On Monday afternoon, news broke that seven hundred Marines were being deployed from their base in Twentynine Palms. The 2nd Battalion 7th Marines—known for their battles in Guadalcanal, during the Second World War; Incheon, in Korea; and Helmand Province, in Afghanistan—were now coming to support two thousand members of the California National Guard who had been activated by President Trump last week to respond to Los Angeles protests against Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Shortly after one in the afternoon, a small group of demonstrators, objecting to the Administration’s recent immigration raids across their city, began gathering outside of the Federal Building, in downtown L.A. Earlier that day, a large rally had been held in nearby Grant Park, in protest of the arrest of David Huerta, a Los Angeles labor leader who was being held in federal custody for conspiracy to impede an officer during an immigration raid on a Los Angeles business on Friday. (He has since been charged with a felony.) Now, as older people wearing Service Employees International Union and Writer’s Guild of America T-shirts headed home, a younger crowd arrived mostly on foot, a few pulling up in cars. (The head of the S.E.I.U. released a statement that said the organization was proud of Huerta’s actions but clarified that he was a “community observer.”)
Fewer than twenty members of the California National Guard, whose role is to protect federal property, stood at the entrance to the Federal Building, holding large plastic shields. Legally forbidden from carrying out domestic law-enforcement duties, they could not do much to block the protesters on their own. They were thus accompanied by black-uniformed members of the Los Angeles Police Department, whose job seemed to be to protect the Guard from protesters while the Guard ostensibly protected the building.
The sweeps by ICE that had provoked the protests were sporadic and difficult to predict, so those wishing to demonstrate chose to do so in front of the Feds, and this consistently meant gathering at the Federal Building, which was the only place in downtown L.A. they could be seen. The soldiers brought in to put down the protests were drawing new ones around them. As the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, questioned the federal presence in news conferences, it was unclear whether the soldiers were playing the role of an ordering force or an occupying one.
As of early afternoon, the standoff was relatively casual. The demonstrators—maybe two hundred in total—remained in the street, chanting, “Chinga la migra.” One stood up through the sunroof of a car with “VIVA LA RAZA” written on it and waved the Mexican flag. Another played rap music on a bicycle speaker. The demographics may have skewed young, but the flags and slogans on view reflected pride in the makeup of Los Angeles County, where thirty-three per cent of the population was born in another country, nearly fifty per cent identifies as Hispanic or Latino, and fifty-five per cent speaks a language other than English at home.
The Federal Building is one of several government buildings at the northeastern end of downtown, a cluster that includes federal and county courthouses, Los Angeles City Hall, the federal Metropolitan Detention Center, and a Veterans Affairs clinic, with the 101 Freeway marking the area’s informal northern boundary. It’s a part of downtown with few residential homes, shops, or restaurants, and lots of urban plazas, concrete planters, and public art. Since last week, when the protests began, demonstrators had blanketed the marble steps and late-modernist office blocks of the government buildings in graffiti. “TRUMP LOVES COCK” and “DEATH TO FASCISM” had been painted on the stone walls of City Hall, “WHEN TYRANNY BECOMES LAW, REBELLION BECOMES DUTY” was scrawled on the Federal Building, and “FUCK ICE” appeared virtually everywhere. On Monday, more slogans were being added in real time. I watched as a young woman spray-painted “FUCK TRUMP” over a “Mission Impossible” poster in a bus stop; another person, masked, wrote “VALUE HUMAN RIGHTS!!!” on a wall.
As the afternoon went on, and the golden California sun cast longer shadows, the crowd grew more agitated. Their signs indicated a sense of betrayal: “BUILT the country that HATES US,” said one.
“I don’t think it’s right how ICE is targeting specifically my Hispanic people,” a thirty-year-old protester named Stephanie Gonzalez told me. She held a small American flag and a sign that said “Por Mi Familia RAZA UNIDA!” “My family came from Mexico; I’m first generation; my parents didn’t come here with papers. We have the opportunities we have now because of the sacrifices my parents did.” She pointed out that Homeland Security agents have arrested immigrants as they’ve come to court to try to follow the law. “We’re here now, and we just need to handle things humanely, because what they did was not humane.”
The protest had a distinctly California feeling. At the periphery, a Honda Civic painted with racing stripes started doing doughnuts; another car, with covered plates, a dented fender, and a person in the passenger seat wearing a Halloween mask from the movie “Scream,” performed a tire burnout; a motorcyclist took a moment to deafen everyone with some backfiring. A group of guys on minibikes—homemade motorcycles with the engines of power washers and what looked like go-kart tires—wove their way around, one driver wearing a furry, wolf-shaped helmet. There were lots of skateboards.
The demonstrators nearest the soldiers began shouting “Shame on you!” Many of the protesters had covered their faces and wore long sleeves; one wore a sombrero. Around five, a black pickup truck pulled up to the crowd and began unloading boxes containing face shields and other protective gear. The police ordered the crowd to disperse. Some protesters started making their way to the fringes; the L.A.P.D. began forcing out the others by using flash-bang grenades and shooting projectiles.
I stood a ways up a slope with several dozen other observers, watching this play out. One man was sermonizing through a loudspeaker. “This will not go down on the right side of history,” he said. Just out of range from the nonlethal weapons, a vender was selling aguas frescas for five dollars apiece. A protester ambled up and asked if I needed a mask. His name was Brandon and he had taken the train into town from the Inland Empire, as the suburbs of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are known. He wore Vans and a Snoop Dogg-branded shirt in the purple and yellow of the L.A. Lakers that said “Dogg Supply” on it. It was his first time at a protest, he told me. He was white, and, he said, he “had a lot of Mexican co-workers, friends, just a lot of people in my life.” The scene had made him sad, he continued, showing me a photo of a woman’s ankle that had been hit by a rubber bullet earlier that day. “The city’s fucked up, the cops are pissed off, the people are pissed off, everybody’s just mad.”
Shortly after he said goodbye, the police finally succeeded in clearing the area in front of the Federal Building. The protesters started marching west, then south, past City Hall. Confrontations continued into the night, as the police chased a shrinking group of people around an area of a few blocks of downtown. Around midnight, several people broke into and looted an Apple Store, an Adidas store, and a weed dispensary on Broadway. By the end of the night, the L.A.P.D. had arrested more than a hundred people, according to the Mayor’s office; on the same day, ICE had conducted another five raids in the L.A. metropolitan area, including one at a Home Depot in Huntington Park and another at a Home Depot in Whittier.
Donald Trump signed the memorandum activating the California National Guard last Saturday, posting on Truth Social, “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!” (Governor Newsom filed an emergency motion to block the deployment, on Monday, charging that the takeover violated federal law; hearings in the case will begin on Thursday.) The President’s claims that, as one of his posts put it, “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated” without the National Guard appeared to be bluster. As I followed protesters around downtown L.A., I watched local police corral and disperse protesters using armored trucks, flash-bangs, rubber bullets, batons, and shields. The only members of the California National Guard I saw were the dozen or so standing in front of the Federal Building. Physical confrontations seemed to have been carried out almost entirely by the L.A.P.D., the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and other coöordinated state and local law-enforcement agencies.
On Monday, the President announced the deployment of an additional two thousand members of the California National Guard, meaning that, as a local news station pointed out, there were now more military personnel deployed to L.A. than in Iraq and Syria combined. At a press conference that night, Mayor Bass said that the ICE raids had set off a city that on Thursday, before federal agents began raiding car washes and Home Depots, had been peaceful. Questioning the deployment of the Marines, she asked, “What are they going to do? Do you know what the National Guard is doing now? They are guarding two buildings. So they need Marines on top of it?”
The next morning, Tuesday, downtown L.A. was quiet. The jacaranda trees glowed purple in the morning sun and the power washers were out tackling the graffiti. The National Guard was now standing outside some federal buildings on Alameda Street, on the other side of the same block. When I walked by, only five or so of the two thousand soldiers deployed were outside, but the tripods of the news media had set up there, and a little while later protesters would gather there, too.
Bass spent much of a press conference that morning condemning the rowdier protesters. “I do not believe that individuals that commit vandalism and violence in our city really are in support of immigrants,” she said. “They have another agenda.” She called on business owners to help clean up the extensive graffiti. “We are one year away from the World Cup,” she reminded us.
Bass emphasized that the Department of Homeland Security was not coördinating with city government about the raids, which the city tends to learn about as they happen. The previous day, she had learned of the Whittier raid while in a meeting with immigration-rights activists—“their cell phones started blowing up,” she said. “But the real solution of all of this is for the Administration to stop the raids,” she continued. “We have heard that these raids might take place for the next thirty days. We don’t know how many are going to take place in a given day. And you just think about the disruption to families and the disruption to our local economy.”
She noted that Trump had congratulated the National Guard on Saturday for stopping the violence. “The National Guard didn’t arrive in the city until Sunday,” she said. “I don’t know how he could say that the National Guard is who saved the day. Who saved the day are our local law-enforcement agencies.” She seemed to acknowledge that Los Angeles had been enveloped in a spectacle-making machine. “They are talking about spending over a hundred million dollars with this deployment, which is why I say that I feel like we’ve all been, in Los Angeles, a part of a grand experiment to see what happens when the federal government decides they want to roll up on a state or roll up on the city and take over.”
It would be reported over the course of the day that the Marines had indeed arrived and were waiting for orders at the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, a coastal city in Orange County. The local news channels aired video of the soldiers training there: moving in an arrow-shaped phalanx around a field while holding their plastic shields; practicing what appeared to be a skirmish line. If and when they join the National Guard at the Federal Building, or some other federal building, they, too, will be unable to make arrests unless Trump successfully invokes the Insurrection Act.
Despite the fact that the Marines were still in Orange County, Trump asserted later on Tuesday that “L.A. would be burning if the Marines had not arrived.” Reality doesn’t figure much in the social-media circus around the protests, which has relied heavily on the public’s misunderstanding of L.A. geography, a mistaken impression that the National Guard took over the streets, and looping footage of two Waymos on fire downtown. Even Gavin Newsom exaggerated the military’s impact thus far, implying, in a televised address he gave on Tuesday evening, that it was the National Guard and not the L.A.P.D. that had escalated confrontations with the protesters to the point that tear gas and rubber bullets were used.
By Tuesday afternoon, anti-ICE demonstrators had again gathered where the National Guard soldiers stood, in front of a federal building on Alameda Street. As the L.A.P.D. cordoned off the area, a small group temporarily shut down the southbound lanes of the nearby 101 Freeway, and then was arrested. Other protesters continued moving through the streets. I saw one man on a skateboard with a full balloon of nitrous in one hand and a whip-it container in the other. Another person, perhaps responding to online criticism that the demonstrators were waving Mexican, Honduran, and Salvadoran flags, carried a pink-striped flag featuring a photo of the Bronx-born rapper Ice Spice.
That evening, Bass announced that one square mile of the city’s center, an area shaped by the major freeways that surround downtown L.A., would be under a curfew, from eight in the evening until six o’clock in the morning. As I walked south of where the protests had been concentrated, businesses were boarding up their windows with plywood and restaurants were shuttering early. The Whole Foods was thronged with people rushing to get their shopping done; some local residents, however, seemed unhurried, such as the woman I saw wearing Hello Kitty headphones and taking her hairless kitten for a walk in a pink stroller.
Bass’s announcement was made as a group of interfaith leaders gathered for a prayer vigil in Grant Park, a few blocks west of the Federal Building. As the curfew approached, the attendees—an older, explicitly nonviolent crowd, many of them in religious dress—made their way, singing, back to the Federal Building, where they stood holding candles and flowers in front of the unmoving National Guard soldiers until the hour of the curfew arrived. Then the police began moving in, and the crowd dispersed. That night, the news showed video of ICE agents chasing farmworkers through the fields of Ventura County, to the north; a late-afternoon protest on Wednesday in downtown’s Pershing Square had already been announced. ♦
