The Spectacle & The System
What the LA Protests Reveal About Power, Surveillance & Resistance
By the Center for Racial and Disability Justice
The Manufactured Crisis
As streets across Los Angeles erupt with protests against sweeping ICE raids and militarized federal responses, a familiar narrative is already taking hold: that these demonstrations are a “distraction” from more serious matters. But this framing is not only misleading — it’s dangerous. What’s happening in LA is not a deviation from the norm. It is the norm laid bare. And the real distraction is the claim that these protests are anything but central to understanding the authoritarian trajectory of the Trump regime.
The use of overwhelming force in response to grassroots resistance, especially by immigrants and communities of color, follows a long tradition of silencing those at the margins. These patterns are not new — they are amplified and digitized versions of old forms of state control. Understanding this moment requires more than observing the headlines — it demands we examine the systems underneath the spectacle.
Protest as Truth-Telling & the Performance of Power
Let’s be clear: the use of masked ICE agents conducting warrantless detentions in majority-immigrant neighborhoods, the deployment of federal troops without state consent, and the suppression of peaceful protesters to spread misinformation are not isolated incidents. They are components of a much larger architecture of control — one that is built on racialized and ableist assumptions about who is deserving of dignity, who is deemed a threat, and who gets to be seen.
This performance of repression is not only about optics — it is about erasure. By rendering immigrant and disabled bodies hyper-visible as threats, and yet politically invisible as citizens with rights, the state justifies exceptional violence under the guise of order. It also sends a clear message: resistance will be punished not just with force, but with invisibilization.
“For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force…” - President Trump
This extends beyond the ICE raids. It includes the denial of protest permits, surveillance of student activists, targeted arrests of community leaders, and the militarization of public space. The deployment of 2,000 “National Guard” and 700 U.S. Marines in LA — without the consent of local or state officials. This marks the first deployment without a governor’s consent since 1965, drawing legal scrutiny and signaling a disturbing shift toward federal authoritarianism. Federal immigration raids are expected to persist for the next month, and demonstrations are likely to continue in response.
The Spectacle of Authoritarian Drift
At the heart of this moment is the Big Ugly Bill (H.R. 1) — a sweeping budget reconciliation package that proposes unprecedented tax cuts for the wealthy, slashes to healthcare and food assistance, and a massive expansion of immigration enforcement funding. Far from improving our economy, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years, would increase debt by nearly $3 trillion, would lead to nearly 13.7 million Americans losing healthcare coverage, and would devastate Medicaid.
Polls show that the public overwhelmingly opposes this Big Ugly Bill, which would effectively dismantle the New Deal state and replace it with a Project 2025-style government. Yet instead of scaling back, the Trump regime has chosen to escalate. Stephen Miller’s tweet (“Stand with ICE. Pass the Big Beautiful Bill”) is evidence the Trump regime is using fear and chaos to sell the bill: flooding the streets with troops and staging a $45 million military parade in Washington, D.C. on June 14. It is no coincidence that this performance of state power coincides with Army Day, Flag Day, and Trump’s birthday as he offers “VIP experiences” to donors. Former officials label it a “martial spectacle” echoing Soviet and North Korean displays, and caution that involving the military in political theater dangerously erodes apolitical norms.
The Trump regime is manufacturing a crisis to justify authoritarian policy and distract from the bill’s unpopularity. The LA crackdown is not isolated — it’s a preview of what could happen nationwide if the bill passes. However, public resistance has exceeded expectations, and the regime is scrambling to reassert control through escalation and misinformation. California has filed suit against Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the federalization of the National Guard, calling it unlawful and inflammatory.
Counter-Protest & Grassroots Resistance
While the parade is expected to include tanks, aircraft, and a concerted media spectacle, a grassroots counter-protest campaign — titled “No Kings” — has emerged across all 50 states. More than 1,500 decentralized actions are planned to assert that real patriotism lies in resisting tyranny, not celebrating it. These protests, largely peaceful and intentionally community-rooted, are being met with the same state repression as in LA — underscoring that this moment is not about maintaining order, but about suppressing dissent.
The language of “order” often obscures whose lives are being protected and whose are being policed. It is not accidental that immigrant neighborhoods, university campuses, and protest sites are being treated as enemy territory, while government contractors and political donors remain shielded from scrutiny.
Unlike the state’s spectacle of control, these protests are grounded in a different vision of collective care and resistance. The chant of “No Kings” doesn’t reject a president — it rejects the consolidation of unchecked power, the militarization of public life, and the erasure of public accountability. The breadth and diversity of these actions also disrupt the dominant narrative that dissent is fringe, violent, or unpatriotic when it is anything but.
Surveillance & the Myth of Efficiency
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led to this point by Elon Musk, exemplifies how the rhetoric of modernization and cost-cutting is being weaponized to dismantle public infrastructure. What was sold to the public as a cost-saving efficiency initiative has instead ushered in a regime of opacity, privatization, and digital control — a regime that has not only failed to deliver on its promises, but is arguably creating more waste, fraud, and abuse than it claims to eliminate. It could end up costing $135 billion, while claiming to have saved only $160 billion.
DOGE outsourced huge portions of federal management to private contractors with opaque vetting, no-bid contracts, and ideological affiliations. These contracts often lack transparency and are awarded to tech firms with little public accountability, many with connections to Musk or allies. Oversight has diminished, not improved, especially after gutting Inspectors General and internal audit offices (e.g., the watchdogs who were saving taxpayers billions of dollars). The result? Billions in contracts are now flowing with little accountability — a new breeding ground for fraud and favoritism.
DOGE is also centralizing sensitive federal data across health, immigration, education, and employment systems into a master database without adequate or appropriate safeguards, thereby creating a single point of catastrophic vulnerability. Whistleblowers and cybersecurity experts have warned of internal misuse, unauthorized access, and increased exposure to foreign cyber threats.
This centralization not only exposes the U.S. to breaches — it also enables an unprecedented form of surveillance governance. By integrating databases across agencies, under their AI-First strategy, DOGE could algorithmically flag individuals based on vague criteria of “risk,” “fraud,” or “noncompliance.” These designations, often unappealable, serve as the basis for benefit denial, enforcement targeting, and public exclusion. We saw an example of this backfire when DOGE used an AI tool to arbitrarily terminate hundreds of contracts at the Veterans Administration (VA), many of which have to be reinstated. Perhaps most disturbing is how this “efficiency” framework is used to exclude rather than serve. Surveillance tools developed under the banner of fraud prevention are disproportionately targeting disabled people, immigrants, and communities of color. Oversight bodies have been gutted. AI systems have been used to flag vulnerable individuals as fraudulent or ineligible for benefits — often without clear criteria or appeal mechanisms. These automated decisions disproportionately target disabled people, people of color, and poor communities, reinforcing a feedback loop of exclusion while escaping democratic accountability.
Claim vs. Reality
- Cutting waste: Created opaque, politicized contractor networks and patronage
- Streamlining services: Caused duplication, legal confusion, data delays
- Saving taxpayer money: Increased costs through restructuring and outsourcing
- Fighting Fraud: Using AI to exclude vulnerable people, not actual fraudsters
- Enhancing transparency: Removed oversight, concealing data, and silencing critics
The notion of “efficiency” in this context is not neutral — it is a political weapon. It is being used to rationalize the evisceration of the social safety net, the expansion of surveillance infrastructure, and the privatization of core public functions. All while Musk’s companies continue to profit from federal contracts he helped structure — until, that is, he dared to criticize Trump.
Mask Hypocrisy & Structural Ableism
The contradictory enforcement of masking laws surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare how the state selectively deploys the politics of visibility and anonymity. During the height of the pandemic, disabled people, immunocompromised individuals, and others at high risk relied on masks to protect their health and lives. In many cases, these individuals were subject to harassment or exclusion for continuing to mask once mandates were lifted, their precaution framed as unnecessary or suspicious.
In protest contexts, particularly those led by marginalized communities, mask-wearing has historically served not only a public health function but also a safety mechanism — protecting individuals from retaliation, doxxing, and surveillance. However, under the Trump regime, mask bans have been invoked at protests to criminalize those protecting themselves, particularly during student-led actions.
The hypocrisy becomes most glaring when juxtaposed with how ICE agents, military contractors, and federal enforcement teams have operated. In the LA protests, numerous reports confirmed that agents were masked, unbadged, and refused to identify themselves. This anonymity serves to shield the state from accountability, creating an environment of impunity while robbing civilians of the right to protest without fear of state retribution. This becomes even more critical given known ties to white supremacy and far-right extremist groups among law enforcement and armed services.
This asymmetry reveals how mask policy is not truly about transparency or safety. It is about control. When the public masks for protection, it is seen as evasive. When the state masks to obscure its actions, it is accepted as strategic. This dynamic is deeply racialized and ableist. It criminalizes disabled people for trying to survive, and protesters, especially Black, Brown, LGBT+, and undocumented protesters, for trying to resist and to survive.
Differences in How Masking is Treated
- Protesters, disabled people → Criminal, deceptive, dangerous
- ICE agents, law enforcement → Tactical, necessary, untraceable
These double standards extend to enforcement of public health policies. First having dismissed long COVID and ended mask mandates for essential workers, the regime now celebrates agents and operatives who conceal their identity while conducting extrajudicial arrest and detention, violating due process rights. In a legal and cultural system where disabled people are routinely seen as burdens and threats, the demand for “unmasking” becomes a form of surveillance and forced exposure — a demand to be seen, identified, and punished.
What we are witnessing is not merely inconsistent policy. It is an ideological project that frames some people’s safety as expendable and others’ authority as absolute.
Fractures in the Power Structure
While it has recently been walked back, the fallout between Trump and Musk has revealed critical fissures in the regime’s internal cohesion. Musk’s denunciation of the budget bill, calling it a “disgusting abomination”, and his endorsement of posts calling for Trump’s impeachment mark a sharp pivot from his prior alignment. Trump’s response — threatening federal contracts and publicly mocking Musk — exposes the fragility of elite alliances when power is at stake.
This breakdown is not just political theater. SpaceX, Starlink, and other Musk-affiliated companies play pivotal roles in national infrastructure — from internet connectivity to defense systems. Disrupting those contracts could have cascading consequences for domestic security, global communications, and the viability of future public-private partnerships. Yet, behind the scenes DOGE continues to centralize power, silence dissent, and reframe dissent as fraud. This is not government innovation. It is the repackaging of authoritarian control as modernization.
What’s more, the optics of personal vendettas dictating national contract policy are deeply troubling. They expose the arbitrary nature of executive power in a political climate where loyalty is rewarded and dissent punished — not based on merit, law, or ethics, but on personality and proximity to the president.
In this context, the LA protests and the June 14 parade serve a dual function: they divert attention from the fracture and reinforce Trump’s narrative of external threats. The public’s gaze is directed toward managing dissent rather than scrutinizing the internal instability and policy failures of those in power.
Centering Race & Disability in Resistance
This is where history matters. To fully grasp what is unfolding in Los Angeles and beyond, we must understand it through a historical framework that centers race and disability. The logics of exclusion we are seeing now — efficiency as a rationale for cuts, surveillance as care, public order as repression — are not new. It is rooted in a legacy of colonial control, eugenics, racial capitalism, and carceral ableism. Each of these systems has relied on defining who counts as fully human, who is marked for care or containment, and who is erased from the narrative altogether.
Marginalized communities have always been disproportionately subject to surveillance — whether under colonial governance, slave patrols, eugenic asylums, or modern policing. Technologies from fingerprinting to facial recognition have long been tested on and deployed against these communities first, before becoming normalized. Disability has been pathologized and used to justify institutionalization, sterilization, and exclusion. Pseudoscientific claims about deficiency and deviance have been weaponized to justify the denial of rights to women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ individuals throughout our history. This has escalated during the Trump regime, particularly given Trump’s own ableist language, which he uses to demean his political opponents. He calls them “sick,” “deranged,” or mentally unwell. This is not only stigmatizing, it is profoundly dangerous. Such rhetoric draws on a long and violent history of pathologizing dissent and framing disability as synonymous with deviance or threat. Such stigmatized language reinforces ableist norms that cast disabled people as untrustworthy, unstable, or inherently harmful.
Whether through eugenic sterilization, exclusion from education and citizenship, or traumatic forms of medicalized “therapy” (e.g. ABA, ECT, and others), the language of pathology has always served power — not care. Trump’s use of ableist slurs taps into and reactivates these systems of control, reinforcing a political order in which difference is punished rather than protected. Political discourse that relies on ableist slurs doesn’t just degrade civility — it endangers lives. What is happening now — centralized data collection, algorithmic profiling, and unaccountable enforcement — is a digital evolution of these systems of control.
From the early institutionalization of disabled people in asylums to the sterilization of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people without consent, U.S. policy has long used pseudoscientific ideas of efficiency, productivity, and threat to justify exclusion. During the Progressive Era, eugenicists merged racial hierarchy with ableist ideology to argue for the removal of the “unfit” from society — a logic that informed not only social services but immigration law, education, and policing. The eugenics movement popularized the notion that people who could not work (especially poor, disabled, racialized people) were “burdens on the state” and should be removed from public life. Under the New Deal and Great Society, some benefits were extended, but many were intentionally designed to exclude Black people, disabled people, and immigrants (e.g., Social Security’s initial exclusion of domestic/agricultural workers).
Calls for “efficiency” in government — especially during neoliberal reforms of the 1980s to 2000s — often meant cutting services for the most marginalized and blaming them for the costs of inequality. Today’s “waste, fraud, and abuse” rhetoric echoes this legacy: it frames disabled, poor, or undocumented people as liabilities, while ignoring structural inequities. Programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Social Security are framed as bloated or abused not because they are, but because they serve people already constructed as undeserving — disabled people, immigrants, single mothers, trans folks, and communities of color. Surveillance technology, once a tool for military use, has now been redirected toward these domestic targets, reinforcing a belief that accountability flows only downward.
DisCrit (Disability Critical Race Theory) helps us understand how race and disability are co-constructed in this moment: whose bodies are deemed deviant, whose labor is dismissed, whose lives are labeled expendable. Through this lens, the protest is not just a reaction — it is a refusal to be disappeared. Systems of control do not operate in silos. They construct race and disability together to justify incarceration, exclusion, and surveillance. We see this clearly in the framing of the protests. The regime has labeled disabled and racialized protesters as “insurrectionists,” while erasing the structural violence enacted by the state — militarized raids, masked agents, mass arrests without due process. This reversal of victim and perpetrator is not accidental; it is an intentional reordering of reality to legitimize repression.
Historical Pattern vs. Present-Day Manifestation
- Surveillance of racialized/disabled bodies: AI profiling, ICE facial recognition, protester targeting
- Efficiency used to justify exclusion: DOGE slashing benefits, denying services via algorithms
- Pathologizing dissent: Protesters labeled “insurrectionists”; disability criminalized
- Erasure of data & voice: Disability demographic data deleted; public health suppressed
- Policing under the guise of care: ICE raids framed as “protective,” masking carceral violence
- Militarization of domestic governance: Marines deployed without consent; parade staged as unity
When the state uses disability as a reason to surveil but not support, to institutionalize but not empower, to punish but not protect — it reveals its priorities. The fusion of carceral and administrative violence exposes a broader ideological project: to consolidate power by narrowing the circle of whose lives are deemed valuable.
Protest as a Mirror & a Warning
What is unfolding in Los Angeles — and in dozens of cities across the country — is not a crisis of public disorder. It is a confrontation with state power, rooted in long-standing traditions of resistance by communities who have borne the brunt of authoritarian overreach.
When the federal government calls masked protestors an insurrection while deploying masked agents without accountability, it is not simply being hypocritical — it is reasserting a worldview where power protects itself and those at the margins must justify their existence. This is not law and order. It is a calculated spectacle designed to distract, dominate, and divide.
But people are not fooled. From union leaders like David Huerta, to grassroots mutual aid networks, to students, clergy and religious groups, artists, organizers, health and care workers — communities are showing up for one another. They are connecting the dots between militarized immigration enforcement, data surveillance, political repression, and systemic injustice. They are building coalitions that refuse to accept that what is happening in LA is normal — or inevitable.
We must understand that the protests are not a detour from “real” issues. They are the frontline of all of them. They show us the price of unchecked executive power, the danger of masking cruelty with patriotism, and the urgency of resisting authoritarianism at every level — federal, local, digital.
We are living through a moment when the very definition of our democracy is being rewritten — not only in laws and policies, but in the streets, in detention centers, in classrooms, in courtrooms, and in code. As political leaders maneuver for control and spectacle, the people are offering a different vision: one rooted in care, solidarity, and accountability.
Listen to the chants. Read the signs. Follow the organizers. The streets are speaking. The question is whether those with power will listen — or whether they will continue to mask their fear of justice behind violence.
Because if we fail to listen now, the cost won’t just be constitutional. It will be human.
Call to Action
- If you are a legislator: demand accountability for unlawful detentions and unauthorized military deployment.
- If you are an educator or academic: teach the history of resistance, not just repression.
- If you are a journalist: amplify the voices of those on the ground and scrutinize state narratives.
- If you are a technologist: build tools that protect, not punish.
- If you are a community member: show up, speak out, and organize.
Justice is not something we inherit. It is something we build. Together.
The Northwestern Pritzker Law Center for Racial and Disability Justice (CRDJ) is a first-of-its-kind center dedicated to promoting justice for people of color, people with disabilities, and individuals at the intersection of race and disability.
Learn more about CRDJ by visiting the Center for Racial and Disability Justice webpage.
