Is Los Angeles really under siege? This map shows how little of the sprawling city has been affected by protests.

Yahoo

21 hours ago

If you listen to President Trump and members of his administration, you'd get the impression that Los Angeles is currently a city under siege, completely overrun with violent protests against recent immigration raids.
'If I didn't 'SEND IN THE TROOPS' to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now,' Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described L.A. as a 'city of criminals' that needed the federal government to send in thousands of National Guard members and Marines 'to allow people to live in a safe community again.' Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth argued that the troops were there to stop the 'rioters, looters and thugs' who were overwhelming local law enforcement.
L.A.'s leaders have repeatedly insisted that the administration's rhetoric does not in any way reflect what is actually going on in their city.
'To bring in soldiers, who are trained in foreign combat, who are trained to kill, coming into our urban area — that is not even needed,' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in an interview on Wednesday. 'I have no idea what they're gonna to do. Maybe they're gonna march up and down the street because there's nothing going on that requires that.'
L.A. Police Chief Jim McDonnell agrees. 'We don't need the National Guard, and they are not here to help us right now,' he told CBS News.
It is true that there have been a series of protests in L.A. over the course of the past several days, some featuring scattered incidents of violence and property destruction. But life in most of the city has been largely unaffected.
Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolitan area that's home to nearly 13 million people. Unlike a lot of big cities, it doesn't have one main population center. Angelenos are much more spread out than New Yorkers or Chicagoans. Most of the protests this week have taken place in a radius of just a few blocks of downtown L.A., where City Hall, LAPD headquarters and a federal detention center are clustered together.
That detention center is where demonstrators gathered on Friday after several people, including a local union leader, were taken there for allegedly impeding an ICE operation elsewhere in the city earlier that day.
The next morning, rumors of more ICE raids prompted hundreds of people to take to the streets in the predominantly-Latino city of Paramount, about 15 miles south of downtown. Unrest in Paramount, which spread to nearby Compton later in the day, is what first drew national attention to what's been happening in L.A. and what prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard to the city for the first time.
Since then, the most disruptive protests and the most intense clashes between demonstrators and the authorities have been concentrated downtown. There have been a handful of sizable protests scattered throughout other areas of L.A. and nearby cities, including Pasadena and Santa Ana.
The curfew put in effect by Bass starting on Tuesday only applies to a small area of downtown.
'The city of Los Angeles is a massive area, 502 square miles. The area of downtown where the curfew will take place is one square mile,' Bass said during a press conference on Tuesday. 'It is extremely important to know that what is happening in this one square mile is not affecting the city.'
Trump and the GOP, more broadly, have been falsely portraying America's Democratic-led big cities as centers of violence and chaos for years. His rhetoric about the current situation in L.A. is a continuation of that, but it also may serve a larger purpose than simply making his political opponents — chiefly California Gov. Gavin Newsom — look bad.
Newsom, Bass and other Democrats have accused the president of using overstated claims about anarchy in L.A.'s streets as a pretense to illegally seize control over American cities.
'California may be first, but it clearly will not end here,' Newsom told CNN on Tuesday. 'Other states are next. Democracy is next. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.'
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco in Congress, described Trump's actions as 'a hallmark of authoritarianism on the road to tyranny.'
McDonnell, L.A.'s police chief, said he doesn't believe that the National Guard or Marines are there to control the protests at all but are instead being co-opted into carrying out the administration's mass deportation program. 'They're working in support of the federal agencies that are working with ICE on civil immigration enforcement and criminal immigration enforcement," he told CBS News.
The claims also play an important legal role. The law that the administration cited in sending National Guard troops to L.A. only allows the federal government to overstep the authority of a state's governor in three extreme instances: invasion, open rebellion or when regular forces are too overwhelmed to execute U.S. law.
'Sounds like all three to me,' Hegseth said while testifying to Congress on Tuesday.