How Artists Responded to 2025’s Surging ICE Raids

The day before mass ICE raids swept across LA, and mere weeks before tightening visa restrictions forced her to return home to Mexico, artist Kiyo Gutiérrez staged what she calls a “ritual-performance” on the bank of the LA River. Using ice and soil, she spelled out “No Human Is Illegal” through a sequence of meticulous, physically taxing gestures: breaking ice, arranging the cubes before they dissolved, then covering them with earth. As the ice melted, carrying the sediment into the rushing current, the work enacted the ambiguity of artificial borders and the precarity of those who cross them. The image’s disappearance, even as it was being made, captured the unresolved state in which countless lives still hang today.

Central America’s rich printmaking tradition began with colonial devotional imagery and later evolved into bold, social commentary championing revolution and working-class identity. Chicago-based Nicaraguan artist Carlos Barberena inherits and extends that lineage. In his sepia-toned relief print Abolish ICE, a young girl, hair tucked behind her ears, peers out from a chain-link fence. The precision and the quality of attention with which her expression is rendered counters the dehumanizing nature of statistics and news cycles, insisting on the individual life behind the policy. Easily reproduced and widely circulated, the print reflects Barberena’s commitment to democratic art forms that move from museum walls to brown paper bags and protest placards with equal legibility.

A Richard Neutra–designed home high in the Hollywood Hills served as the venue for “Temporary Home,” a group exhibition organized by artist Beatriz Cortez that was on view for two weekends in July. Among the works featured was Maria Maea’s installation Then They Came, 2025. Far removed from the state-sanctioned violence unfolding in the city below, Maea sought to collapse the distance that made the reality on the ground so easy to ignore. Using trailing blades of grass as markers, she mapped the dates, locations, and descriptions of ICE abductions directly onto the home’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Given Maea’s engagement with Indigenous histories, including her own Mexican and Samoan ancestry, and her ongoing practice of threading the present to the past, the timeline seemed to extend beyond the frame, situating this current displacement within a longer, ongoing continuum.

Long before workplace raids rose to the fore of public discourse, Brooklyn-based artist Jenny Polak was documenting the government’s habitual exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment. Begun in 2006, her ICE Escape Signs repurpose the wayfinding language of emergency signage to prepare and protect communities facing labor raids. A selection of these site-specific maps, equipped with arrows, stairs, and stick figures and commissioned by various establishments over the years, appeared in her recent solo show “Labor Market” at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York, organized with the nonprofit Artists Alliance Inc. Also on view were related projects such as Track the ICE Raid, which uses Google Maps to trace the cascading effects of enforcement actions. Polak’s practice offers a rare answer to how art might materially meet the demands of the moment: by devising mutual defense strategies and modeling a politics oriented toward seeing those made to feel invisible.   

For the past decade, LA-based artist Patrick Martinez has refined neon signage, a medium synonymous with consumerism, into a means of resistance and critique. His neon works redirect the aesthetics of advertising to reveal how public messaging can tilt toward coercion or be mobilized toward social progress. Included in this year’s Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, Hold the Ice, an arctic-blue jug illuminated with the words “agua is life; no ice,” took on renewed urgency in light of Trump’s recent immigration crackdown. In response to nationwide protests, Martinez printed images of his fluorescent-lettered signs, including “Deport ICE” and “Then They Came for Me,” on corrugated plastic and distributed them in the streets and at the Broad museum. For those who don’t yet have the language to articulate their fear, despair, or outrage, Martinez once offered: “They can use my work as a placeholder.”

In a new multi-channel video installation, The Border (Los Pollos vs. La Migra), Julio César Morales reworks a Hollywood dramatization of the US-Mexico border, the 1982 film The Border, isolating and enlarging the migrants who originally appeared only in the periphery. Cutting out the original’s protagonists (la migra, slang for “immigration agents,” or ICE) and centering los pollos (the migrants derisively likened to chickens destined for slaughter), the artist exposes the brutality that our cultural and political narratives deliberately minimize. An accompanying film, We Don’t See (2025), deepens the inquiry: scenes from the 1982 drama are overlaid with reflections from the artist’s friend, a former border patrol agent. At one point, he says, “We don’t see their screams, we don’t see their conflicting emotions.” Together, the works grapple with the enduring durability of early cultural narratives and how urgently their assumptions need to be overwritten.

In a year saturated with barbarous imagery that has become only increasingly more difficult to bear, there is something to be said for foregrounding delight, for putting the honey before the vinegar. Víctor “Marka27” Quiñonez’s I.C.E. SCREAM, which debuted at Frieze LA in February via the fair’s Impact Prize, does precisely that: disguising a pointed indictment as a nostalgic summer treat. Beneath the oversized, candy-colored acrylic ice-cream sculptures—realized in various states of deliquescence—are popsicle sticks printed with the ICE logo and the words “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.” Drawing on his experience as a Mexican immigrant, the Brooklyn-based artist embeds images of smiling fruit vendors alongside handcuffs and American flags within these resin treats, juxtaposing communal joy and resilience with the apparatuses meant to constrain them.

“Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here” and “no aceptaremos una América racista” (“we won’t accept a racist America”) are two of the chants heard in Call to Arms, an 18-minute compilation of staged performances and protest actions filmed over the past decade. Artist Elana Mann and her collaborators are seen activating her arm-shaped acoustic sculptures—horns with flared openings that emerge from cupped-hand mouthpieces—using breath, song, and percussive gestures to send sound through streets, campuses, and arts institutions.

Four of these megaphone-limb hybrids, along with a 10-foot photo collage visualizing their use, accompanied the video in an exhibition at Pepperdine University titled “Hold My Hand in Yours.” The exhibition opened in September and was slated to run until next March, but the university deemed the work “too political” and removed it from view on October 1. In response a dozen artists asked for their works to be removed in solidarity; Pepperdine opted to shutter the exhibition completely, a month into the show’s run. In a work preoccupied with who is granted the right to speak and who must fight to be heard, the university’s decision reads as a confirmation rather than a contradiction: a reminder that the conditions for expression are often unstable and always unevenly distributed.

On October 15, conceptual artists Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese installed a 17-foot-wide, 5-foot-tall, 3,000-pound ice sculpture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Titled Last Call DemocracyICED, the work spelled out “DEMOCRACY” in monumental block letters carved from ice, positioned within sight of the White House. Over the course of the day, the sculpture thinned, stooped, and collapsed, a metaphor for the erosion of democratic ideals under the current administration, turning it into a visceral loss. Confronting viewers with the consequences of complacency, the artwork struck a collective nerve, garnering national attention. “It’s a powerful symbol,” said Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s, “that helps express the feelings and sadness and the horror of Americans.”     

Perhaps one of 2025’s largest and most collaborative shows of cultural solidarity, the “Am I Next?” Campaign projected testimonies from residents affected by ICE raids alongside billboard-size monochromatic portraits of everyday Angelenos onto building facades across Southern California. Paired with more than 30 digital works by nine local artists, including Brandy González, Lilia “Liliflor” Ramírez, and John Fleissner, the citywide intervention marshals scale, exposure, and repetition to register the year’s escalating assaults on civil liberties and democratic norms. The project asks viewers to consider not only individual vulnerability but the fragility of the structures that make public life in this country possible. By casting the question across the city—Am I next?—the campaign transformed a private fear into a collective reckoning.