On Friday and Saturday, federal officers descended on streets and workplaces across Los Angeles County to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. There was a large raid at Ambiance Apparel, in the fashion district, and a showdown, thick with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, between protesters and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Paramount, in southeast L.A. Some immigrants who appeared for check-in appointments at the federal courthouse in Little Tokyo were taken to the basement, then removed, by van, to unknown locations. Homeland Security had recently confirmed that a nine-year-old elementary-school student in Torrance, who’d been detained after a hearing in late May and relocated to a prison in rural Texas, would now be deported. These were not the first immigration-enforcement actions taken by President Trump, who has struggled to fulfill his campaign promise to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” But these tactics were, as Oscar Zarate, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told me, “lawless, just not normal.” Lawyers were being denied access to detainees; workers were being picked up on the basis of their racial appearance, he said. “There are rules of engagement that are not being followed. It’s incredibly dangerous, not just for immigrants but for citizens.”
Los Angeles is, of course, an immigrant town. A third of the county’s residents were born outside the U.S., and more than half speak a language other than English at home. L.A. is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state: local authorities are not permitted to coöperate with federal immigration enforcers. And so, as word of the recent detentions—described to me by immigrant advocates as “kidnappings” or “abductions” or “disappearances”—spread through text messages and social media, thousands of people showed up to confront an influx of federal law-enforcement personnel from various agencies. Protesters marched and chanted and put their bodies in the way of vehicles and arresting officers; some lit trash on fire, threw rocks, and sprayed graffiti (“Fuck ICE”; “Can’t Stop da Raza!”). Officers responded with drones, batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. At Ambiance Apparel, they arrested David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union. They also blocked a delegation of elected officials and immigration advocates from seeing detainees at the courthouse, a previously routine form of oversight.
Federal agents captured some two hundred immigrants in two days, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which helps to run a hotline and legal-services network. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the arrest of a hundred and eighteen people. Yet Trump apparently could not tolerate—or maybe saw an opportunity in—the friction caused by the community’s efforts to intervene. Late Saturday night, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, announced that he would deploy two thousand members of the California National Guard to quell what Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, was calling a “violent insurrection.” Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, objected to the order; they could handle the situation on their own, they said. Nevertheless, three hundred National Guard members were in place by early Sunday, as a number of marches and rallies were held in various parts of the county.
I encountered around twenty National Guard members—in camouflage, armed, helmeted, clutching shields—outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. on Sunday afternoon. Behind them were a half-dozen tactical vehicles. The scene did more to provoke than soothe. Hundreds of activists filled the surrounding streets and sidewalks, demanding an end to raids and deportations. The crowd had not assembled at the instruction of any particular group. They wore Pride rainbows, kaffiyehs, and Mexican and Salvadoran flags. (Miller wrote on X: “Foreign flags flying in American cities to defend the invasion.”) Prisoners in the jail rising above us participated from behind their tiny windows by flicking the lights on and off.
A woman who asked to be called Xiomara, because she feared reprisal if she used her real name, and her partner, both social workers and native Angelenos from immigrant families, held signs reading “What if it was your family? You don’t need to be undocumented to stand w/ us” and “BASTA CON LA MIGRA! STOP DEPORTATION.” Xiomara told me that she was close to many people who had voted for Trump and now regretted that decision. “The Administration originally said that deportations were to remove people with a violent criminal history,” she explained. “That’s not what we’ve been seeing. We’ve seen them target kids and people in manual-labor jobs. We’re ripping families apart.” (Homeland Security has claimed that at least some of those arrested are “gang members” and “murderers”—“the worst of the worst.”)
Despite the warlike stance of the National Guard, it was the Los Angeles Police Department that did all the work. There looked to be more than a hundred officers from the L.A.P.D., all outfitted in black riot gear. For hours, they positioned themselves as human cordons, shot off tear gas, and gave confusing instructions to protesters. “Move south!” “Leave the area!” “You can’t go there!” “You can’t leave!”A pair of officers shoved me repeatedly and pushed me forward on the sidewalk with their batons. (When I identified as press, one said, “I don’t care.”) Helicopters and surveillance drones flew low. There were L.A.P.D. cars, S.U.V.s (including one that accelerated dangerously through the crowd), trucks, motorcycles, and, later, horses.
In the early evening, the confrontation heated up. A message blared from a helicopter, threatening the crowd with arrest and “serious bodily injury” unless the area was cleared within one minute. (Nothing happened after a minute.) Protesters threw stones and plastic water bottles at police cruisers and onto the 101 Freeway, temporarily stopping traffic, and members of the crowd set several driverless Waymo cars on fire, producing a funnel of black smoke. Officers began shooting rubber bullets and corralled the protesters near City Hall. Xiomara witnessed officers on horseback “trampling over people,” she said. Aimee Zavala, a twenty-nine-year-old who left the area around this time, believed that the police response was unmerited. “People are going to be passionate,” she told me, “but I didn’t see any protesters with any weapons. I didn’t see anybody causing physical harm.” On one stretch of sidewalk, I watched a volunteer medic administer gauze and aspirin to three young men with round, bloody wounds. The L.A.P.D. arrested ten protesters, bringing the weekend total to thirty-nine, and used X to declare all of downtown “an UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY.”
Not all of the weekend’s demonstrations corresponded to a specific raid or deportation. Some were more elemental: expressions of rage at the Administration’s casual, spectacular cruelty. Just days after Trump’s Inauguration, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, had taken part in a videotaped series of immigration raids in New York City, also a sanctuary jurisdiction. Now it was Los Angeles’s turn, and it was as if immigrant workers, children, and families had been cast in a film made for Fox News. Local officials weren’t entirely blameless; the chief of the L.A.P.D., Jim McDonnell, pointed out over the weekend that, technically, the department “is not involved in civil immigration enforcement.” The sheriff of L.A. County, Robert Luna, said the same. “But there’s a loophole,” Anthony Bryson, an activist with the group SoCal Uprising, told me. “If they assist with traffic, that’s not immigration enforcement.” The police were present at raids and protests; they willingly backed up their federal peers. “The police were there instigating, creating a militarized boundary,” Bryson went on. “The belief that Los Angeles is a sanctuary city is a myth.” ♦