ICE And The Israeli Military Are 2 Sides Of The Same Coin — We Must Resist Both

Opposing ICE in the US while backing genocide in Gaza is senseless. These struggles are intertwined.

By Marcy Winograd, TruthOut

On July 12, 2025, Homeland Security agents shoved Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) out the door of a department press conference when he tried to ask a question of Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The secretary had deployed hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to the sanctuary city of Los Angeles, where they unleashed tear gas on outraged residents. Video of security agents in LA knocking Padilla to the ground, ordering him to “lay flat” while handcuffing him, went viral on social media. Overnight, the son of Mexican immigrants became a symbol of resistance to MAGA race hatred.

Yet, three weeks later, the liberal darling would join Adam Schiff, California’s other senator and one of the biggest recipients of AIPAC largess, to vote against Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) resolution to block nearly $676 million in weapons to Israel. In the midst of overwhelming U.S. public opposition — including 92 percent of Democratic Party voters — to Israel’s military onslaught in Gaza, Padilla sided with a minority of Senate Democrats to continue arming a genocide so inhumane it led to the coining of a new humanitarian crisis term: “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family” (WCNSF).

It was as though the ICE raids at home were separate and apart from Israel’s bombardment and mass starvation of 2 million people in Gaza.

Despite the presence of Palestinian flags at ICE protests, lawmakers and mainstream Democrats often refuse to make the clear connection between ICE agents ethnically cleansing U.S. militarized communities and Israeli soldiers ethnically cleansing occupied Palestine.

In actuality, the Trump administration and the Israeli government are operating from the same playbook to realize their vision of ethnic or racial supremacy. For Donald Trump and his MAGA base, the goal is a white, Christian, cisgender America where the country’s past crimes — Indigenous genocide, African slavery, racial segregation, Japanese incarceration — are erased from the classroom, from the history books, and from the collective memory; for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters, the goal is an ever-expanding Jewish supremacist state purged of Palestinians, their expulsion never taught nor acknowledged, their culture — from falafel to dabke to oud music — appropriated to erase all signs of Palestine, only to resurface under the false name of “Israeli culture.” In this playbook, Israel’s critics are labeled antisemites in order to shut down debate.