The street chaos that erupted in Los Angeles last month — when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents moved to arrest illegal-alien criminals — wasn’t random. Anyone surprised by the outburst hasn’t been paying attention.
The moral fervor driving these riots doesn’t come from thin air. Just look at the rhetoric in far-left media coverage of immigration. One outlet in particular, In These Times, offers a window into the revolutionary mindset of the #AbolishICE crowd and the broader young left. I reviewed dozens of the outlet’s immigration pieces. What I found wasn’t cherry-picked — it was consistent, radical, and dangerous.
Illegal aliens are the oppressed. ICE is the villain. Any action — including violence — is excused as righteous resistance. It’s about fighting evil.
The left’s project has always aimed to smash moral, legal, and natural distinctions. That same instinct was on full display in L.A. earlier this month. As G.K. Chesterton warned: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” The left wants all fences gone.
Erasing distinctions
To a doctrinaire leftist, distinctions between rich and poor, citizen and foreigner, criminal and non-criminal, man and woman, even adult and child are “oppressive.” In immigration, the lines between legal and illegal, citizen and noncitizen, felon and guest worker get erased. Right-leaning Americans may only just be waking up to this. The rioters in Los Angeles already live it.
In These Times doesn’t hide its radicalism. A few representative quotes from its pages:
- “We must stop thinking about citizenship for [illegal] immigrants in terms of who deserves it. Individuals should be granted citizenship simply because they are human and they are here.”
- “Having our [legal and illegal immigrant] community arbitrarily divided into those deserving of rights and those who are expendable reflects a system that never was meant to acknowledge our community’s full humanity in the first place.”
- “[Restrictionists falsely claim] job competition would slack off [with reduced immigration], and wages would go up because ‘they’ wouldn’t be taking ‘our’ jobs.”
The message is unmistakable: If you support immigration enforcement, you oppose humanity itself. Never mind the stolen Social Security numbers or the abuse of American goodwill. Illegal immigrants, we’re told, deserve the same rights as citizens — simply for existing. This rhetoric escalates quickly.
One article chastises American workers for blaming illegal immigrants for undercutting strikes: “Blaming Mexican workers for lost strikes is playing the employers’ game. … In a previous era, there would have been accusations against Black workers, or Italians, etc.”
Elsewhere: “We will need to resist local and national immigration enforcement against all marginalized communities.”
This isn’t about labor or policy. It’s about framing illegal aliens as the next great oppressed class — and erasing the moral and legal categories that make self-government possible.
Twisting moral language
At the AFL-CIO convention, In These Times published a poem titled “america” (lowercase intentional), written by the daughter of an illegal immigrant. It closed with a familiar cudgel from the left:
“While my father’s hands blister from work all day
and he doesn’t feel like he has a say
in this nation dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.”
The left routinely abuses that line from the Declaration of Independence to indict “hypocritical America” — meaning anyone who disagrees with the left. Enforcement of immigration law becomes the new Jim Crow. Homeland Security agents are cast as the KKK.
Another article accuses the Trump administration of using deportation raids to intimidate “Black and Brown” voters and suppress turnout — echoing the claim that the DHS was “race-baiting” by displaying wanted posters of criminal aliens.
Righteous violence
In this framing, the old civil rights movement becomes the template for modern street violence. Hollywood, legacy media, and academia glamorize past “moral” resistance. The left applies the same playbook to immigration.
Illegal aliens are the oppressed. ICE is the villain. Any action — including violence — is excused as righteous resistance. It’s not about the law. It’s about fighting evil.
RELATED: California cities cancel 4th of July events to shield illegal aliens amid anti-ICE madness
Photo by Jon Putman/Anadolu via Getty Images
Manufacturing a narrative of suffering also requires hyperbolic language and imagery, which In These Times employs in droves. Making the not-uncommon comparison of ICE to Nazis, one piece quotes a Jewish anti-borders activist from a group called Never Again Action: “Imprisoning people in concentration camps, vilifying and rounding up people who are deemed ‘outsiders,’ and turning away asylum seekers and immigrants hits close to home for Jews. … We’ve seen this before, and we won’t wait for it to get worse to take action.”
Another calls U.S. immigration enforcement “ethnic cleansing,” “crimes against humanity,” and a system “designed to brutalize.” Yet another calls deportations “state violence.” ICE, we’re told, merely enforces “unauthorized” immigration. The goal, of course, is to abolish ICE and “the entire deportation and incarceration system.”
Stripping responsibility, shifting blame
In another rhetorical sleight of hand, the left denies all moral responsibility for illegal immigrants. Even President Obama’s “no fault of their own” line about Dreamers isn’t enough. In These Times insists that no illegal alien — child or adult — is to blame for anything. Poverty and violence “left them no alternative.”
Even criminal aliens get a pass. The outlet laments that while the left now emphasizes conditions for detained women and children, “there is a glaring failure to examine the violence against men, including those with criminal convictions.”
Illegal immigrants, it turns out, are “disposable” in the eyes of the U.S. government. Obama said “felons, not families,” but In These Times calls even that distinction unjust.
Amnesty proposals that carve out special treatment for “essential” illegal workers aren’t good enough either. According to Shannon Gleeson and Sofya Aptekar: “We believe all undocumented people, regardless of where they work — or whether they work at all — should be eligible for the same path to citizenship.”
Gleeson and Aptekar even reframe the looting during the 2020 George Floyd riots: What if you’re “building a more just America by helping organize the Black Lives Matter uprisings”?
America made them do it
To square the moral circle, Gleeson and Aptekar — who are university professors, naturally — assign blame to America itself. Why are illegal aliens here? Because we were there.
Illegal aliens “are here because we were there,” they contend. “Their need to leave their homes can be traced to the United States — its corporations, its government, its military, and its enormous footprint in the climate crisis.”
Immigration becomes “restitution.” Another open-borders activist writes: “People from Europe and the U.S. crossed our borders to come to Guatemala, and took over our land and economy. … Now it’s our turn to cross borders.”
Don’t call this immigration. It’s revenge masquerading as justice. Illegal immigration is really just “fighting back.”
Obliterating order
By inventing past and present grievances, the left justifies lawbreaking as moral resistance and calls it justice. Amnesty becomes the “long-overdue first step.” What’s at the root of all this supposed suffering? Us.
The idea that illegal immigrants are “owed” citizenship — that lawbreakers are the victims — is morally perverse. But it’s vital for a movement bent on erasing the line between citizen and noncitizen.
The left doesn’t want to stop at amnesty. The left wants the obliteration of law, order, borders, and the moral framework that makes all of that possible.
Chesterton’s warning about fences applies now more than ever. The left tears down every distinction without asking why it existed in the first place. Whether it’s gender, citizenship, or the rule of law, nothing is sacred — only power.
