Though one can never know for certain what tips the scales toward protest — what single mundane horror, in a country oversaturated with mundane horrors, finally impels someone to shake loose their humdrum half-comforts and lob a rock through the window of an ICE vehicle — it seems that this time it was an arrest.

On June 6, union leader David Huerta — president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California — was thrown to the ground and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in downtown Los Angeles. ICE officials claim that Huerta interfered with their raid and slapped him with the felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer. SEIU disputes this claim and maintains that Huerta was assaulted by ICE while acting in his lawful capacity as a community observer.

Since Huerta’s arrest, protests have exploded across Los Angeles and greater California. But no single event births mass protest alone. As the late Joshua Clover writes in his book Riot.Strike.Riot, protests like those in Los Angeles may seem to suddenly erupt “in moments of shattered glass and fire,” but in reality they emerge out of larger structures of inequality “inextricable from ongoing and systemic capitalist crisis.” The wildfire is lit by a single spark, yes, but it also requires accumulations of dead timber that have gathered unnoticed for seasons.

With this in mind, it begins to make much more sense why Huerta’s arrest spurred everyday Angelenos to finally take to the streets. It is not just that ICE’s assault of Huerta was an unequivocal image of the agency’s unchecked brutality (though it was), nor simply because Huerta is a galvanizing and clear-eyed public speaker (though he is), nor even because Huerta’s personal identity feels particularly poignant in our age of mass deportation (seeing Huerta, a US citizen descended from Mexican immigrants, manhandled by masked agents leaves no doubt that Stephen Miller’s white supremacist fantasies include disappearing migrants and citizens alike).

It was, of course, principally because Huerta is the president of a powerful union, which possesses the infrastructure to immediately organize 750,000 members in California — not to mention at least tens of thousands of community members in solidarity with them. Crucially, SEIU did not simply demand the release of its president but the wholesale termination of ICE raids, full stop. Rarely do we witness such concrete affirmations of the fact that the well-being of US workers and immigrants are deeply and materially intertwined.

It is urgently needed; the Left in the United States simply does not have the infrastructure to resist the bulk of the Trump administration’s overtly authoritarian policies. A not insignificant reason for this is because union membership is at its lowest point in a century — less than 10 percent of the workforce carries a union card today. But what is clear from the protests in Los Angeles is that unions are crucial in organizing meaningful resistance. Mainstream media may focus on irruptions of fire and glass, but the real story so far is that SEIU and community organizations were already prepared when the protests finally did ignite.

Seen in this light, a union is not simply that bureaucracy we briefly interact with every few years in order to receive a raise or file a complaint against the boss — though those things are certainly still important. It can be a much more alive thing, the body through which we might form intimate human connection with our communities and the most vulnerable.

Put bluntly, the power of a union is that it can unify, not only through obvious means (workers against the boss, etc.) but also in novel ways that match the most pressing matters of our time, from divesting from Israel to regulating artificial intelligence to work for us instead of against us — and, of course, fighting for the rights of the undocumented.

Huerta has not just made this clear since his arrest; it has long been an essential component of his and the union’s labor organizing model. At SEIU, Huerta’s approach has been to continuously incorporate immigrant labor into the union fold rather than view it as an outside threat. Under his leadership, at least hundreds of union members have become US citizens, and he has steered the union to push for comprehensive immigration reform.

“What happened to me is not about me,” said Huerta in a statement from jail.

This is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.

The protests in Los Angeles have already drawn comparisons to the George Floyd uprisings almost exactly five years ago, when millions of people across the country took to the streets after Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by the white police officer Derek Chauvin.

But there is a critical difference. While the 2020 uprising mostly caught unions on the back foot, with locals and leaderships more likely to engage in introspective diversity initiatives than to wield their power to change society, the LA actions have already seen organized labor take up a vital role. A coalition of groups that includes the SEIU was ready to respond rapidly to the ICE workplace raids, arriving on the scene to face down agents and defend workers. Its ability to seize the situation and compellingly communicate not only its demands but also dictate what the larger community should be doing has been essential in maintaining consistent action and widespread support, despite the vagaries of large protests and the wanton provocations of Donald Trump’s White House.

The 2020 protests, on the other hand, erupted so spontaneously that no institution, whether union or otherwise, truly succeeded in channeling that unwieldly explosion of social effervescence into concrete, long-lasting reforms, and so the brave energies of the George Floyd protesters mostly disappeared into the ether just as quickly as they had come.

Unions, as we can see clearly with SEIU, can help us steer clear of the whirlpools of sectarian and identitarian self-indulgence. Immigrants are workers, and workers are immigrants. As Clover writes, an increase in class consciousness and organization is to be found not in the streets alone but in the swing from riot to strike, meaning from momentary anger to a more formalized “struggle over the price of labor power and over employment itself.” This is why immigration raids almost always occur in workplaces — it is a labor disciplinary mechanism, a warning to all other workers that they, too, will be made dispensable if they resist their own exploitation.

It is no coincidence that some of the highest-profile immigration arrests and deportations — including that of the recently returned Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the still detained Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez — have been of union members. Their abductions don’t just test the bonds of family but the bonds of those who labor alongside each other as equals.

What is happening in Los Angeles seems to indicate we are learning from our past mistakes and in fact building productively upon them. Huerta and the SEIU have effectively placed emphasis on solidarity between workers and immigrants as a means of acting decisively to kick ICE out of town. This decisiveness has already had an impact — the city of Glendale, California, recently announced that it is terminating a detainee holding contract with ICE.

Still, unions are not a panacea, and, like all institutions, they contain various contradictions that need to be addressed. As Eric Blanc has written, most US unions — despite their record-high assets — flunked the test of the COVID-19 pandemic, choosing to prioritize and preserve their coffers over investing in organizing and expanding their ranks. If there was ever a time for labor to open its war chest, it’s now.

On June 9, three days after his arrest, Huerta was released from jail. He gave his first address in Spanish. “Esta lucha es nuestra,” he said, “es de nuestra comunidad, pero es de todos.” This fight is ours, it’s our community’s, but it belongs to everyone.