The recent uprisings in June (2025) in Los Angeles against the ICE raids have proven to me that on the one hand, gentrification is a form of counterinsurgency, and the neighborhoods that have been more successful in resisting ICE have been the working class indigenous/latino and all other migrant communities not yet pacified by gentrification.
Counterinsurgency is the comprehensive political, economic, and social actions taken by the state to defeat and co-opt a rebellious people. Its objective is not merely to kill insurgents, but to dismantle the community support, culture, and political solidarity that make resistance possible. Gentrification operates with the same methodology and strategy. The "insurgency" in this context is the persistent non-conformity of communities of color and the poor: their ways of life, their informal economies, their political dissent, and their very existence where they live. Gentrification is the state-sanctioned and capitalism-driven campaign to neutralize this insurgency and physically occupy a neighborhood.
Gentrification has brought in heightened policing and surveillance to Los Angeles. The introduction of "crime prevention through environmental design" (CPTED): better lighting, the removal of benches, the creation of easily monitored streets. This makes spaces less hospitable to existing residents and more welcoming to new wealthier white ones. An increased police presence criminalizes everyday life, breaking up informal networks and instilling a climate of fear. The community is no longer a sanctuary; it becomes, even more than before, an occupied territory.
Gentrification creates political and economic displacement, and the ultimate goal, of both counterinsurgency and gentrification, is to replace a hostile population with a friendly one. Gentrification does this directly through skyrocketing housing costs, property taxes, and evictions. The physical removal of the existing population is the most definitive way to dismantle their power base.
From the 2020 uprisings following the murder of George Floyd to the Anti-Ice battles of 2025 (and the history of rebellion in Los Angeles from 1965 in Watts and beyond), the police repression and rebellion has always been concentrated in historically oppressed communities. The most intense and successful confrontations against ICE were in Paramount, Compton, South Central, and Bell which are communities made up working class people of color and migrants. Downtown LA, also a historically poor area, and where many people convened in the early days against ICE, was confrontational and waged inspiring fights but police and state repression (along with neoliberal cooptation) drowned out the direct action. They are the "unpacified" zones where community ties, though frayed, remain strong enough to facilitate direct action and sabotage.
The ICE raids are part of the overall strategy of not only terror, but counterinsurgency against communities who's very existence poses a threat to white supremacy and imperialism as a whole. Once a whole community of people is removed, the neocolonial gentrification can replace the less desired people through a new form of settler-colonialism. The community networks will be fractured, the rebellious population displaced with new residents who lack historical ties and lived experience of police violence that fuels that rebellion. Even if those new residents have good intentions, and mean well, they are part of the overall pacification process. Even gentrifiers who are left leaning - any movement that grows from them is one that leads back to protecting the status quo (i.e. DSA and electoral politics), is built on top of the displaced, and with the support of the state usually. They may even sometimes coopt and recuperate tactics and language of the communities they displace, while removing the revolutionary aims to just stop way short of challenging the system and the institutions of power (who some may even have ties to themselves). The tactics that are mainly promoted are ones that are passive, and where they don't have to put themselves in harm's way.
True community rebellion against gentrification and against ICE are two fronts in the same war: the defense of community autonomy against a counterinsurgency that uses detainment, deportation, the eviction notice and occupation as its weapons. The people from oppressed communities must be empowered and supported to continue to use tactics and militancy that will be successful in stopping ICE in their tracks.
There has been a lot of inspiring resistance, and creativity in every city being invaded by ICE. Communities have mobilized, organized, and taken direct action to sabotage ICE raids. While reorganization is needed, as anarchists we must think that the most effective and revolutionary organization comes from within the oppressed themselves not from the outside. Having an organization for the sake of an organization doesn't do any good, if doesn't come from the oppressed and from the community itself. Spontaneous rebellion and self-organization should be supported by those organizations, not hindered by or for their own opportunist aspirations. This leads to cooptation and eventual pacification of the people because these movements tend to limit the tactics in how people fight because they have a reformist strategy or by their own proximity to institutional power. These liberal movements alienate oppressed working class and colonized people. The oppressed communities will erupt precisely where the counterinsurgency has failed to fully pacify the population, where the community's will to resist has not yet been priced out or policed out of existence. These uprisings are the unmistakable sound of an insurgency refusing to be silenced.
