June 8, the third day of protest in downtown Los Angeles, began with a loose assemblage of people behind the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building bearing flags and predictable signs — “F— ICE” and “Chinga la Migra” — hollering under a hot sun at a line of camouflaged soldiers. These armed troops were a fraction of the 2,000 National Guard members that Donald Trump had federalized without asking the governor of California or the mayor of Los Angeles if they needed help, so their presence became a natural target of the protest. Some soldiers carried riot shields reading: “California National Guard.”
“We don’t really know who they are,” a man named Lorin told me. “You can’t trust uniforms. Even ICE wears camouflage now.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested 44 people over the previous two days by raiding workplaces to deport workers who had not been convicted of any serious crime. It had interrupted the undocumented economy of Southern California, and because Trump had sworn to deport only criminals — or because the labor community could recognize the falsehoods in conservative media as cover for a racist government sweep — LA had erupted.
“It’s like Kabul,” Lorin said, looking at the line of military camouflage. “They brought the class war here. They’re making war on the working class.”
He was a calm-tempered young man with dark hair and a goofy grin, who said he worked with an outfit called LeftCom, short for “Left Communism.” What does LeftCom want? A world revolution for a stateless, classless new order. Lorin and his friends handed out pamphlets that tried to make clear that the new international order would not be like the old one, would not result in Stalinist statism or Maoism or anything awful like that.
The protest was theater, as author and former actor Peter Coyote has suggested — a staging ground for anyone to voice an opinion. The response was theater, too. There was no absolute reason for anyone to stand behind the Federal Building on Alameda Street on June 8 except to yell at each other. People were here because other people were here. No protester on Alameda would prevent a deportation, since the ICE raids were happening elsewhere, but the Federal Building was symbolic. Detained laborers were watching and even pounding encouragement from the upper floors. Everyone seemed to want action. There were shouted threats, amplified speeches, chants, drums and Mexican flags.
But no violence.
Over the two preceding days, a car had burned near a donut shop in Paramount, where ICE had raided a gathering spot for day laborers in the parking lot of a Home Depot. A small crowd had also hassled an ICE van during a different raid in the Fashion District. A union leader, Service Employees International Union President David Huerta, was arrested during that scuffle, and he was still in custody — supposedly upstairs in the Federal Building — when the protest gathered on June 8. A middle-aged protester who called himself Nick told me, “I live in South Pasadena, but I was down here when the Dodgers lost to the Mets last Wednesday. There was more violence over a game in New York than there is now.” He laughed. “Nobody called the f—— National Guard.”
It’s the governor’s job to mobilize a given state’s guard troops. Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom both told the president that LA was under control. But Trump insisted on federalizing 2,000 troops to place them under White House command. It was not a normal thing to do. “That move,” Newsom said, “is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth then said U.S. Marines could be summoned to reinforce the guard. Marines on the streets of LA? In contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act? That smelled like fascism. It was also a writ-large version of Huerta’s arrest, which occurred only after an ICE agent shoved him. Huerta maintained his balance, which other agents seemed to regard as resistance; he was knocked to the ground and arrested. Provocation has been the feds’ entire method of operation.
Outside the Federal Building, I could smell a tang of tear gas, and people said a canister had been lobbed to clear space for a truck to drive out. So, again, the guard staged its trucks in front of the protest, assembled a line of troops, then gave an order and fired when people failed to move. That was “protecting” the Federal Building.
The protest, though, was largely quiet. After an hour, hungry and bored, I wandered up the street for lunch. Two troop trucks ran in the opposite direction, bearing black-clad riot cops toward the protest. California Highway Patrol units had blocked a few off-ramps from the 101, perhaps anticipating trouble. Sure enough, on my way back — after 20 minutes — the Federal Building was unreachable. More law enforcement had arrived, not just Highway Patrol officers and LA County Sheriff’s Department deputies, but a whole battalion of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cruisers, which came howling and blinking up an open off-ramp to unload cops in riot gear. A police line prevented me and a crowd of other people from nearing the Federal Building, but the helmeted cops poured in, past another column of blinking cruisers, and people around me started a chant: “Shame, shame, shame, shame.”
They had kettled the lukewarm protest, employing the familiar tactic of corralling protesters in a small area to control them. I saw white clouds rising near the Mexican flags. We could hear the pop of “foam projectiles,” as the LAPD refers to its rubber bullets, and a few plastic water bottles arced from the crowd in response. A basic law of physics: The protest will heat up under pressure.
Even then it did not become a riot, which contradicts most official statements on social media. FBI Director Kash Patel boasted on X: “My responsibility is to the American people, not political punch lines,” he wrote, but then delivered a punch line. “LA is under siege by marauding criminals, and we will restore law and order.”
That was the joke of the weekend, because downtown LA escalated only after the kettling operation. A Waymo robotaxi stalled on an off-ramp at Alameda, and while the cops poured toward the protest, it sat with its sensors spinning, slathered in bitter graffiti (“Chinga la Migra,” “F— ICE”). By nightfall, it would be in flames. Waymo cameras, of course, can be subpoenaed for surveillance footage, which is one reason people hate the cars.
Soon, protesters outside the kettle halted traffic on the 101, and an evening crew of riot-willing people turned up with different objectives. Cop cruisers got smashed. A parking lot toll booth went up in flames. Even before sundown, when people started to throw rocks, an Australian reporter I had noticed in the streets, Lauren Tomasi, set up with her crew and told the camera: “The situation has now rapidly deteriorated, [with] the LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters, moving them on through the heart of LA.”
She nodded to sign off, and the camera panned across the riot line behind her. One cop, unprovoked, fired a rubber bullet at her ankle. Tomasi screamed in pain and shock. Her camera operator swore. “You just shot the f—— reporter!” The video went viral as a (largely accurate) thumbnail of the protest.
People serious about the stakes in LA were upset by the nighttime violence, even if they supported the protests. “Nonviolence is a practice,” one activist friend told me. “You have to know how to do it.” Of course public protests attract all sorts of people, and they should. But leaders and organizers will need discipline if they want to win the propaganda war. For a symbolic protest like this one, there was no reason to burn cars. Trump’s department heads are glad to paint their opponents on the street as criminal marauders. Why make it easy?
A broad cross section of the American public has been alienated by Trump’s response to these protests — not just labor and immigration activists, but also liberals, libertarians and even William Kristol, the neoconservative co-founder of The Weekly Standard. He was as startled as anyone by the National Guard summons. “I suspect we aren’t alarmed enough by this presidential order,” he wrote on The Bulwark. “Neither Los Angeles nor the state of California is mentioned in the memorandum. Trump’s mobilization order is in no way limited as to time or place. It is an open-ended authorization for the secretary of defense to mobilize as many troops as he wishes for as long as he wishes, and to deploy them anywhere he wishes within the United States. And these military personnel can be deployed not just where protests have occurred, but anywhere protests ‘are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.’”
Some call it “states’ rights,” others an abuse of power. But when the stink of fascism rises, LA can’t be the only town to resist.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.