11 Theses on the Unrest in Los Angeles
Whichever way you cut it, this is extremely dangerous territory.
On Friday, amid a push from President Trump to deport unauthorized migrants en masse, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents wearing riot gear swept several locations near downtown Los Angeles, leading to the arrest of 45 people. In response, President Trump on Saturday authorized the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to the city, over the objections of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) confirmed the troops arrived Sunday and clashes between protesters and law enforcement continued into the evening.
Things started escalating on Friday when two incidents, one in the parking lot of a Home Depot in the Westlake neighborhood and another at a clothing wholesaler in the Garment District, turned into violent standoffs between federal officers and protesters. Then, on Saturday, protesters gathered in front of a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in nearby Paramount, California that Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents were using as a staging center; some demonstrators lit fires and threw rocks at CBP vehicles, while federal agents fired non-lethal munitions and tear gas into crowds.
Also on Saturday, President Trump invoked Title 10 of the U.S. Code to authorize the deployment of National Guard troops to the city, directing them to support ICE. Trump’s decision marks the first time a president has deployed the National Guard to a state against the wishes of its governor since 1965. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth confirmed the troops had mobilized that evening, adding that he would send active-duty Marines to the city if the violence persisted. Governor Newsom called Hegseth’s statement “deranged behavior,” leading to a back-and-forth between the two over the social media platform X.
Protests continued on Sunday, as thousands of demonstrators gathered around city hall, the federal courthouse, and a detention center. Demonstrators shut down a portion of the US-101 freeway, throwing rocks and damaging police vehicles, according to the LAPD. Several Waymo vehicles were also set on fire in downtown Los Angeles and police arrested 39 people involved with the protests over the weekend.
Mayor Bass called the National Guard deployment “completely unnecessary.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the administration would not let “a repeat of 2020 happen.” Through it all, contradictory claims about the unrest swirled on social media.
Below, I’ll give 11 thoughts to try to add clarity about what we’re witnessing in Los Angeles right now.
Since Trump announced his deportation plan, mass civil unrest and confrontations between law enforcement and citizens have seemed inevitable—many immigrants here illegally are also loved by and embedded in their communities, many high-profile mistakes have been made by the Trump administration in their deportation efforts, and many activists are looking for a reason to fight the government. After federal officers arrested Newark’s mayor in May for protesting at an ICE detention center, I expected things to get worse—and they have. Not just in Los Angeles, either; demonstrators are clashing with law enforcement in New York and San Francisco. I expect protests will continue to spread.
Would I be a hare-brained liberal if I pointed out that so many of these purportedly lazy, criminal, leeching-on-society illegals are getting arrested at work or at their immigration hearings? If dangerous criminals are invading our country, I wouldn’t expect ICE to be arresting them at locations such as these. It’s a hard thing not to notice.
Would I be a cold-hearted fascist if I thought the police in Los Angeles were right to clear the streets from mobs blocking major highways or lighting cars on fire? I mean, there is protesting, and then there is shutting entire city highways down, burning vehicles, vandalism, and so on. Protests seemed to be mostly controlled on Friday and Saturday, but thousands of people poured into the streets in one of America’s largest cities on Sunday, which certainly required a pretty significant police response.
I believe President Trump wants this confrontation. The mayor of Los Angeles is not seeking his help. The governor of California is not seeking his help. Trump is essentially forcing a city and state to let the National Guard in, which strikes me as a huge provocation—though not as huge as suggesting that Los Angeles needs the Marines to dispel protesters. But provocation is the point. The last time a president deployed the National Guard against a governor’s wishes was when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent servicemembers to Alabama in 1965—to protect civil rights demonstrators. Trump wants the fight. The protesters want the fight. So… we’ll get the fight.
The protests were mostly peaceful up until Trump announced he was deploying the National Guard. Consider this: On Saturday, the Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement describing the protests as peaceful and commending people for exercising their rights responsibly. The Los Angeles Police Department—not exactly an outfit known for taking kindly to civil disobedience. On Saturday night, Trump thanked the National Guard for stabilizing the situation (even though the Guard hadn’t even gotten there). The situation got markedly worse in basically every way on Sunday, once the National Guard did actually arrive. Sending the military to confront protests, unless local law enforcement is truly overwhelmed, is always inflammatory. Even if you believe that Trump is earnestly trying to restore order, you must concede that violent clashes with hundreds or thousands of protesters is a profound failure in his effort to get things under control.
I’ve been to many protests as a reporter, and they are never clashes between pure, ideologically motivated activists on one side, and peacekeeping police officers trying to protect their communities on the other. More often than not, it’s a game of chicken—often between young men on both sides—who try to push the boundary of how much they can antagonize, how awful they can act, and how close they can get to the line before someone on the other side steps over it. I’ve literally seen protesters taunt police to the point of touching them, at which point a group of officers attack and subdue the protesters, and two minutes later the same cops and protesters are talking crap to each other and laughing it up. It looks a lot like that in Los Angeles right now.
Los Angeles isn’t on fire. Trump’s claim that the city is under some kind of migrant invasion and spiraling out of control is just totally overboard. News coverage of these events always makes them seem apocalyptic, but most Angelenos probably wouldn’t even know what was happening if it weren’t for the news. I’m not minimizing the damage occurring in the neighborhoods where the unrest is spilling over into destruction—I’m just pointing out how big the city is and how contained the protests are. The same was true in New York in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter riots. I remember watching CNN broadcasts of an absolute war zone elsewhere in the city while I sat peacefully in my living room in Brooklyn on a quiet weekday night.
Have Democrats and leftist protesters learned anything from 2020? Will the party try to excuse the worst of the offenders? Will the protesters continue to destroy the city they live in as some form of protest? The scenes out of Los Angeles are reminiscent of those in 2020—and you can expect people to react similarly. Protesters waving Mexican flags next to burning vehicles will be this weekend’s most enduring images. That will not endear the protesters, and by association immigrants, to neutral onlookers. Americans rightly want order in their streets. It’s stunning to me that so many people on the left (and these protesters) don’t understand this.
I find it rather funny (and alarming) that people on the right who normally believe some version of “you cannot trust the government” are now voicing support for masked, unnamed federal agents raiding homes, workplaces, and immigration centers to arrest and deport people (while the president rails against protesters wearing masks). You’d think skepticism of government power would preclude the acceptance of unidentifiable agents conducting mass arrests.
Are we seeing the first signs of buyer’s remorse? In South Florida, some elected Republicans are starting to speak out against the Trump administration’s deportation actions. The co-founder of Latinas for Trump said “this is not what we voted for,” calling the president’s actions “inhumane.” Representative Maria Elvira Salazar issued a lengthy statement criticizing the deportation of people with pending asylum cases, asking the administration to focus on criminals.
A final message to the protesters: You could just… not do this? Not light cars on fire. Not throw rocks at police. Not try to represent the immigrant community you purport to care about by destroying the city you live in. If you are actually interested in convincing people the administration is overstepping its authority and acting inhumanely with the deportations, the best way to do that would be to build sympathy for your cause. We know the people who will be most harmed—the shopkeepers whose windows get smashed, the restaurants who can’t open because roads are closed, the small mom-and-pop shops who lose business because their neighborhoods no longer seem safe. Keep them in your minds before things really spin out of control in a way that makes it impossible to turn back.
Isaac Saul is the founder of Tangle, a newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from the right and left on the news of the day.
A version of this article was originally published by Tangle.
Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
 | A guest post by
|
Many excellent points and of them #11 stands out. If we want to persuade onlookers that the protests have a moral foundation as well as a political argument, they must be peaceful. Hard to do when passions run high, but passion alone won’t carry the day.
"The protests were mostly peaceful up until Trump announced he was deploying the National Guard."
Oh Jesus. HAHAHAHA. Here we go again. CNN claiming "mostly peaceful protests" in front of burning buildings.
This article is pure leftist drivel. Propaganda following the massive ignoring of the Biden border crisis that allowed hundreds of millions of illegal immigrants to flow.
The good news here is that these people rioting and holding Mexican flags are likely deportation subjects. Note that the majority of Los Angeles residence support a cleanup of the Biden mess.