Meet the Marxist Group Sabotaging ICE Raids

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

They patrol L.A.’s streets in search of ICE, Trump immigration raids,” is how the Los Angeles Times described the pro-illegal alien activists sabotaging the arrests of illegal alien criminals. The newspaper breathlessly described how ‘community patrols follow ICE vehicles and alert illegal aliens that federal law enforcement is on the way.”

The pro-illegal alien activists use megaphones to make noise, hoping to scare away the criminals that ICE has come to protect the community from, to the applause of the media.

During one recent raid in Alhambra where ICE, the FBI and DEA were preparing to arrest dangerous criminals, Union del Barrio activists began shouting through megaphones, and alerting any nearby criminals that law enforcement was here.

But who are they?

The LA Times misleadingly described the pro-illegal alien activists as belonging to Union del Barrio as “an independent political organization advocating for immigrant rights and social justice.” More accurately, Union del Barrio is a Marxist group which draws inspiration from the Communist Cuban revolution and its stated mission is destroying the United States in the name of La Raza, meaning the Latino ‘race’, to replace it with a ruthless leftist dictatorship.

California has already been renamed Califatzlan in preparation for the ‘reconquista’.

Union del Barrio’s political program calls for “the liberation and reunification of Mexico under a revolutionary government” which will be “committed to the liberation and unification of Nuestra América” and the dismantling of the United States as an “illegal settler state” by “achieving independent political power inside the belly of the beast”. Non-Latinos who are not members of ‘La Raza’ are described as “anglo settlers” who will presumably have to be ethnically cleansed.

UdB claims that its current form derives from Castro and Hugo Chavez’s ‘Bolivarian Alliance’ and after his death, Union del Barrio described Castro as “a symbol of struggle” and vowed that Fidel will “accompany us in our difficult task of fighting… within the bowels of the empire.”

Union del Barrios was founded by Ernesto Bustillos, a former sociology professor at Pasadena City College, who claimed descent from one of the early Mexican ‘dons’ who settled California (a hypocritical affectation for a Marxist class warrior), who liked to quote Lenin, and studied Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro and Karl Marx. UdB’s operation in San Diego is known as ‘Base Ernesto Che Guevara (BECG)’ after the Communist terrorist and mass murderer.

This is the group whose work the LA Times promoted under the headline “SoCal immigrants, allies can learn what to do when ICE shows up. Here’s how”. The media, which has been celebrating Union del Barrios for its opposition to ICE, has not disclosed UdB’s dedication to the destruction of America, its ties to Communist Cuba and its ugly history of hate.

CNN promoted the ‘Community Self-Defense Coalition’ without disclosing that it’s a front group for Union del Barrios. And local news network outlets tout the ‘Coalition’ and its anti-ICE activities as part of the anti-Trump messaging adopted by mainstream media outlets.

But what they leave out is that Union del Barrios did not begin conducting its anti-ICE operations when Trump took office, but had also been running them under Biden, and perhaps earlier.

Back then the media had no interest in promoting radical groups disrupting law enforcement.

Ron Gochez, a high school social studies teacher and prominent member of the UTLA union, recently honored by the California Teachers Association with its ‘human rights award’, has been interviewed by the media about the disruptions of ICE raids as a leader of Union del Barrios.

Gochez was previously better known for his work with MEChA: another radical La Raza group infamous for its motto, “Por La Raza todo, Fuera de La Raza nada” or “For the Race everything, outside the Race nothing.” The racist slogan goes back to Jose Vasconcelos: a Nazi collaborator, who had praised Hitler and coined the term ‘La Raza’ for a new master race.

MEChA’s extremism led to the hate group being disavowed by the National Council of La Raza over its racism and calls for violence including rhetoric such as “all the Migra pigs should be killed, every single one…the only good one is a dead one…The time to fight back is now. It is time to organize an anti-Migra patrol…It is to [sic] bad that more Migra pigs didn’t die with him.”

By ‘Migra’, MEChA meant what is today known as ICE.

A past screencapped tweet from Gochez read, “non-violence has never and will never work against fascists, capitalists and imperialists”.

Did the Union del Barrios’s anti-ICE patrols have their roots in that 1995 editorial written under a pseudonym calling for the murder of immigration officials? Especially as the current anti-ICE activism by UdB and its front group is being accompanied by an unsigned ‘doxxing’ campaign trying to intimidate ICE personnel by posting their photos, names and phone numbers.

MEChA and Ron Gochez both also have a history of antisemitism. MEChA used slurs like “San Luis Jewniversity” and “Jew York” and coordinates with anti-Israel groups supportive of Islamic terrorism. Gochez had previously defended MEChA by claiming that “the Jewish-owned media continue to blind the masses” leading them to support the Bush administration.

More recently, Gochez was caught delivering a presentation to the UTLA teachers union discussing “how to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired” in which he talked about getting students to anti-Israel rallies, and claiming that “Zionists” were spying on him.

In 2010, Gochez delivered a speech at UCLA, declaring that “we know that all of that is happening in the context of where we now stand is stolen, occupied Mexico”, describing his group as the “Northern Front of a Latin American Revolutionary Movement” and quoting Che.

In 2015, a screencapped tweet showed Cochez sitting in his classroom in front of a Cuban Communist flag featuring Che and describing his teaching “on the US imperialist attack on the magnificent people of Vietnam”.

None of the media outlets promoting Gochez and UdB’s anti-ICE activities have bothered to mention his antisemitism or his past controversies over calls for the destruction of America.

“‘There’s raza that’s been detained,’ Ron Gochez, founder of Union del Barrio’s Los Angeles chapter,” is how the Associated Press covered his response to an ICE raid.

The AP did not bother translating ‘Raza’ to mean ‘race’.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.