Arnold Schwarzenegger Condemns Media Depicting L.A. As 'War Zone' Amid ICE Protests: 'Isn't Really The Case'
With protests in resistance to ICE raids pop up around Los Angeles, Arnold Schwarzenegger is pushing back against media disinformation.
The former governor of California recently commented on the ongoing demonstrations and media rhetoric that 'the whole of Los Angeles is a war zone' as Donald Trump deploys troops around the city.
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'I totally agree with you, by the way, Jimmy, because they make it out like it is a war zone — the whole Los Angeles — the whole city or the county,' he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. 'And the fact of the matter is it's maybe like 0.001% of the area of Los Angeles has problems and there's a protest.'
Schwarzenegger continued, 'And so, I think this is important for people to know, because I don't want, all of a sudden, tourism to suffer in Los Angeles because what they see on television. Because the media sometimes shows it as if the whole of Los Angeles is a war zone, which isn't really the case.'
As Kimmel noted, 'None of Los Angeles is a war zone.'
'But this wouldn't happen if the politicians would do the work,' added Schwarzenegger, accusing Republicans and Democrats of having no interest in addressing comprehensive immigration reform, instead using the issue 'to raise money.'
The Golden Globe winner added of the protests, 'America will always got out of this mess. And we will get out of this. Believe me, this will be solved, this issue. Los Angeles will always be a great city to come to. I'm very, very proud of Los Angeles. And I think the key thing here is that the federal government, and the state, and the locals work together to solve these problems.'
On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom condemned Donald Trump in a fiery speech after the president deployed nearly 5,000 troops to LA amid ICE raid protests, lambasting the 'brazen abuse of power by a sitting president [that] inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers and even our National Guard at risk.'
'Look, this isn't just about protests in LA. This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first — but it clearly won't end here. Other states are next,' said Newsom, adding: 'Democracy is under assault right before our eyes. The moment we've feared has arrived.'
Gov. Newsom's speech came less than an hour after LA Mayor Karen Bass issued a dusk-to-dawn curfew for tonight on a on-mile square area of DTLA. After Trump Golden federalized State National Guard on June 7 as protestors focused on federal buildings being used as makeshift detention centers, 4,000 members of the Guard are downtown along with 700 U.S. Marines.
Seen by many as a prelude to invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump's order to put National Guard boots on the tense streets of LA came without any consultation with Newsom, the Governor has said repeatedly the past few days. Newsom's sharply-crafted words followed a failed effort to get a federal judge to move with haste to place a Temporary Restraining Order on Trump's control of the California Guard. Trump's DOJ lawyers were able to convince the Bay Area judge to give them more time. Now a hearing is scheduled for June 12.
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Los Angeles Times
27 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Political violence is threaded through recent U.S. history. The motives and justifications vary
The assassination of one Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband and the shooting of another lawmaker and his wife at their homes are just the latest addition to a long and unsettling roll call of political violence in the United States. The list, in the last two months alone: the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C.; the firebombing of a Colorado march calling for the release of Israeli hostages; and the firebombing of the official residence of Pennsylvania's governor — on a Jewish holiday while he and his family were inside. Here is a sampling of other attacks before that — the assassination of a healthcare executive on the streets of New York City late last year; the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally during his presidential campaign last year; the 2022 attack on the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) by a believer in right-wing conspiracy theories; and the 2017 shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) by a gunman at a congressional softball game practice. 'We've entered into this especially scary time in the country where it feels the sort of norms and rhetoric and rules that would tamp down on violence have been lifted,' said Matt Dallek, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies extremism. 'A lot of people are receiving signals from the culture.' Politics have also driven large-scale massacres. Gunmen who killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, 23 shoppers at a heavily Latino Walmart in El Paso in 2019 and 10 Black people at a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store in 2022 each cited the conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jews was trying to replace white people with people of color. That has become a staple on parts of the right that support Trump's push to limit immigration. The Anti-Defamation League found that from 2022 through 2024, all of the 61 political killings in the United States were committed by right-wing extremists. That changed on the first day of 2025, when a Texas man flying the flag of the Islamic State group killed 14 people by driving his truck through a crowded New Orleans street before being fatally shot by police. 'You're seeing acts of violence from all different ideologies,' said Jacob Ware, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who researches terrorism. 'It feels more random and chaotic and more frequent.' The United States has a long and grim history of political violence, including presidential assassinations dating to the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, lynchings and other violence aimed at Black people in the South, and the 1954 shooting inside Congress by four Puerto Rican nationalists. Experts say the last few years, however, have reached a level not seen since the tumultuous days of the 1960s and 1970s, when political leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Ware noted that the most recent surge comes after the new Trump administration has closed units that focus on investigating white supremacist extremism and pushed federal law enforcement to spend less time on anti-terrorism and more on detaining people who are in the country illegally. 'We're at the point, after these six weeks, where we have to ask about how effectively the Trump administration is combating terrorism,' Ware said. One of Trump's first acts in office was to pardon those involved in the largest act of domestic political violence this century — the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob intended to prevent Congress from certifying Trump's 2020 election loss. Those pardons broadcast a signal to would-be extremists on either side of the political debate, Dallek said: 'They sent a very strong message that violence, as long as you're a Trump supporter, will be permitted and may be rewarded.' Often, those who engage in political violence don't have clearly defined ideologies that easily map onto the country's partisan divides. A man who died after he detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic last month left writings urging people not to procreate and expressed what the FBI called 'nihilistic ideations.' But each political attack seems to inspire partisans to find evidence the attacker is on the other side. Little was known about the man police identified as a suspect in the Minnesota attacks, 57-year-old Vance Boelter. Authorities say they found a list of other apparent targets that included other Democratic officials, abortion clinics and abortion rights advocates, as well as fliers for the day's anti-Trump 'No Kings' parades. Conservatives online seized on the fliers — and the fact that Boelter had apparently once been reappointed to a state workforce development board by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — to claim the suspect must be a liberal. 'The far left is murderously violent,' billionaire Elon Musk posted on his social media site, X. It was reminiscent of the fallout from the attack on Paul Pelosi, the former House speaker's then-82-year-old husband, who was seriously injured by a man wielding a hammer. Right-wing figures falsely theorized the assailant was a secret lover rather than what authorities said he was: a believer in pro-Trump conspiracy theories who broke into the Pelosi home echoing Jan. 6 rioters who broke into the Capitol by saying: 'Where is Nancy?!' No prominent Republican ever denounced the Pelosi assault, and GOP leaders including Trump joked about the attack at public events in its aftermath. On Saturday, Nancy Pelosi posted a statement on X decrying the Minnesota attack. 'All of us must remember that it's not only the act of violence, but also the reaction to it, that can normalize it,' she wrote. After mocking the Pelosis after the 2022 attack, Trump on Saturday joined in the bipartisan condemnation of the Minnesota shootings, calling them 'horrific violence.' The president has, however, consistently broken new ground with his bellicose rhetoric toward his political opponents, whom he routinely calls 'sick' and 'evil,' and has talked repeatedly about how violence is needed to quell protests. The Minnesota attack occurred after Trump took the extraordinary step of mobilizing the military to try to control protests against his administration's immigration operations in Los Angeles during the last week, when he pledged to 'HIT' disrespectful protesters and warned of a 'migrant invasion' of the city. Dallek said Trump has been 'both a victim and an accelerant' of the charged, dehumanizing political rhetoric that is flooding the country. 'It feels as if the extremists are in the saddle,' he said, 'and the extremists are the ones driving our rhetoric and politics.' Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.
Washington Post
31 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Trump wanted a military spectacle. Instead, he got a history lesson.
The Army's 250th birthday parade was not the grand military spectacle that many anticipated, and for that Americans can breathe a momentary, measured sigh of relief. It was a family-friendly conclusion to a celebratory day, with events on the Mall and fireworks at the end. What had been billed as an overwhelming display of military might turned out to be a linear history lesson, from the early days of revolution to the age of robotic dogs and flying drones. A narrator made sense of it all over loudspeakers and for those watching the live stream on television, with a script that rarely strayed from the Army's disciplined sense of itself as a lethal fighting machine in the service of democracy and the Constitution. The tone was reminiscent of the wall texts and exhibits at the National Museum of the United States Army, which opened on the grounds of Fort Belvoir in November 2020, during one of the most dangerous moments in recent American history. Like Saturday's parade, the museum celebrates the Army's history, but it does so with the temperance and nuance of serious professional historians, and a well-crafted historical and cultural narrative that largely steers clear of propaganda. It opened in the waning days of President Donald Trump's first term, after he lost reelection, and only days after he fired his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper. There was, at the time, considerable anxiety that Trump might attempt to use the Army to sustain his false claims of election fraud. That Army, which has a keen sense of its own aesthetics, had been embroiled in Trump's efforts to politicize it earlier in his first administration. In June 2020, a photograph of members of the D.C. National Guard on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial went viral, during the unsettled days of national protests after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. That picture, of troops seemingly deployed and ready for combat, standing in an orderly phalanx on the steps of the memorial, recalled the horror of the 1970 Kent State shootings, when Ohio National Guard troops fired on unarmed student protesters, killing four of them. It also seemed to presage a new age of domestic militarism, with the U.S. Army loyal not to the Constitution, but to Trump personally. The same anxiety preceded Saturday's parade, especially after a speech earlier in the week by Trump at Fort Bragg, during which uniformed troops booed mentions of former president Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and cheered Trump's partisan MAGA message. But on Saturday, at least, the Army stuck to its familiar themes of service, sacrifice and duty. The result was a display of civics, not power. The president was supposedly inspired to demand a military parade, an exceptionally rare event in recent U.S. history, after seeing a very different display on Bastille Day 2017, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Given Trump's admiration for strongman leaders in Russia and China, there was worry that the Army parade might hew to the authoritarian geometry of military spectacles in totalitarian countries, especially the absurdist mix of camp and menace favored by the regime in North Korea. But the soldiers who paraded past the presidential reviewing stand on Constitution Avenue walked with a loose-limbed gait, disciplined but not robotic, with individual soldiers integrated into the collective without losing their identity. Those riding by on tanks, trucks and other combat vehicles waved and smiled, engaging with an enthusiastic crowd. The announcer often sounded as if he were narrating a fashion show for machines rather than a military parade. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle: 'It is fast, it is tough, and it is lethal.' Parades always come with a message, which is why so many people were wary. When the American painter Childe Hassam painted a series of patriotic events, including a Fourth of July parade, before America's entry into World War I, he offered an innocent, exuberant vision of red, white and blue, all but overwhelming the individual marchers, as if flags, banners and bunting were sufficient to win a battle. But he was also positing an image of a unified America, during a period of considerable anxiety over mass immigration from European countries not deemed sufficiently Anglo-Saxon to fit a racist model of the country's emerging imperial identity. The impressionist blending of colors mimics the blurring of origins in the proverbial American melting pot. The last big U.S. military parade in Washington, held in 1991 after the Gulf War, wasn't just a welcome-home for the troops, but also an effort to allay the alienation of many Americans from their armed forces following the debacle in Vietnam. Since at least World War II, the Bastille Day review in Paris has been an even more complicated affair, a Gaullist effort to prioritize visions of orderly state power over leftist memories of modern France's birth in revolution and bloodletting. In Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Nazi propaganda film, 'Triumph of the Will' — a terrifying compendium of parades and military spectacles — there is a scene in which Adolf Hitler walks through a vast empty space flanked by hundreds of troops. They have been reduced to the fascist ideal, mechanical dots on a relentless grid, remote and so distant from the leader to affirm the vast difference in their status: One man alone has agency, all the rest are part of the machine. Riefenstahl's image reminds us of a basic rule of thumb for analyzing a military parade: Look to the edges. Is the army of and among the people, or does it cut its own space, cleaving the throng, inhabiting its own power separate from civilian society? The U.S. Army has complicated edges; it is professional and thus apart from the civilian world, but it is also voluntary, and thus integrated into the fabric of American society. Heavy security on Saturday kept the people apart from the troops, but individual service members often seemed intent on bridging the distance, with waves and smiles. That offered a sharp contrast with the presence of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles, where the governor insists that they are not wanted or needed, where the edges of their presence are sharp and dangerous, and could be cutting. This year marks not just the 250th anniversary of the Army's birth, but also the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, which was the all-time nadir of the military's reputation in the United States. The parade on Saturday could have done exceptional damage to a decades-long effort to climb out of that hole. The current president is extraordinarily good at creating situations that force unique message discipline on his critics. Thus, people who are deeply troubled by the unprecedented federal use of the National Guard on the streets of Los Angeles were invited to hate on an unnecessary and costly (up to $45 million estimated) but mostly benign Army celebration in Washington. But the Army proved even better at message discipline, keeping attention on its history, its service and its members. One early warning sign of a shift in the Army's allegiance will be a fraying of how it tells its own story: If it fires its historians — or attempts to coerce their compliance, as seems to be happening in other institutions, including the Smithsonian — there will be even more serious trouble ahead. But on Saturday, it kept that history in the foreground, and even the president looked bored during much of it, which isn't surprising. The Army made it about the country, not the man.
San Francisco Chronicle
41 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Very scared' immigrants continue to answer ICE summons as protesters target S.F. building
Dozens of protesters returned Sunday to a nondescript, two-story white building in an alleyway in San Francisco's South of Market where Bay Area residents working to legalize their immigration status were summoned by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement this weekend. Activists suspected a trap and brought immigration attorneys to counsel confused immigrants and their families who feared violating the terms of their conditional release if they failed to show and arrest if they did appear. So far, the office has remained locked and closed, as protesters chanted and banged drums at the Tehama Street building. 'People were very scared and very panicked,' said Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, a San Francisco deputy public defender. 'It's very irregular to receive a last minute message to report on a weekend. In my 10 years of practicing, I've never heard of reporting on a weekend.' Savalza and other attorneys, most volunteering their time, said Saturday they assisted more than 50 participants in the Alternatives to Detention or Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. About 7.6 million immigrants participate in the program, which allows them to live at home as their cases are processed, according to ICE figures from October. Four program participants who received similar text messages were arrested after reporting to the ISAP office in Fresno on Saturday, Savalza said. 'We have a very strong reason to believe that our mobilization and support stopped ICE from detaining people at the office yesterday,' Sanika Mahajan, an organizer from Mission Action, said Sunday. ICE officials did not immediately return a request for comment Sunday. The mysterious weekend reporting requests coincided with massive No Kings Day marches and rallies in San Francisco and nationwide in response to a growing opposition movement to President Donald Trump as he pushes to deport immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally. The text messages, sent in Spanish, told recipients to report to the Tehama Street facility during business hours Saturday or Sunday. 'If you do not present yourself according to instructions it will be considered an infraction,' the messages read. Savalza said attorneys have counseled immigrants who went to the facility to inform their reporting officer and to verify their arrival with a photo at the location. Immigrants continued to show up Sunday, though it remained locked in the morning. Protesters circled in front of the front door, chanting and holding signs, such as 'I.C.E. Out the Bay.' Anti-ICE graffiti remained on the walls from the day before. In the past, ICE protests have focused on more high-profile buildings such as the field office on Sansome Street and the San Francisco Immigration Court on Montgomery Street.
