US anti-Israel activists throw their weight behind Los Angeles immigration protests
Protest groups urge followers to join demonstrations, link Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Israel: ‘This is a global infrastructure of state violence and we must dismantle it’
Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.
Anti-Israel activist groups have thrown their weight behind immigration protests in Los Angeles and other US cities that started on Friday.
The protests in Los Angeles began when immigration authorities arrested dozens of people around the city. The demonstrations have seen vandalism, property destruction, highway blockages and clashes with police, prompting an escalating response from federal authorities.
Leading anti-Israel activist groups, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestinian Youth Movement, PAL-Awda, Within Our Lifetime, and campus protesters have urged their followers to join the demonstrations, tying the unrest to Israel.
National Students for Justice in Palestine called on its followers to protest, and posted an image of Trump administration officials with a swastika, calling the administration “the fourth reich.”
“We have a duty to resist oppression wherever it manifests: from the barrios of LA to the refugee camps of Bethlehem,” National Students for Justice in Palestine said. “We will globalize the intifada.”
“Death to the occupation, from the West Bank to LA,” the group said.
The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace also compared the protests to the Holocaust, saying, “Never again means never again for anyone. Not for Palestinians under siege. Not for immigrants in detention.”
“The same surveillance drones used over Gaza now fly over the US-Mexico border,” the group said. “This is a global infrastructure of state violence and we must dismantle it together.”
Anti-Israel groups also urged their followers to join protests in Chicago, New York and other cities.
“As the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza reaches its most violent point yet, weaponizing aid to displace, slaughter, and starve Palestinians, ICE is disappearing community members,” said Within Our Lifetime, the leading anti-Israel activist group in New York.
The extremist group Unity of Fields, formerly Palestine Action US, called for “an intifada, people’s war” in Los Angeles and for more property destruction. The group shared images of Molotov cocktails, the improvised firebombs used to target hostage protesters in Colorado last week.
Anonymous submission from the Hamas Marxist Army in Los Angeles: pic.twitter.com/RayNlIklW1
— Unity of Fields (@unityoffields) June 9, 2025
“This level of militant, revolutionary internationalism in the heart of Amerika was unthinkable before the al-Aqsa Flood,” Unity of Fields said, using the Hamas term for the October 2023 invasion of Israel. “We owe everything to the anti-colonial armed resistance of the Palestinian people. Sinwar and Deif and all of the brave warriors.”
The group said on Friday that Apple had suspended its Telegram channel as it agitated for upheaval in Los Angeles. The group has repeatedly supported violence, including by backing Elias Rodriguez, charged with killing two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, last month.
Alongside pro-immigrant graffiti, vandals at the protests have scrawled anti-Israel slogans such as “Free Palestine,” “intifada,” “Israel trains ICE,” and inverted red triangles, a Hamas symbol.
At the protests, some demonstrators cover their faces with keffiyehs, a symbol of the pro-Palestinian movement. Video shows a protester wearing Palestinian terror group apparel and waving a Mexican flag in front of a burning vehicle.
In San Francisco, protesters vandalized a Jewish-owned community center with antisemitic graffiti.
Anti-Israel activists in the US have long sought to tie their movement to unrelated domestic and global issues, from library closures to law enforcement.
When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles earlier this year, many of the groups blamed the fires on Israel, sparking backlash from Jewish groups.
The Times of Israel Community.