Rage Against the ICE Machine

Trump’s ICE forces are facing militant and organized opposition everywhere they turn.

Screenshot via X

By Sonali Kolhatkar

A New York City woman wearing a navy blue polka-dot dress has gone viral for her defiant resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a raid in lower Manhattan on October 21, 2025.

Appearing as though she was on her way from work—the woman wore a navy blue blazer and brown shoes and carried a large handbag—the “polka-dot dress woman” as she’s being called, took a powerful stand in the middle of the street. With a military tank rolling toward her, she stopped and flipped off ICE agents with both hands.

She appeared unafraid. She pushed back physically as ICE agents attempted to bully her and others. Her face, hands, and body exuded rage and resistance.

The aggressive noncompliance of the polka-dot dress woman and her fellow protesters is precisely what our dangerous march toward fascism calls for.

There are countless incarnations of such resistance in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere. These resisters are refusing to go gently into the night of fascist dictatorship. They are fearlessly facing off against President Donald Trump’s deployments of immigration agents, National Guard, and other federal law enforcement and military personnel, and are refusing to accept the crushing of dissent, demographic diversity, and democracy itself.

One such activist is Leonardo Martinez, a volunteer and lead organizer with VC Defensa, an immigrant defense group and rapid response network based in Ventura County, California, who found himself on the receiving end of ICE violence on October 16, 2025.

While in the midst of community patrols, Martinez, who is a U.S. citizen, followed ICE agents in Oxnard driving an SUV. It was a routine action for volunteers like him who have been nonviolently confronting and intimidating federal agents away from their communities. But this time, the ICE agents seemed to have had enough. Street-level and dash cam videos show their SUV ramming violently into the side of Martinez’s pickup truck on a relatively empty street.

“I was definitely shocked when they initially hit me because the industrial area that we were in did not have a lot of traffic,” said Martinez. His quick thinking likely kept him safe. “Once they aggressively hit me, I knew that if I pulled over in the moment, that they were going to drag me out and beat me up.”

Instead of getting out of his truck, he continued driving for a few minutes—with the SUV following him—toward downtown Oxnard, where he knew there would be more street and foot traffic. At first, the ICE agents claimed Martinez hit them—not knowing there was video footage. After being arrested, Martinez’s wrists and ankles were handcuffed, but he demanded medical attention to document his injuries. After a stop at a hospital, he was eventually taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and was later released.

“We’ve kind of already practiced a lot of these scenarios in real life and troubleshooted and figured things out,” said Martinez. His fellow VC Defensa activists quickly located him and posted the now-viral video footage of his truck being hit. The incident has drawn attention and admiration for the work of a highly effective organization that boasts 700 highly trained volunteers like Martinez.

Such sophisticated organizing is evident all over the nation. In Chicago, where ICE agents terrorized children in a military-style raid involving rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter to arrest adults and children in an apartment complex, similarly militant and organized activism has taken root. Like Ventura County’s VC Defensa, Chicago’s Patrulla Popular or People’s Patrol consists of organized volunteers who warn community members when ICE agents appear and help document ensuing abuses.

The Chicago activists use car horns or scream at agents while recording them on their phones. Now, brightly colored plastic whistles have become a formidable weapon in the nonviolent anti-ICE arsenal. Community patrollers are encouraged to whistle loudly when ICE agents are present. The city’s anti-ICE resistance includes teachers, delivery drivers, and even children.

In Portland, Oregon, activists have been protesting outside the local ICE detention center for months, wearing inflatable animal costumes—an effective way to inspire media attention and highlight the absurdity of Trump’s claims of the city being “war-ravaged.” Even ICE officials have been forced to address the costumes, with one Homeland Security official calling the protest “a bizarre effort to obstruct ICE law enforcement.”

In San Francisco, which Trump announced would be the next site of a massive military deployment, organizers braced themselves with training and rapid response plans. The call for federal law enforcement appears to have come from one of the Bay Area’s Trump-supporting tech billionaires, Marc Benioff. It’s wealthy elites like him who have fueled skyrocketing inequality in the San Francisco area and then complain about a scourge of unhoused people.

Eventually Trump, making clear exactly who he works for, called off the surge after conversing with his billionaire buddies.

The president is facing militant and organized opposition to his anti-immigrant war everywhere he turns. It’s a testament to the mixed-status immigrant communities that have infused American cities with their rich cultures, cuisines, and traditions, becoming an integral part of their functioning.

Women like the polka-dot dress lady are on the frontlines of this battle. According to VC Defensa’s Martinez, “It’s incredible how many mothers we have in this organization [who] take the lead on so many of the projects and are some of the most dedicated people that we have.”

Just days before ICE agents rammed his truck, they cornered a woman volunteer who was observing them. “They all got out with their guns drawn,” said Martinez, and “started banging on the window, boxed her in, and then after she didn’t open up for them, and didn’t do anything, they ended up getting back in their car and leaving.”

A Los Angeles area tech worker calling herself Kim showed up to the “No Kings” gathering on October 18 wearing an “ICE out of LA” T-shirt. She explained that as a “Chicana, second-generation American,” she was at the march “supporting immigrant communities across the board, not only the Latino community, but all immigrants because as we also know through history that’s what made this country.”

According to Kim, “we’re showing [Trump] we’re not afraid to stand up for our rights, stand up and defend our country.”

It’s clear that Trump is not going after “criminals” given that the vast majority of people arrested by ICE either have no criminal record or have pending charges—in other words, they’re innocent until proven guilty. Further, ICE has arrested and detained nearly 200 U.S. citizens during the first nine months of Trump’s second presidency.

It would be easy for people to fold, to go about their business, keep their heads down, and not get involved. But, far too many are speaking up, pushing back, putting their bodies and lives on the line in the face of ICE deployment, as Trump enacts his agenda.

Such mass resistance is the answer to staving off full-blown fascist authoritarianism, especially when taken together with mass shows of force at organized, coordinated gatherings such as the latest “No Kings” protests that drew an estimated 7 million people. Anti-Trump protests are also spreading to parts of the nation known as pro-Trump strongholds, and overall protest activity is at an all-time high, comparable to the historic racial justice protests in summer 2020.

The icons of the movement who are trying to wrest control of the nation from fascist forces are everyday people, sometimes nameless, whose bravery and audacity are infectious. May the polka-dot dress woman inspire legions as she goes down in history as a symbol of necessary rage.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.