How Trump's immigration crackdown sparked LA uprising

Telegraph

3 hours ago

It began with co-ordinated raids on locations throughout Los Angeles on Friday.
Immigration officials, backed by heavily armed FBI officers with assault weapons and body armour, stormed a clothing factory and at least two other locations in Latino areas of the city, trying to make good on orders to ramp-up the pace of deportations.
Crowds gathered outside Ambiance Apparel in the city's Fashion District within minutes.
'You do not have to sign anything,' shouted a protester with a bullhorn dispensing free legal advice.
Officers there said they were armed with search warrants to investigate 'fictitious employee documents'.
Videos posted online captured what happened next.
A masked protester places himself in front of an SUV carrying detainees as he tries to thwart the arrests.
Then comes the sound of tear gas canisters being tossed in the street to clear the crowds, and the cracks of flash-bangs as darkness falls.
The raids were the trigger for two days of clashes between protesters and federal officers in Los Angeles, where fires flared and fireworks exploded, prompting Donald Trump to order 2,000 National Guard troops onto the streets of the city.
They arrived on Sunday morning, much to the fury of the Democratic leadership in California. Gavin Newsom, the state governor, said their presence would only make things worse.
'The president is attempting to inflame passions and provoke a response,' he said in a fundraising email as he tried to rally opposition to the US president's move.
'He would like nothing more than for this provocative show of force – and [Secretary of Defence] Pete Hegseth's absurd threat to deploy United States Marines on American soil – to escalate tensions and incite violence.'
Homeland Security Investigations said officers arrested 44 people in Friday's raids.
They appeared to mark a fresh phase of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, amid worries that the pace of deportations had fallen far short of the president's aim of one million people deported in a year. Officials now say they will increasingly focus on workplaces to root out illegal immigrants.
Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor of the city, condemned the raids.
'I am deeply angered by what has taken place,' she said. 'These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city. We will not stand for this.'
Television footage showed unmarked vehicles resembling military transports loaded with uniformed agents streaming through Los Angeles on Friday.
Dozens of people were reportedly arrested around a Home Depot store in the heavily Latino city of Paramount, just outside Los Angeles, where street vendors and day labourers, looking for a few hours' work on construction sites, gather daily.
'You will not stop us or slow us down'
Some of the worst violence erupted nearby, as word spread that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were using nearby offices as a staging area for detainees.
Officers with batons and tear gas canisters faced off with demonstrators after authorities ordered crowds of protesters to disperse at nightfall.
Protesters hurled bricks and chunks of concrete taken from pallets of building material, while federal officers responded with rounds of tear gas and pepper spray.
Worse followed on Saturday, when protests erupted for a second day.
Fires set by protesters threw up plumes of thick black smoke. They set off fireworks and used shopping carts to barricade the street, using chunks from broken cinder blocks to pelt Border Patrol trucks.
Police said they had been targeted with rocks and that demonstrators had thrown Molotov cocktails.
Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, said on X: 'A message to the LA rioters: you will not stop us or slow us down.'
As darkness fell on the West Coast, the Trump administration announced it was deploying the National Guard, pitting it against the city's Democratic leadership.
Such action is rare. It is the first time since 1965 that Washington has deployed the National Guard without the backing of state leadership.
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said: 'The Trump Administration has a zero tolerance policy for criminal behaviour and violence, especially when that violence is aimed at law enforcement officers trying to do their jobs. These criminals will be arrested and swiftly brought to justice.'
The administration believes it has public opinion on its side after winning a mandate for a mass deportation programme in last year's election.
A CBS poll published on Sunday, and conducted before the weekend's violence, found some 54 per cent of respondents backed Mr Trump.
It was published just as the first National Guard troops were spotted in Los Angeles, mobilising around the federal complex in the downtown part of the city, one of the hotspots for protests.
Protesters say rather than stamping out opposition to the Trump administration's tactics, their presence will make matters worse.
'Bringing the National Guard in is going to spark a national riot,' Vitaly Nieves told the Washington Post. 'It won't just be in California, it'll spread to other states.'