ICE protests live updates: Los Angeles imposes downtown curfew as demonstrations against Trump's immigration enforcement raids grow across the U.S.

Yahoo

2 days ago

Protests over President Trump's immigration enforcement raids and his mobilization of the Marines and National Guard in Los Angeles have spread to other major U.S. cities as a federal judge is set to consider California Gov. Gavin Newsom's emergency motion to block the president's deployment of troops.
The Trump administration has sent 700 active-duty Marines to the city and has activated more than 4,000 National Guard members despite local officials saying the demonstrations were mostly peaceful and limited to several blocks in downtown L.A., where a curfew was imposed fir a second straight night.
Newsom accused Trump of "turning the U.S. military against American citizens.' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass criticized what she described as an unnecessary show of force.
'When you raid Home Depots and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you're not trying to keep anyone safe; you're trying to cause fear and panic," she said.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said he would deploy the National Guard to respond to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests happening in San Antonio and Austin, angering the mayors of those cities.
Follow the live blog below for the latest updates.
The overnight curfew that was imposed in downtown Los Angeles for a second-straight night was lifted at 6 a.m. local time.
Police began making arrests shortly after the curfew took effect, at 8 p.m. on Wednesday night.
But by 8:45, the streets appeared calm, according to the Associated Press, with no signs of Marines or National Guard members.
Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar, two Democratic congressmen representing Texas, released a joint statement Wednesday condemning Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to deploy the National Guard to respond to protests happening in San Antonio and Austin.
"By deploying the National Guard, Governor Abbott is trying to intimidate our community for rallying against President Trump's authoritarian policies," the statement reads. "We encourage everyone to gather peacefully against President Trump's unlawful, undemocratic actions."
San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg reacted to Abbott's decision earlier Wednesday at a press conference, telling reporters that city leaders hadn't requested the troops, "nor did we get advance warning." Austin Mayor Kirk Watson confirmed that his city had been notified about the National Guard coming to help local law enforcement during planned protests on Saturday.
Nirenberg called the move an example of "the government's crude interpretations of immigration law and cruel approach to human rights."
"Peaceful protests are part of the fabric of our nation, but Texas will not tolerate the lawlessness we have seen in Los Angeles," Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott's press secretary, told NBC's Austin affiliate KXAN. "Anyone engaging in acts of violence or damaging property will be swiftly held accountable to the full extent of the law.'
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass suggested at a press conference Wednesday that the Trump administration's immigration raids could be "part of a national experiment to determine how far the federal government can go in reaching in and taking over power from a governor, power from a local jurisdiction" and the result has left "our city and our citizens, our residents, in fear."
Standing alongside more than 30 mayors from L.A. County, Bass emphasized that the group represents "cities in this region where immigrants are key and, in some cases, not the majority of the population."
'When you raid Home Depots and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you're not trying to keep anyone safe; you're trying to cause fear and panic," she said.
Bass said she did not agree with the media's depiction of the protests happening in response to the immigration raids.
"The portrayal is that all of our cities are in chaos, rioting is happening everywhere," she said. "It is a lie."
Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, head of Task Force 51 overseeing the deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, answered questions from reporters Wednesday about their orders and the rules of engagement.
Sherman said their mission is to support federal agencies, in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and to protect federal agencies, personnel, assets and facilities "in the locations where there have been demonstrations lately."
He said 2,000 National Guard troops are ready for missions on the ground in Los Angeles. An additional 2,000 troops are mobilizing.
Sherman said some of the National Guard troops have been assigned to strictly protect ICE agents as they do their federal job. The troops' weapons are not armed with ammunition, rather the bullets are "only on their person."
If confronted by protesters, Sherman said National Guard troops "do not conduct law enforcement operations, like arrests, or search and seizure. They are strictly used for the protection of federal personnel as they conduct their operations and to protect them to allow them to do their federal mission."
Sherman said troops are "allowed to temporarily detain and wait for law enforcement to come and arrest them. They do not do any arrests."
The 700 Marines who have been mobilized are currently undergoing civil disturbance training. Sherman couldn't give an exact date when they would be on the streets in portions of downtown L.A., but affirmed it would be "soon." When asked about the Marines's mission, Sherman said, "they will be doing the same operations."
While protests against the federal deportation raids in L.A. will likely continue throughout the week, nationwide demonstrations are planned for Saturday as part of the "No Kings Day of Defiance" movement.
Around 1,800 protests are planned in response to the large military parade that's scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., on Saturday in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States Army. (While there are "No Kings" protests happening in all 50 states, there is intentionally no official protest scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C.)
The groups behind "No Kings" have been planning the events since early May, but the Los Angeles protests seem to have driven more people to join the "No Kings" movement. Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the groups involved, spoke with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC on Monday about how President Trump's response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles caused interest in the "No Kings" website to skyrocket.
'Of those 1,800 ['No Kings' protests], more than 100 of those have been added to the map since Trump announced that he was sending the National Guard to L.A.,' Maddow told viewers. 'If [Trump] was hoping to get people to not protest, it's backfiring.'
Read more from Yahoo News: Hundreds of 'No Kings' protests planned nationwide Saturday in response to Trump's military parade
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass first imposed a curfew for a small portion of downtown L.A. on Tuesday in order to prevent more violent clashes between protesters and authorities.
The curfew began at 8 p.m. local time Tuesday and ended at 6 a.m. Wednesday. Bass said Wednesday that the curfews would likely continue in the coming days for as long as they are needed.
Under the curfew, anyone within the designated area is subject to arrest, with limited exceptions including people who live or work there. The LAPD arrested more than 200 people in the area overnight Tuesday, and 17 were arrested for curfew violations. Most of the arrests were for failure to disperse.
Bass has emphasized that the curfew zone, and the protests more broadly, do not indicate that Los Angeles is consumed by violent chaos, as President Trump and his administration have claimed.
"The city of Los Angeles is a massive area, 502 square miles. The area of downtown where the curfew will take place is 1 square mile,' she said during a press conference on Tuesday. "It is extremely important to know that what is happening in this 1 square mile is not affecting the city."
Over 200 people were arrested from Tuesday into Wednesday, mostly for failure to disperse after a curfew took effect at 8 p.m. local time for parts of downtown Los Angeles where immigration enforcement protests have been centered.
The Los Angeles Police Department broke down the arrests in a post on X:
Failure to disperse: 203 arrests
Curfew violations: 17 arrests
Possession of firearm: 3 arrests
Assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer: 1 arrest
Discharging a laser at LAPD airship: 1 arrest
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened Wednesday's press briefing by condemning the immigration protests in Los Angeles.
"What we have seen transpire in Los Angeles, Calif., in recent days is shameful," Leavitt began. "Left-wing radicals waving foreign flags viciously attacked [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and Border Patrol agents, as well as Los Angeles police officers. ... All because the Trump administration was removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the city."
Leavitt claimed California Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have not responded properly to the protests, and are "shamefully" not living up to their obligations as elected officials.
"Mayor Bass and Gov. Newsom fanned the flames and demonized our brave ICE officers," she said. "In other words, the position of the Democrat Party is that the federal government is not allowed to enforce our laws into arrest and deport illegal alien criminals. They're attempting to use a violent mob as a weapon against their own constituents to prevent the enforcement of immigration law. This is deeply un-American and morally reprehensible."
The roughly 700 Marines mobilized in the Los Angeles area by the Trump administration are undergoing civil disturbance training in Orange County, Calif.
Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman, head of the task force overseeing the deployment of the National Guard and Marines to the city, told reporters Wednesday that they're still training at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach. He wouldn't speculate on when the Marines would join the National Guard troops in the downtown L.A. areas.
Chicago police said 17 people were arrested, and at least one woman was injured in anti-immigration protests in the city's downtown area on Tuesday.
Ten were charged with misdemeanors, four were charged with felonies and are due in court Wednesday, one was cited with possession of paint with the intent to deface and charges are still pending for two, Chicago station WGN-TV reported Wednesday.
Heather Blair, 66, was injured late Tuesday night after a car sped through one of the crowds. She told ABC's Chicago affiliate WLS-TV that she and her husband were protesting when they saw a red car accelerating toward them around 6:20 p.m. She said she doesn't remember if she was hit by the car or injured because she fell over.
"The next thing I know, people are carrying me to the sidewalk and calling an ambulance," she said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers that President Trump's orders to federalize the National Guard could also be replicated in other states.
Trump's order on Saturday, which said at least 2,000 National Guard troops would be called into federal service, was very broad and did not specify the exact location.
"Part of it was about getting ahead of the problem, so that if in other places, if there are other riots, in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there, if necessary," Hegseth said Wednesday, testifying before a Senate subcommittee.
Amid an escalating feud between President Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a brush fire in Southern California, dubbed the Ranch Fire, has scorched over 4,000 acres and is 10% contained. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department issued an evacuation order affecting Apple Valley and Lucerne Valley.
Newsom posted on X that California's National Guard fire crews are understaffed because five out of 14 crews were deployed to Los Angeles by Trump. "This isn't just illegal. It's dangerous," he wrote.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a key "architect" behind President Trump's immigration crackdown policies, wrote in a post on X Wednesday that "America voted for mass deportations." He continued, "Violent insurrectionists, and the politicians who enable them, are trying to overthrow the results of the election."
The top Trump aide reportedly demanded in a tense meeting on May 21 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents increase their arrest and deportation numbers as much as possible.
At a press conference on Wednesday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo told reporters that 61 Mexicans have been detained in Los Angeles, and that Mexican officials have been in touch with their families.
According to the New York Times, she did not specify whether they were detained during the Trump administration's immigration enforcement raids or the ongoing protests over them.
Police in Denver said they made 17 arrests Tuesday night during protests over the Trump administration's immigration enforcement raids.
Most were for failing to obey orders to disperse or interfering with police, according to a police breakdown published by KUSA-TV, NBC's Denver affiliate:
Graffiti - 3Interference with police authority - 1Unlawful throwing of projectiles and failure to obey lawful order - 1Obstruction of streets and failure to obey lawful order - 7Obstruction of streets, failure to obey lawful order and interference with police authority - 2Second degree assault - 1Second degree assault to a police officer - 2
Denver police said officers used smoke canisters and pepper balls to disperse crowds blocking roadways.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was joined by a coalition of Democratic attorneys general from 17 other states to condemn the Trump administration's deployment of the California National Guard, calling it unlawful.
'The president's decision to federalize and deploy California's National Guard without the consent of California state leaders is unlawful, unconstitutional, and undemocratic,' the attorneys general said in a statement released by Ellison's office on Wednesday.
Joining Ellison in issuing the statement are the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Vermont.
As chief legal officers of their states, they also expressed support for California's Attorney General Rob Bonta's legal challenge to President Trump's order.
The protests in downtown Los Angeles erupted over the weekend following a series of immigration raids that led to more than 100 people being detained. President Trump has deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of active-duty Marines without the consent of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The Associated Press reports:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass denounced the raids and the deployment of troops, saying Tuesday that the actions were aimed at intimidating the area's vast immigrant population, one of the country's largest. She said she has heard even immigrants with legal status are being swept up and that the raids may continue for months.An estimated 950,000 people in Los Angeles County do not have legal immigration status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. That is about a tenth of the county's population, and they include cooks, nannies, hotel employees, street vendors, gardeners, construction workers and garment workers.'Families across the city are terrified," Bass said. 'They don't know if they should go to work, they don't know if they should go to school.'She said many of those detained have had no contact with their loved ones or lawyers. The raids have only fueled unrest in the city, Bass said.
Dozens of people were arrested in New York City overnight during a protest against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement policies, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said on MSNBC Wednesday.
About 2,500 people took part in the "largely peaceful" demonstration near Foley Square in lower Manhattan, Tisch said. A total of 86 people were arrested by police, mostly for disorderly conduct.
"Everyone has the right to protest peacefully," Tisch said. "But if things get out of hand and you break the law, they will step in and make arrests and that's exactly what they did."
In a separate interview with Fox 5, Tisch said that amid the weekend protests in Los Angeles, she was in touch with federal law enforcement partners to relay the message that the NYPD does not need their help.
'We have this under control,' Tisch said
President Trump deployed hundreds of active-duty Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles. Now, military veterans are speaking out about the decision.
Marine combat veteran Robert Rolls wrote in an opinion piece for the Detroit Free Press: "Some Americans cheer this on. They call it 'law and order,' as if safety is more valuable than freedom. But order without justice is not peace — it is submission. Security without liberty is not safety — it is fear. We don't salute uniforms because they exist — we salute the principles they're supposed to uphold."
Marine veteran Janessa Goldbeck told the Independent, 'When I joined the Marine Corps, I swore an oath — not to a person, not to a party, but to the Constitution."
Goldbeck, who is CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, a national nonpartisan advocacy group, also added, "What we're seeing now is a deliberate effort to turn the military into a political prop."
One TikTok user, Reesio Jones, who identified himself as an "old Marine," addressed Marines in a video, saying, "We don't follow unlawful orders. We are the standard bearers, brothers, do you understand?" They added, "We're hammers, brothers, and our people are not nails, you understand?"
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told MSNBC she believes the curfew from 8 p.m. local time on Tuesday to 6 a.m. on Wednesday was "effective" because "there was no looting, there was no vandalism last night, so I do think that that has helped.'
An LAPD spokesperson said that as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday, 25 protesters were arrested in downtown L.A. on suspicion that they violated the curfew.