BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
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Showing posts with label U.S. Constitution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label U.S. Constitution. Show all posts
THE only explanation for the constitutional ignorance of the lt governor of Indiana is his schooling in neo-nazi, fascist authoritarianism which is all to common in that state. THANK GOD many people in Indiana, as shown in this video, know and understand our laws, civil liberties, civil rights, human rights and our Constitution and are not intimidated by punks like their lt governor!
Beckwith, a Christian pastor by trade, was elected to the state's second-highest office last year alongside Republican Gov. Mike Braun.
The lieutenant governor has frequently split with Braun on state policy issues and garnered headlines for his taxpayer-funded purchase of a $88,000 SUV, lack of neutrality as the Indiana Senate's presiding officer and his belief that the federal government is using airplanes to control the weather.
THE struggle to save our nation will continue until NOT MY pres drumpf / trump is gone, and that can't be too soon ( LET'S GO TACO, GET OUT! ). We can not become tired and complacent, keep in mind we are in the right as we are defending our democracy, our constitution, our freedoms and responsibilities, and our rights. The extreme right wing fascist, those that would have voted for hitler or stalin or mussolini or franco do not have the right and we can not let them gain the power to impose project 2025 and their authoritarian theocratic oligarchy on us. The millions who will be participating in the NO KINGS rallies across the country (2000+ so far) show our numbers and our strength is growing! Be Peaceful, Strong, Loud and Proud on Saturday, we're gonna show NOT MY pres drumpf / trump, NOT MY vp vance, their neo-nazi, fascist magat administration cultist and the gop / greed over people-republican party WE ARE WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!!! This from the ACLU.....
This weekend, ICE carried out dangerous raids across Los Angeles that caused chaos and terror throughout the community. When people took to the street to protest ICE's cruelty, law enforcement aggressively arrested even more of our neighbors – including the leader of California's largest union, David Huerta.
In response to these peaceful protests, President Trump federalized 2,000 National Guard troops and deployed them to Los Angeles.
This is the first time that a president has activated National Guard troops to a state without a request from the governor since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators. What's happening now is very different.
The administration's militarized response is unnecessary, inflammatory, and an abuse of power. The Trump administration is putting people in Los Angeles in danger and undermining the democratic principle that the military should not police civilians.
And make no mistake: Trump's order isn't restricted to the protests in Los Angeles. President Trump is attempting to write himself a blank check to use the military in any city where people are protesting ICE raids that are terrorizing their communities.
The administration's goal is to scare us into silence. But the ACLU, our affiliates, and our members will continue to show up to defend our neighbors and our rights.
President Trump's decision to deploy thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of active-duty Marines in response to protests against dangerous, military-style ICE raids in Los Angeles is not only an overreaction – it's an abuse of power, a violation of our free speech rights, and it endangers civilians and service members alike.
Over the past week, President Trump has made it very clear he has no problem sending the military into our communities to suppress protest. But if his goal was to intimidate us into silence, it's having the opposite effect. Millions across the country are preparing to take to the streets this Saturday in what's expected to be the largest mass mobilization of his second term.
NOT MY pres drumpf / trump ( LET'S GO TACO ), NOT MY vp vance, NOT MY pres musk, their neo-nazi fascist project 2025 administration and the arsch licking gop / greed over people-republican party controlling congress are doing their best to destroy the American democratic Republic. Their goal, which we were warned about, is the imposition of an authoritarian theocratic oligarchy. We have been a Republic for 249 years, but we will not see 250 if the American people do not fight to save it. You can start by attending a non-violent "NO KINGS" protest near you ( there are hundreds if not thousands across the country including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, go to Indivisible to find one). Here is a thoughtful article by Bill McKibben of Mother Jones on the state of our nation....
I live in Vermont, 268 miles from Canada’s capital of Ottawa and 487 miles from Washington, DC, so an interesting thought experiment is: Why do I identify with the United States? I’m legally an American, of course, and Canada doesn’t need me—but those are practicalities. What I’m asking is, at least at first, a philosophical question: What does it mean in 2025 to be an American?
And it’s a question that acquired new urgency in the last week when—obscured somewhat by the Trump–Musk imbroglio—something quite fascinating happened. The president threatened to cut off much of the federal aid to California, in response to what a White House spokesman called “lunatic” state policies, most recently the fact that a transgender girl was allowed to compete in a high school track meet. In response, Gavin Newsom, governor of the most populous state in the union (and fourth-largest economy on the planet), threatened to withhold the state’s tax payments to DC. “We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back,” he tweeted at the president. “Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realdonaldtrump.” As one California congressman said in a letter to the president, “this targeted political vengeance is a threat to our democracy and an offense to California and every American.” Several of the contenders in last week’s New York mayoral debate made the same point. And the stakes were raised over the weekend, as an increasingly imperial president federalized the California National Guard and threatened to mobilize the Marines to quell what was essentially peaceful protest against his signature policy of mass deportation.
Until a few months ago, the question of America’s cohesion—whether it would stick together—was rarely raised. Yes, there are always simmering secession movements (there’s a Texit, and an NHExit, and the Alaskan Independence Party, which helped Sarah Palin win the mayoralty of Wasilla back in the day), but they’re always deeply fringe (and usually deeply cringe). That’s because most people could answer my initial question fairly easily, though with different emphasis. Here’s what I would say: I am an American because, beyond my citizenship, I identify with the outlines of the American idea: America was born as a radical experiment in democracy, denying the right of kings and empires to rule at a distance or without the consent of the governed, a place with full religious liberty but where no single creed ruled save the secular one of progress undergirded by science and reason.
America was not always true to those ideals—indeed, it often fell disastrously short. But that democratic process allowed for improvement and that democratic ideal guided that improvement: toward more democracy, defined as more involvement by more types of people. America, haltingly, was on a path toward becoming the first big truly multiethnic democracy the world had ever seen. As a player in that world, America had done great damage, but when the chips were furthest down—above all in the world wars of the last century—it had sided with democracy against authoritarianism. And it had—more than most places—opened its arms to those seeking what we had to offer and fleeing the tyranny we had defined ourselves against. If we had a job as citizens, it was to keep America on those tracks, indeed to accelerate its progress down those tracks.
America was born as a radical experiment in democracy, denying the right of kings and empires to rule without the consent of the governed.
I am loath to give those ideals up, and I am fighting for them as hard as I know how (eager for No Kings day on Saturday!)—but in the past few months the new Trump administration has done its best to shred those notions. (Put them through a wood chipper, to use Elon Musk’s phrase.) We now have a king, or a president attempting to be one—not just posting pictures of himself in a crown, but ruling by fiat as best he can. He and his colleagues are doing their best to restrict the number of people who can participate in that democracy, and to restrict the control that democracy can exercise; they have done their best to remove even the evidence that our society once worked to expand participation and opportunity (the Navy has decided against naming boats for Harriet Tubman and Harvey Milk on the grounds they weren’t fierce-enough warriors); they have downgraded science and reason, insisting that the widely understood principles of climate change and vaccine science are hoaxes. Around the world they are abandoning defining commitments; the US is considering stepping back from its formal leadership of NATO, a post first held by Eisenhower in the aftermath of D-Day. We now routinely side with the big and autocratic against the small and democratic.
So—assuming as a thought experiment that we are unable to derail this new regime, and that it manages to impose its values on our government for the foreseeable future—what is it going to mean to be an American?
It’s pretty simple to figure out what it means to Trump: It’s to be a winner. We’re meant to have more. More money, more territory. A 51st state to the north, a giant frozen island protectorate to the east, a global shipping canal to the south. His urges are always the urges of toddlers; if he has a larger vision, it’s that this will yield more money for the rest of us too, but toddlers are not great at sharing. And I’d say Elon Musk and many of the Project 2025 zealots are responding to the urges of adolescent males—for “liberty” narrowly conceived, the right to do what one wants to do, unrestricted by any larger interest, the triumph of Ayn Rand in place of Ben Franklin. (Musk is clearly not a patriot—he’s got close friends in the corridors of Russian and Chinese power, and if his allegiance is to any territory, it’s probably Mars.) And of course there are Christian nationalists, responding to the high-pitched sounds of a weird hymn the rest of us (including old-school Christians) can’t really hear.
All of these are minority ideas. Powerful minorities, yes. Libertarian ideology combined with corporate money and power, especially in our age of grotesque inequity, can be overwhelming. But they aren’t ideas capable of explaining a diverse nation to itself—unlike the story I outlined above, which has more or less sustained us since the Revolution, and especially since the Depression. Trump’s and Musk’s are highly individualized stories, about personal wealth and personal salvation.
The closest I can come to making out an actual argument for what America means to MAGA comes from erstwhile (and quite good) author JD Vance, who laid it out most explicitly in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention. In it, he paid passing lip service to the idea that there were “brilliant ideas” like “the rule of law and religious liberty” that got written into our Constitution, but what he really wanted to stress was:
America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” When I proposed to my wife, we were in law school, and I said, Honey, I come with $120,000 worth of law school debt, and a cemetery plot…. in Eastern Kentucky is near my family’s ancestral home. And like a lot of people, we came from the mountains of Appalachia into the factories of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They’re very hardworking people, and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat. And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them. But they love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it. That is the source of America’s greatness.
Aside from the slightly comical roll call of swing states (apparently greatness mostly resides in states whose electors you most need), this is a kind of classic blood and soil appeal. Indeed, Vance kept returning to that graveyard:
Now in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country.
As it happens, my people have been here longer still, back to when we lived in a colony. They too came from those Appalachian hills, and they too fought in war after war—the frontier Pennsylvania home of John McKibben hosted the first Presbyterian worship service west of the Alleghenies and then became a stockade fort in the Revolution; my ancestors were fully implicated in the glories, and the Indian-fighting atrocities, of frontier America.
We now have a king, or a president attempting to be one.
But over the centuries my people moved around. America is a vast country, continental in width and almost all of it temperate, a place that made for easy mobility. My grandfather was born in China to missionaries, and he settled out West where he was the only doctor in a small shipbuilding town. His kids ended up scattered far and wide, and his grandkids even more so; I’ve made my life at the northern end of the Appalachians, in the mountains on either side of Lake Champlain. We’ve remained committed Americans, but not because we’re tied to some ancestral piece of soil; instead because we were tied to the story of our national experiment. Grandpa McKibben won a Silver Star in World War I for dragging the wounded off battlefields under intense bombardment; he’s no longer around to ask, but I don’t think it was Volkisch attachment to a piece of land that animated him. (And, since he also volunteered for World War II, I don’t need to ask what he would have thought of Vance’s friends throwing Nazi salutes.)
Vance tried a variation of his argument again a little later, when he tried to explain that he was a big believer in the Catholic concept of ordo amoris.
“[Y]ou love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” he explained, calling it an “old-fashioned Christian concept.” One gets why he’d like to ground his lack of ideals in an ideal—and how freeing it would be for a ruler to operate outside a philosophical framework that could constrain or shame them. That’s what clannishness amounts to; if it’s good for your people then it’s good.
But the first and most obvious problem is moral. A few days after Vance’s attempt at exegesis, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the US bishops explaining that Vance had gotten his theology backward. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” he explained. “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
Never fun to be corrected by the pope, but the other problem with Vance’s reasoning is simply practical. Namely, given the size and diversity of this country, is an appeal to place really sufficient to hold it together?
That is to say, as Vance is attached to the mountains of Ohio and Kentucky, so I am entirely at home in the Adirondacks and Vermont. I understand their geography, their history, their political currents, and the people who inhabit them. I feel deep connection to their flora and fauna and the way their seasons progress. I feel a certain kind of affection for the West Virginia where my mother grew up, but it’s not the same tight connection; I feel no great attachment to the black soil of the Mississippi Delta, though I honor the brave civil rights movement it helped spawn.
My link to these places is through that shared story, with which I began, but if we’re going to throw that story overboard, then Arkansas or Indiana become as Peru or the Cotswolds are to me; perfectly fine places that I’m perfectly happy to respect and admire, but not of particular deep connection. And I’m sure that Hoosiers and Arkansans feel much the same about Vermont or New York (their remove is sometimes exploited by some politicians of the heartland who disdain New Yorkers as criminals, and Californians, as we have seen, as “lunatics”).
Our vastness and complexity have always been at tension with unity. Even when America was much smaller, people’s affection for their particular place was often greater than their love for the whole, which is why the Articles of Confederation didn’t work and had to be quickly replaced by the Constitution. But if it was difficult when the country comprised the eastern seaboard, it’s much harder now. Vance and Trump can’t deport enough people to make our diversity go away; either it’s going to be something we celebrate as part of the story that makes us a whole, or it’s going to be a strain.
I’d much prefer the former. I love our vast country precisely for its geographical and cultural diversity. But if that’s not going to be our story, I’m also content to live a New England life. We’d make a perfectly sensible country, 16 million people with enough colleges and commerce and resources to get by just fine: We have the wind off the Atlantic to provide our energy, and we’ve always been skilled traders. Boston would make a fine capital, and Fenway Park is a spiritual ground zero. We’ve got Emerson and Longfellow, Thoreau and Alcott; W.E.B. Du Bois and Ethan Allen, Bernie Sanders and Big Papi, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. We could cobble together our own story; it obviously wouldn’t be a perfect story, since this is where the oppression of indigenous North Americans had its start, and since New Englanders played their role in the slave trade—but it can boast quite rightly of everyone from William Lloyd Garrison to Susan B. Anthony to William Sloane Coffin. It has its own foodstuffs (the lobster roll, the maple sap boiling in the evaporator) and its own musicians: from James Taylor to the Dropkick Murphys. And Phish!
Our vastness and complexity have always been at tension with unity.
You could do the same exercise for, say, California, where history has been abusive to both land and people and where a breed of tech overlord currently holds too much sway, but also where they’ve built a kind of dynamism that turned the Golden State (with the help of that local industry Hollywood) into an idyll for the rest of the world. The best public college system in the history of the planet, an ever-more-successful merging of cultures from both sides of the border and both sides of the Pacific, the great parks of Big Sur and Yosemite. (And yet, with 40 million people, rewarded with the same two senators as Vermont or North Dakota.) And for that matter you could build a story for Texas, or for Florida, or the Upper Midwest, or the Plains states, or the Deep South.
It would be impoverishing to let our national links wither—I love the idea that the great national parks and wildernesses of the West are supported in some part by the ecological impulses of the crowded East, and that the civil liberties of new arrivals to the Southwest draw in some measure from the principles of early Pennsylvanians; those immigrants enrich in turn even the lives of those of us at some remove. Reflexively liberal New England is made stronger by grappling with conservative ideas from the Lone Star State, and vice versa. And Americans still speak common languages—baseball, basketball, barbecue, Beyoncé—that make life better. But those may not be enough to sustain this national project in the face of the ideological nihilism unleashed by Trump and Musk and Vance. They are taking our national tale, which is about democracy, and turning it into a tale about power, and there’s a lot of us who don’t want to live in that story.
I wrote a book about a Vermont secession once. It was a mostly comic novel, but I was impressed with the number of neighbors who resonated with the idea. That was in the first Trump years, and I said when I was interviewed about it: “I don’t think we should secede. But ask me again if there’s a second Trump administration.” And now there is a second Trump reign, far more militant than the first, whose main task seems to be disposing of the story that knit this vast country tenuously together. Trump’s been increasingly clear that he wants to kill off FEMA, the system that lets (temporarily) intact parts of the nation bail out those parts in distress: “I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” he declared recently. There are still some practical things that link us—above all Social Security, which people have spent lifetimes paying into and can’t afford to walk away from. But it’s now unclear how long MAGA will let Social Security survive—and in a congenial breakup there’s no reason it shouldn’t be part of the settlement.
I still think our national story is worth fighting for. And I can imagine ways we come together to write new chapters. For instance, in the rapid heating of the planet we face an external threat as great as any war, and a national project to move to clean energy could be as exhilarating as the moonshot of the 1960s. It takes advantage of our scientific prowess, and it works into both liberal and conservative ideas of the good life: If your red-state home is your well-defended castle, why wouldn’t you want a bunch of solar panels on the roof? But fossil fuel money has corrupted this administration, and it feels far more likely that a clean energy Apollo project is going to be China’s story, not ours.
Maybe we’ll figure out something else to bring us back together. The American idea is worth fighting for. But not indefinitely. It’s possible we may honor it best by remembering that its early chapters were written by relatively small numbers of people in a relatively small place. Everything is bigger now, of course, except our ideas.
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I posted this as a comment on the Washington Post article "Trump administration weighs broad cancellation of California funding" because the Post isn't allowing comments on their article "Trump activates National Guard after L.A.-area protest / National Guard arrives in L.A. after Trump order to intervene in protest of immigration raids".
Since jeff joesph goebbles bezos isn’t allowing comments on their "reporting" on the protest against the ice raids in Los Angeles I will post my comments here. Why is drumpf / trump sending the Nat. Guard to Los Angeles when they have not been requested when he didn't send any assistance to the Capital when it was requested on 6 JAN 2021? Is this the beginning of the fascist overthrow of our democratic Republic?
I posted this as a comment on "Trump activates National Guard after L.A.-area protest"
NOT MY pres drumpf / trump didn't send help to the Capital when it was requested on 6 JAN 21 BECAUSE that was an insurrection started by him. drumpf / trump is a sociopathic psychotic narcissistic fascist and this is probably his 2nd attempt at overthrowing our democratic Republic. This becomes more plausible with the threat by Sec of Defense petie lola hegseth to deploy active duty Marines to Los Angeles in violation of posse comitatis.
And I just added this comment to the same article.
This is important for everyone to know since NOT MY pres drumpf / trump activated the California National Guard. "Members of the National Guard are rarely covered by the Posse Comitatus Act because they usually report to their state or territory’s governor. That means they are free to participate in law enforcement if doing so is consistent with state law. However, when Guard personnel are called into federal service, or “federalized,” they become part of the federal armed forces, which means they are bound by the Posse Comitatus Act until they are returned to state control." https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained
Service members began to arrive in Los Angeles early Sunday, part of the 2,000 California National Guard troops that President Donald Trump has ordered to be deployed tothe city to intervene in protests against his administration’s immigration sweeps. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) condemned the move, which a military legal expert said was escalatory because the state did not request assistance but notably did not involve the president invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow service members under federal orders to perform law enforcement.
Here’s what to know as the National Guard arrives in Los Angeles after this weekend’s protests against federal immigration sweeps, part of what the president has said would amount to the largest-scale deportation operation in the country’s history:
Around 300 members of the California National Guard deployed to the Los Angeles area Sunday, according to U.S. Northern Command. They are “conducting safety and protection of federal property & personnel,” the command said.
The National Guard arrived to a mostly calm city, as many parts of the sprawling Los Angeles County carried on as normal despite pockets of protests in downtown L.A. and in the cities of Paramount and Compton over the weekend.
President Donald Trump ordered the mobilization of 2,000 National Guard members Saturday evening against the wishes of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who said local and state authorities had the situation under control.
Video from Paramount and Compton in L.A. County showed property damage and cars set on fire Saturday. Three people were arrested overnight in Paramount for assaulting peace officers, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Newsom urged protestors to “speak out peacefully" and said the federal government had deployed troops “not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.”
11:48 p.m. EDT
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has urged public to protest peacefully
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officers near a Home Depot in Paramount, California, on Saturday. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has urged the public to “exercise the right to protest peacefully with respect for the safety of all community members.”
“Our primary responsibility is to ensure public safety for all individuals present, both demonstrators, residents and bystanders, by addressing potential safety concerns while supporting the safe and lawful expression of First Amendment rights,” the statement from the department said.
The White House activation of the National Guard marks a major escalation as protests erupt over immigration sweeps, in what the president has promised will be the largest-scale deportation operation in history. For much of last year on the campaign trail, the president and his allies argued that blue-state immigration policies were putting Americans at risk. They warned that the administration would crack down on Democratic-run cities and states that offered “sanctuary” to undocumented immigrants.
In a statement, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt claimed that “violent mobs have attacked ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations in Los Angeles.”
“These operations are essential to halting and reversing the invasion of illegal criminals into the United States,” she said. She said Trump signed the presidential memorandum deploying 2,000 members of the National Guard to “ensure the laws of the United States are executed fully and completely.”
Newsom, in a Saturday night post on X, urged demonstrators to “never use violence” and “speak out peacefully.” He told protesters to deny the Trump administration the show of force it wanted by staying calm.
“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles — not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” he wrote. “Don’t give them one.”
While statements from the White House suggested chaos in Los Angeles on Saturday, the Los Angeles Police Department said that demonstrations in the city had been peaceful.
“While today’s events concluded without incident, the Los Angeles Police Department remains fully prepared to respond swiftly and appropriately to any potential acts of civil unrest,” the LAPD statement said.
12:15 a.m. EDT
Trump’s response comes as his team weighs cancellation of California funding
The White House has asked federal agencies to review funding for California, targeting an array of sources of federal money the state receives, according to one federal official and records reviewed by The Post. Federal employees have been asked to develop rationales for the funding cuts, including citing noncompliance with Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity efforts and steps to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the government.
The plan could run afoul of an existing federal court injunction and would almost certainly face fresh legal challenges. A senior White House official stressed Saturday that no final decision on blocking the funding has been made.
Vice President JD Vance described the protesters in L.A. as “insurrectionists” and said on X that it was time to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill to secure the border. “The president will deploy the national guard to quell these protests, and any person who violates the law or obstructs law enforcement will be aggressively prosecuted,” he added.
A car burns during a protest in Compton, California, on Saturday. (Eric Thayer/AP)
Demonstrators are burning cars and refuse on the streets, while Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies are confronting them with tear gas and other crowd control measures.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department deputies confront protesters in Compton. (Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images)
A protester surrounded by tear gas throws a rock at law enforcement officers in Paramount, California. (Eric Thayer/AP)
Expended tear gas canisters are seen on the ground in Paramount. (Eric Thayer/AP)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday night backed the activation of the National Guard to quell unrest and said that active-duty Marines could be used next. “It’s COMMON SENSE,” Hegseth wrote from his personal account on X, saying the Defense Department is mobilizing the National Guard immediately. “And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert,” he wrote.
As the night wore on, the mood of the crowd at Alondra Boulevard and Lime Avenue grew more volatile. Protesters lit off fireworks, the loud booms punctuating the drone of circling helicopters. Local police clad in riot gear advanced slowly from behind a barricade. At one point, the dumpster in a nearby strip mall was lit on fire. Soon after, authorities appeared to deploy pepper spray or tear gas, sending most of the crowd scrambling from the intersection where they had been facing off for hours. As the protesters fled, some coughed.
1:21 a.m. EDT
Rowdy crowds, fireworks and smoke: The scene from Paramount
Protesters face off against law enforcement officers in Paramount, California, on Saturday. (Reis Thebault/The Washington Post)
A few blocks from the Paramount, California, Home Depot, which had become the locus of protester clashes with law enforcement earlier Saturday, a rowdy crowd of perhaps 100 people gathered near a police barricade as the sun set.
Overhead, several helicopters circled low. At street level, police cars lined one side of the intersection, blocking a bridge across the Interstate 710 freeway. The crowd, many wearing masks, waving flags or recording the scene on cellphones, watched as some people lit fireworks, drove motorcycles and steered cars in doughnuts.
At one point, several appeared to ignite a pile of plywood. Down the street, the husk of a car that was burned earlier still smoldered. A wide no-man’s land separated the crowd and officers. Here in south L.A., the cool night air was acrid and smoky.
Protesters wave American and Mexican flags in Compton, California, on Saturday. (Ethan Swope/AP)
After ordering everyone to disperse at the demonstration in downtown Los Angeles, the city police department has authorized the use of “less lethal munitions” — terms commonly used to describe materials like tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, beanbag rounds and hard-foam projectiles.
California Democrats condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the CaliforniaNational Guard. Calling the deployment without the governor’s authorization “unprecedented,” Sen. Adam Schiff said the move is “designed to inflame tensions, sow chaos, and escalate the situation.” Sen. Alex Padilla said the federal government was “just sowing more chaos and division.” Rep. Gil Cisneros noted that Trump had refused to deploy the National Guard when the U.S. Capitol was under attack during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has been restrained in his language so far, reflecting the careful balance he is trying to strike with President Donald Trump. He said local authorities have the demonstrations under control and that Trump bypassing his authorization and federalizing 2,000 California National Guard troops was unnecessary and inflammatory. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, weighed in late Saturday, saying the immigration sweeps instill fear in California, where immigrants “are essential to the life and heart of our state.” “Weaponizing protest to justify federal crackdowns is a dangerous precedent,” she wrote on X.
The California Highway Patrol said Saturday night that they are deploying additional resources to help maintain public safety on highways and roadways at the direction of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). In a statement, the CHP said their mission is to keep the peace and that they have not and will not be involved in federal immigration enforcement activity.
2:31 a.m. EDT
Two brothers protest raids targeting ‘hardworking people’
Vitaly and Bryan Nieves raced toward the Paramount Home Depot on Saturday afternoon as soon as they saw news that federal immigration officers were gathering in the area. The brothers, who live in nearby Bell Gardens, stayed for hours, protesting an immigration crackdown they call cruel and discriminatory.
“It’s nothing but hardworking people they’re taking,” said Bryan, 29, waving a large banner stitched from the flags of the United States and Mexico. The raids are especially brutal, added Vitaly, 31, because they’ve targeted those on the job or looking for work at a time when it’s become increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
“The economy is already bad enough — people are out here struggling, doing side gigs just to survive every day,” he said. “At least target the people doing crimes. The majority of these people are working-class, just trying to make a living and it’s sad they have to live in fear.”
The pair heard about the Trump administration’s plan to send in 2,000 National Guard troops to quell protests in Paramount on the south side of Los Angeles County. The president’s approach will only further escalate the tense situation, they said. “Bringing the National Guard in is going to spark a national riot,” Vitaly said. “It won’t just be in California, it’ll spread to other states. It’s not right.”
A woman watches as federal immigration authorities arrive with detainees at a federal building in Los Angeles on Saturday. (Eric Thayer/AP)
The protests in Compton and Paramount, California, follow a recent string of immigration raids in Los Angeles County, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained dozens of migrants and protesters trying to block the raids and agents from driving away.
Protesters throw objects at a law enforcement van in Paramount, on the south side of Los Angeles County, on Saturday. (Eric Thayer/AP)
A protester places trash on a fire as Border Patrol personnel stand guard in Paramount on Saturday. (Eric Thayer/AP)
3:56 a.m. EDT
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department says they aren’t part of immigration actions
Los Angeles Sheriff's Department officers arriving in Paramount, California, on Saturday. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has jurisdiction over the city of Paramount, is continuing to emphasize that they are not involved in any federal law enforcement operations and are focused solely on crowd control and traffic management. The department said they called in additional deputies Saturday in Paramount when the “crowd of protesters became increasingly agitated, throwing objects and exhibiting violent behavior toward federal agents and deputy sheriffs."
”When federal authorities come under attack and request assistance, we will support them and provide aid," the department said in a statement Saturday night. “However, this does not mean that we are assisting with their immigration actions or operations; rather, our objective is to protect them from any violent attacks. Any assault on federal or local law enforcement is unacceptable.”
Though Trump administration officials described chaos and violence at Saturday’sdemonstrations, local agencies did not request additional resources from the state government and reported that the situation was under control — despite Trump’s activation of the National Guard. State officials said they were closely monitoring demonstrations in Los Angeles and in Paramount, a city about 20 minutes from downtown L.A.
A large law enforcement presence remained late Saturday on the edge of downtown, where protesters had earlier gathered outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and an adjacent detention center run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At the latter, they had set off fireworks. Around 11 p.m., a line of police cars passed through the area, their lights flashing and sirens wailing. As they appeared to leave, several dozen remaining demonstrators jeered.
The Los Angeles Police Department said at midnight that it detained “multiple” people who breached an area near the city’s Metropolitan Detention Center where the agency had declared an “unlawful assembly.” “Those detained will be arrested and booked for failing to disperse,” the force said on social media. Earlier, police said a section of Alameda Street was closed to all vehicle and pedestrian traffic.
The National Guard has not yet been deployed to the sites of any protests in Los Angeles County, according to its sheriff’s department. “We were told that the National Guard had been deployed, however they are not on the scene or the ground yet,” Deputy Sheriff Tracy Koerner said around 1:45 a.m. local time. Earlier Sunday, Mayor Karen Bass said the National Guard had not been deployed in the city limits.
The American Civil Liberties Union weighed in on Trump’s decision to federalize National Guard troops, calling it an inflammatory abuse of power. “By taking this action, the Trump administration is putting Angelenos in danger, creating legal and ethical jeopardy for troops, and recklessly undermining our foundational democratic principle that the military should not police civilians,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump spoke for more than 40 minutes Friday night after demonstrations began to unfold in Los Angeles following federal immigration raids. While there had been some skirmishes on Friday between federal law enforcement and demonstrators, Newsom stressed to Trump that the situation was under control and there was no need for Trump to activate California National Guard troops, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Normally, if additional law enforcement resources are needed to respond to protests, local jurisdictions can work through the county and state to get immediate backup — but that has not been necessary so far.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass’s office sent a note early Sunday stating that she will “continue to actively respond to immigration enforcement operations in Los Angeles” and will be monitoring “reports of unrest outside the city, including in Paramount,” about a 20-minute drive from downtown L.A. The mayor’s office said she has been in direct contact with officials in Washington and from law enforcement “to find the best path forward.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth threatened to mobilize active-duty Marines “if violence continues,” writing on X that Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton were on “high alert.” The post touched off a legal debate on social media, with the advocacy group the Brennan Center for Justice noting that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement, except when expressly authorized by law. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the threat “deranged.”
Bilal “Bill” Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told CBS News affiliate KCAL late Saturday that the National Guard is “on its way” to Los Angeles and is expected there “within the next 24 hours,” after President Donald Trump’s call-up order for 2,000 California National Guard members to intervene in the protests.
Police officers detain someone at the garage entrance of a Los Angeles federal building on Friday. (Daniel Cole/Reuters)
The Los Angeles Police Department is defending its response to a call Friday from federal authorities asking for help dealing with a downtown demonstration that had turned violent.
Todd Lyons, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, said Saturday that “our brave officers were vastly outnumbered” and that people had “surrounded and attacked a federal building.” He said the LAPD took more than two hours to respond.
In the statement Saturday night, the police department acknowledged the delay but said that “within 55 minutes of receiving the call,” they “began to disperse the hostile and riotous crowd.”
“Our response time was impacted by significant traffic congestion, the presence of demonstrators, and notably, by the fact that federal agents had deployed irritants into the crowd prior to LAPD’s arrival,” the statement said. It said those elements “created a hazardous environment for responding officers.”
10:07 a.m. EDT
Speaker Johnson defends Trump’s use of Guard forces amid L.A. protests
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) said Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week” that he has “no concern” about President Donald Trump deploying the National Guard to defuse immigration protests in Los Angeles.
“I think the president did exactly what he needed to do. These are federal laws. We have to maintain the rule of law and that is not what is happening,” Johnson told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “[California Gov.] Gavin Newsom has shown an inability or an unwillingness to do what is necessary there, so the president stepped in. That’s real leadership, and he has the authority and the responsibility to do it.”
The president sending in the National Guard without a governor’s request is extremely rare. But Johnson — who positions himself as a defender of states’ rights over federal infringement — also endorsed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth floating the idea of sending in active military units if the protests do not calm down, saying, “I don’t think that’s heavy-handed.”
“We have to be prepared to do what is necessary,” Johnson said.
10:10 a.m. EDT
The presidential powers Trump invoked to federalize the National Guard
The provision gives the president the authority to call members and units of any state’sNational Guard into federal service under a limited number of extreme scenarios, including if there “is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”
In his order, Trump said that when the protests inhibited “the execution of the laws,” they amounted to a form of rebellion against the federal government.
It’s not the first time a president has directed National Guard members to help quell protests on U.S. soil. But Trump’s move is unusual because he did it without the apparent support of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who on Saturday called such a deployment “purposefully inflammatory” and unnecessary. Governors typically control how National Guard troops are deployed in their states.
Early Sunday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) both said the National Guard had not yet been deployed in their jurisdictions.
Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, wrote in a blog post Sunday that any National Guard members will be legally constrained in their actions. Troops “will not be allowed to engage in ordinary law enforcement activities” and will be able only to “provide a form of force protection and other logistical support for ICE personnel,” he wrote. That’s because Trump has not yet invoked the Insurrection Act, a series of statutes that authorize the president to call up the military on U.S. soil for law enforcement purposes in certain situations, even without a request from state officials.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department arrested two people Saturday evening in Paramount for allegedly assaulting a law enforcement officer, Sheriff’s Deputy Raquel Utley told The Post. The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said several deputies had sustained minor injuries from the protest, includingfrom a molotov cocktail..
Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-California), whose district includes South Los Angeles, told CNN on Sunday morning that sheriff’s officials on the ground in L.A. have told her that they have things under control, and that there’s no need for the National Guard.
“They have the manpower that they need,” Barragán said. “This is really just an escalation of the president coming into California. We haven’t asked for the help. We don’t need the help.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) told CNN that President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to California is a sign that the country is moving “rapidly into authoritarianism.”
Sanders added that, “to a large degree, the future of this country rests with a small number of Republicans in the House and Senate who know better.”
“It’s high time they stood up for our Constitution,” he said.
11:42 a.m. EDT
Trump’s use of National Guard is escalatory but not yet a crisis, legal expert says
While the National Guard activation is escalatory and unusual because California did not request assistance, it has not yet crossed concerning red lines of civilian and military relations, said Rachel E. VanLandingham, a former Air Force attorney and a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.
National Guard troops under state control have broader law enforcement authorities, she said, but these members under federal control have more restraints. They can perform logistics and other support missions, but they cannot, under law, perform law enforcement operations such as immigration raids, arrests and home searches, she said.
“But it can easily and quickly escalate to mortal and constitutional danger” if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, she said, which would allow these Guard members and other mobilized active-duty troops to perform law enforcement duties. That hasn’t happened since riots in Los Angeles in 1992, she said, when Marines were activated to contain unrest following the acquittal of police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King.
Use of the Insurrection Act, including in Los Angeles in 1992, is most often through requests of governors. It has not been invoked against the wishes of a state since 1965, VanLandingham said, when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized National Guard troops to protect civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.
The act was also used to marshal active-duty soldiers to protect Black students in Arkansas, allowing them passage to desegregated schools in 1957 after the governor tried to block them with National Guard members under his control.
“This is problematic for Guard troops, who train for law enforcement missions, but not ones contrived and created by the federal government itself,” VanLandingham said. “This is an excuse to use the military against Americans.”
National Guard troops are deployed around downtown Los Angeles on Sunday. (Eric Thayer/AP)
After two days of unrest in the Los Angeles area, the first National Guard troops, activated by President Donald Trump, began to arrive in the city Sunday morning.
National Guard troops were ordered by President Donald Trump to respond to protests in Los Angeles against his administration’s immigration sweeps. (Eric Thayer/AP)
Protests in Los Angeles began Friday. On Saturday, President Donald Trump issued a directive ordering the National Guard to intervene. (Eric Thayer/AP)
1 hour ago
Noem declines to specify where National Guard is being posted
Members of the California National Guard stand outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Sunday. (Mike Blake/Reuters)
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem on Sunday would not disclose where National Guard troops are being posted in Los Angeles, or describe details of their assignments.
“I won’t speak specifically to all the locations where the National Guard troops will be deployed to, or where they will be conducting different operations,” she said during an interview with CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“As far as security concerns, they’re there at the direction of the president in order to keep peace and allow people to be able to protest, but also to keep law and order,” she added.
Noem said the 2,000 National Guard troops called into Los Angeles “are specifically trained for this type of crowd situation where they’ll be with the public and be able to provide safety around buildings and to those that are engaged in peaceful protests, and also to our law enforcement officers so they can continue their daily work.”
The DHS secretary also criticized California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), saying he “makes bad decisions.” That, she contended, required President Donald Trump to step up even though officials in Los Angeles and California had not asked for federal backup.
“That’s one of the reasons why these National Guard soldiers are being federalized, so they can use their special skill set to keep peace,” she said.
1 hour ago
Here’s where National Guard troops are in L.A. and what they’re doing
National Guard troops were seen staging in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, following President Donald Trump's orders to intervene in the protests of ICE raids. (Video: Reuters)
The California National Guard deployed about 300 members to the Los Angeles area Sunday morning, according to U.S. Northern Command. President Donald Trump ordered 2,000 members to the city in response to protests of immigration sweeps.
The members are from the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, according to Northern Command. The brigade says it’s the largest combat unit in the California Army National Guard.
National Guard members were deployed to three locations in the Los Angeles area, Northern Command said. Photos the command shared on X showed members outside a federal building on Wilshire Boulevard.
Video from Reuters showed members about 12 miles east, outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building on East Temple Street, unloading equipment from their vehicles Sunday morning.
Border czar Tom Homan speaks to reporters outside the White House on May 29. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview on NBC News on Sunday that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) could be arrested and prosecuted by the Department of Justice if they impede federal immigration actions.
Homan said it’s a felony to impede law enforcement from doing their jobs. “If she crossed that line, we’ll ask DOJ to prosecute,” Homan said, referring to Bass. “I don’t think she’s crossed the line yet. But the warning we’re sending is, we’re not going to tolerate people attacking our officers.”
Several political leaders in California, including Newsom, have criticized the deployment of the National Guard, saying that demonstrations against immigration raids have been peaceful and the troops would just add to tensions.
Last month, in another high-profile standoff between federal law enforcement and local politicians, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing after speaking at a new immigration detention facility in Newark. The charges were later dropped, and Baraka has since sued the interim U.S. attorney of New Jersey, arguing the charges were politically motivated.
1 hour ago
Labor leader arrested in L.A. immigration sweep denies wrongdoing
The president of California’s chapter of the Service Employees International Union, a massive labor group representing more than 700,000 state workers, will remain in federal custody through the weekend after being detained during a protest Friday.
David Huerta was documenting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in downtown Los Angeles when federal officers pushed him to the ground and detained him, according to video from the scene. Authorities accused him of obstructing the work of ICE officials.
An SEIU spokesperson said it is not clear what crime Huerta will be charged with when he is arraigned Monday at a Los Angeles federal courthouse. It was also not clear, the spokesperson added, why he was being held through the weekend. The union has denied that Huerta violated any laws and maintains that he was exercising his First Amendment rights.
“What happened to me is not about me; this is about something much bigger,” Huerta said in a statement after his release from a hospital, where he was treated for injuries sustained during his arrest. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals.”
Los Angeles in November became a “sanctuary city,” a classification of jurisdictions that are among President Donald Trump’s top targets as his administration tries to increase immigration arrests. As of 2024, about 34 percent of the city’s population were immigrants.
The SEIU is planning a large demonstration downtown Monday before Huerta’s arraignment.
57 min ago
ICE plans 30 days of immigration raids in L.A. County, lawmaker says
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to conduct 30 days of immigration raids across Los Angeles County, Rep. Nanette Barragán (D-California) said, which would continue the sweeps that sparked protests in L.A. this weekend.
During a briefing with state and federal law enforcement, Barragán said, officials with the Department of Homeland Security advised local law enforcement that “they should expect ICE EROs [enforcement and removal operations] every day for the next 30 days.”
Barragán’s office was informed of the planned immigration sweeps in a separate briefing with local law enforcement. In an interview with The Washington Post, Barragán said officials on the call did not specify where in L.A. County the raids would occur.
It’s also unclear whether local law enforcement would be called in to assist federal authorities with crowd control if protests occur.
Barragán, whose district includes the city of Paramount — the site of Saturday’s demonstrations against a weekend of ICE raids — said her office was told that no immigration raids ultimately occurred there Saturday.
“We were told that the immigration enforcement did not occur,” she said. Although federal officials staged in preparation for an operation, “because [of] the protest, the operation did not move forward.”
In the course of the protests, Barragán said, “one person was arrested and several were detained.”
The National Guard members who arrived Sunday moved quickly because they already were mustered as part of their monthly drilling duties, according to a defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations.
25 min ago
Protesters face off with Guard members at downtown L.A. detention center
Protester Estrella Corral said President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to L.A. was "inflammatory" and not necessary. (Video: Molly Hennessy-Fiske/The Washington Post)
LOS ANGELES — A small group of protesters and onlookers gathered outside a federal immigration detention center in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday morning and faced off with more than two dozen California Army National Guard troops who had arrived several hours earlier.
While the protesters chanted and filmed with their cellphones, the Guard members stood silent, armed with long guns and riot helmets in front of a half-dozen military vehicles. They declined to say where they were deployed from.
“Migrants are not criminals!” chanted Estrella Corral, 39, a social worker from Pasadena who was carrying a homemade bilingual sign. “Los Angeles is our home. We are demanding the immigrants who are detained be set free!” she shouted.
Corral, who had been protesting since Friday, defended the gatherings as largely peaceful and condemned President Donald Trump’s deployment of Guard forces as “a show.”
“They’re escalating,” she said of the administration and Trump. “He’s trying to make immigrant communities seem criminal.”
Cars honked and played anti-Trump songs, while drivers passing by shouted at the troops: “Don’t be fascists!”
Thomas Henning, a neuroscience PhD student at Caltech, hesitated to join a protest Sunday after his father warned that the National Guard would be there.
“I was scared to come. But I wouldn’t feel good about myself if I didn’t,” the 27-year-old Henning said as he stood near armed National Guard members arrayed outside the federal immigration detention center in downtown Los Angeles. “What they’re doing is wrong, the intimidation,” Henning said of President Donald Trump and immigration officials.
He dismissed Trump’s characterization of the several days of local protests as an insurrection: “This is not Jan. 6. We’re not rioting.”
I’m with several hundred protesters at Mariachi Plaza in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, just east of downtown. It’s peaceful here, and no law enforcement officials or National Guard troops are present.
Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, is speaking. The group is planning to march to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center next.
LOS ANGELES — President Donald Trump has ordered the California National Guard to Los Angeles to intervene in protests of immigration sweeps, a move condemned by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who called it “inflammatory” and unnecessary.
The president issued the directive Saturday after violence broke out during demonstrations the past two days against federal immigration raids in Los Angeles County. On Friday night, people in downtown Los Angeles engaged in skirmishes with federal officials, who said they requested backup from city law enforcement. Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons criticized the Los Angeles Police Department for what he called a delayed response. The LAPD acknowledged in a statement Saturday night that it did not begin dispersing the “hostile and riotous crowd” until 55 minutes after receiving the request for help but cited traffic congestion caused by the demonstrations and chemical irritants that federal agents had deployed into the crowd.
Trump administration officials called the local response insufficient. On Saturday afternoon, border czarTom Homan said in an interview on Fox News that authorities were mobilizing “to address violence and destruction” near locations that were raided Saturday. In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump said that if Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass “can’t do their jobs,” the “Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”
Early Sunday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the National Guard had yet to be deployed to any sites in the county, and Bass said it had not been deployed within the city limits.
But the White House activation of the National Guard marks a major escalation between state and federal authorities as protests erupt over immigration sweeps, part of what the president has said would be the largest-scale deportation operation in the country’s history. For much of last year on the campaign trail, Trump and his allies argued that blue-state immigration policies were putting Americans at risk. They said the administration would crack down on Democratic-run cities and states that offered “sanctuary” to undocumented immigrants.
Governors typically control how National Guard troops are deployed in their states. Trump’s move to overrule Newsom’s authority and seize control of 2,000 National Guard troops was immediately condemned by a broad array of Democratic officials and Democrat-aligned groups. Justifying his decision in a presidential memorandum, Trump said “incidents of violence and disorder” following the recent immigration roundups amounted to “a form of rebellion” against the United States. He called the National Guard units into service to protect government personnel by citing a provision in Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services that allows federal deployment of the National Guard if there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the government.
Protests against ICE continue for second day in Los Angeles
1:26
Protests against ICE raids continued for a second day in Los Angeles on June 7, a day after police officers in tactical gear used tear gas to disperse crowds. (Video: The Washington Post)
Officials in Los Angeles County and in Washington offered sharply divergent descriptions of the situation on the ground in Los Angeles on Saturday.
Federal immigration officials began a series of sweeps in Los Angeles County on Friday, including in the fashion district downtown. In a clash with police Friday in downtown Los Angeles, which the LAPD ultimately declared an unlawful assembly, officers reported that a small group of violent people were throwing large pieces of concrete. On Saturday, demonstrators began gathering in Paramount, California — about a 20-minute drive from downtown L.A. — after a Saturday morning raid near a Home Depot.
While LAPD and sheriff’s department officials said both situations were under control, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Saturday that “violent mobs have attacked ICE Officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations in Los Angeles.”
She said Trump signed the presidential memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guard members to “ensure the laws of the United States are executed fully and completely.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also referred to “violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement” in a post on X and threatened to involve the Marines, touching off a legal debate on social media. The Brennan Center for Justice, a legal advocacy group, noted that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement, except when expressly authorized by law.
“If violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert,” Hegseth wrote on X.
Newsom responded on the same platform: “The Secretary of Defense is now threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens. This is deranged behavior.”
Newsom said in a statement that the federal government’s move to nationalize the California Guard was “purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.” Later on X, Newsom urged protesters to demonstrate peacefully.
“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles — not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Newsom wrote. “Don’t give them one. Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.”
Trump has also been weighing whether to pull all federal funding from California, a move that could devastate the state, according to lawmakers there. The threat puts a spotlight on tensions between Newsom and the president, whose administration now appears focused on his home turf.
During a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border this year, Newsom said state and local authorities would not interfere with “the federal right to advance federal laws with federal resources.” But the Democratic governor said the state would continue to abide by its own laws, including legislation passed in 2017 that shields some undocumented immigrants from potential deportation by forbidding local law enforcement agencies, including school police, from cooperating with federal immigration officials.
Though Los Angeles city and county officials generally do not assist with federal immigration operations — unless they involve the apprehension of a convicted criminal — Newsom said in his statement that L.A. authorities “are able to access law enforcement assistance at a moment’s notice.”
“We are in close coordination with the city and county, and there is currently no unmet need,” Newsom said. “The Guard has been admirably serving LA throughout recovery [from the recent fires]. This is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.”
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which handles law enforcement operations in Paramount, urged the public to “exercise the right to protest peacefully with respect for the safety of all community members.”
A few blocks from the Paramount Home Depot, which had become the locus of clashes between protesters and law enforcement earlier Saturday, a rowdy crowd of perhaps a hundred gathered near one police barricade as the sun set.
Police cars lined one side of an intersection, blocking a bridge across the 710 freeway. The crowd, many wearing masks, waving flags or recording the scene on cellphones, looked on as some people lit fireworks, drove motorcycles and spun cars around in circles. Down the street, the husk of a burned car smoldered. A wide no-man’s land separated the crowd and officers.
As the night wore on, the mood of the crowd at Alondra Boulevard and Lime Avenue grew more volatile. Protesters lit off a string of fireworks, the loud booms punctuating the drone of circling helicopters. Local police, clad in riot gear, advanced slowly from behind a barricade. At one point, the dumpster in a nearby strip mall was lit on fire. Soon after, authorities appeared to deploy pepper spray or tear gas, sending most of the crowd scrambling away from the intersection where they had been facing off for hours.
Vitaly and Bryan Nieves had raced toward the Paramount Home Depot on Saturday afternoon as soon as they saw news that immigration officers were gathering. The brothers, who live in nearby Bell Gardens, stayed for hours, protesting an immigration crackdown they call cruel and discriminatory.
“It’s nothing but hardworking people they’re taking,” said Bryan Nieves, 29, waving a large banner stitched from the flags of the United States and Mexico.
Vitaly Nieves, 31, said the raids feel especially brutal because they’ve targeted those on the job or looking for work at a time when it’s become increasingly difficult to make ends meet.
“The economy is already bad enough — people are out here struggling, doing side gigs just to survive every day,” he said. “At least target the people doing crimes. The majority of these people are working class, just trying to make a living, and it’s sad they have to live in fear.”
Late Saturday on the edge of downtown L.A., a large law enforcement presence remained where protesters had gathered earlier outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and an adjacent detention center run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Los Angeles police officers had ordered demonstrators to disperse shortly after 9 p.m. local time. At midnight, the LAPD said it had detained “multiple” people who breached the area where an “unlawful assembly” had been declared.
Five months into Trump’s second term, federal border authorities have sent National Guard soldiers with 20-ton Stryker combat vehicles to arrest and detain immigrants at the southern border, and the Defense Department has planned to take control of a 60-foot strip of land in the area. This spring, the Department of Homeland Security asked for 20,000 Guard troops to assist with immigration roundups across the country.
A Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a social media post Saturday night that the “National Guard has always answered the President’s call to keep the peace & restore order in our communities & that mission remains unchanged.”
Davies reported from Newark. Thebault reported from Los Angeles County.
