet convicted but accused of crimes. That is why the Trump administration created an office devoted to spotlighting such stories. That is why they would rather the headlines be about rogue rioters and burned Waymo vehicles than be about torn-apart families.
Make no mistake: Mr. Trump is not waging a war for the streets. He is fighting a war for the hearts and minds of Americans. The most formidable weapon on this battlefield is the human story. Not fire, not fists, not bullets. The war will be won only through strategic and relentless exposure.
In many of the videos coming out of Los Angeles and other cities, the people recording can be heard helping immigrants to protect their rights — telling people who have been arrested not to sign documents, shouting at neighbors not to open doors to ICE agents unless they see a signed warrant. Other videos show people putting their bodies between ICE and their targets. In one viral video, a white man is partially run over by an ICE van he was trying to stop. Another shows the labor leader David Huerta shoved to the ground by an agent while standing in front of a work site; he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to impede an officer.
These videos are particularly dangerous to Mr. Trump because they expose something his politics can’t touch: the fierce humanity of people willing to risk everything for one another. They don’t just document resistance — they ignite it. They move people not just to care, but to act, to intervene, to put their own bodies on the line.
For example, Abby King, a 25-year-old white resident of Los Angeles, was moved to demonstrate, in part, by the video of Mr. Huerta’s arrest. I met her on Sunday at Gloria Molina Grand Park in a crowd of thousands who gathered for a nonviolent protest of ICE raids and to demand the release of Mr. Huerta, who was set free on a $50,000 bond later that day. She brought her mother along to demand a stop to the arrests of beloved community members. “We’re citizens,” Ms. King said. “We’re white, and if people like us aren’t standing up for them, then who is? You have to push through the fear.”
All around her were others moved by the same impulse: a white grandmother worried about her immigrant neighbors, a Guatemalan father who brought his 7-year-old child, and a Bolivian woman accompanied by an entourage of elderly white friends who helped her feel safe.
It was human stories that motivated them to be there. Those stories sparked their compassion and courage. Mr. Trump is vulnerable in the face of those emotions. He depends on fear and hate. That is why he will continue to try to goad the city into violence so that he can regain the upper hand.
The people of Los Angeles can take the bait and lose the narrative war. Or they can stay disciplined in their nonviolent protests and production of human stories. Then Mr. Trump’s attempt to provoke chaos will collapse under its own cruelty.
Jean Guerrero is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. She is the author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda” and “Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir,” which won a PEN Literary Award. She is a senior journalism fellow at the U.C.L.A. Latina Futures 2050 Lab.
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