Los Angeles Teacher Leads Community Resistance to ICE Raids
LOS ANGELES, CA – as federal immigration enforcement intensifies, a Los Angeles high school history teacher is emerging as a key figure in a grassroots movement to defend communities against ICE raids. Ron Gochez, a leading member of the LA-based organization Unión del Barrio, is spearheading efforts to warn neighbors of potential ICE activity and actively resist enforcement actions.
Gochez’s activism gained prominence following a summer of increased ICE presence in Los Angeles, documented in the new film “A City Fights Back: How LA Defends Itself Against ICE” by filmmaker Brandon Tauszik for The Intercept. The film highlights a multifaceted strategy of opposition, including street patrols, monitoring potential entry points to communities, organizing protests, and training new members to combat ICE.
“if they break LA, they can break any community in this country,” Gochez stated, emphasizing the meaning of defending Los Angeles as a focal point of resistance.
Gochez and Unión del Barrio are part of the Community Self-Defense Coalition, a network of dozens of grassroots groups coordinating these efforts. The coalition conducts daily patrols to alert residents to possible ICE operations.
The fight has become deeply personal for Gochez, a father and educator in the Los Angeles Unified School District. On August 8, ICE agents detained 18-year-old Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz while walking his dog in Van Nuys, just days before he was scheduled to begin his senior year at Reseda Charter High School. Guerrero-Cruz remains in ICE detention at a privately owned facility in Adelanto, California. Days later, agents detained 15-year-old Nathan Mejia at gunpoint outside Arleta High School, later releasing him. Both students are enrolled in the district where Gochez teaches.
“It’s a constant reminder why we struggle and why we do what we do,” Gochez reflects in the film, while playing with his son. “One day when we’re no longer here and he’ll be here, and maybe his children, they’ll have a better life than what we had and what our parents had - so we’re fighting for the next seven generations, and he’s next up.”
This resistance is unfolding against the backdrop of the Trump management’s expanded war on immigrants, prompting a growing wave of community-led opposition across the country.
This project was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with funding made possible by The Puffin Foundation.
