Caylo Seals/Sipa USA via AP Photo
National Guard troops stand behind Los Angeles Police Department lines as they clear protesters from the street outside the Los Angeles Federal building in downtown L.A. on June 9, 2025.
“He who defends everything defends nothing,” said Frederick the Great, the 18th-century Prussian monarch and military sage. Even when you have a long border to defend against your enemies, you still must concentrate your forces in sufficient numbers to effectively repel them.
Donald the Tin Pot claims he has the immense city of Los Angeles to which he must deploy troops, while, in fact, the protests are confined to eight or ten city blocks in a county stretching 4,058 square miles. Against this Potemkin village of a riot, he is ordering in the National Guard and the Marines, whose presence at the Roybal Federal Building (where they have not left and where they are themselves guarded by the LAPD) is the proximate cause of demonstrations there. Supply-side and demand-side meet: sending in the troops creates counter-protests that require sending in the troops, who do nothing but stand behind the other troops who are standing behind police.
The protests in my old hometown fall into three categories. There are the spontaneous neighborhood mobilizations when residents in immigrant-heavy communities like Paramount or Whittier or Santa Ana learn that their friends and family members are being seized by the immigration cops while working in restaurant kitchens or waiting for construction gigs outside Home Depots. Whole fleets of passing motorists honk indignantly—that’s what happened on Saturday outside the Paramount Home Depot—and some rush to the site to see if there’s anything they can do to keep their community from being ripped apart.
Then there are the mass peaceful demonstrations of clergy, union members, activists, and sympathetic pols that have convened around L.A. City Hall. And third, there are a tiny handful of smash-it-all young people. The smashing has been confined to a few blocks, and usually to just what’s in the streets or on the sidewalks. Last night, it subsided chiefly into graffiti spraying and setting off fireworks. Not the sort of thing that usually requires the Marines. The only people firing munitions in Los Angeles are the cops (though of the “less-lethal” variety, the new euphemism for rubber bullets).
To be sure, the hostility between all these types of demonstrators and the troops sent to provoke them, and only secondarily to repel them, is both real and justifiable. Armed agents of the state being armed agents of the state, the troops and the cops don’t always distinguish among these different groups of protestors, and often don’t want to distinguish among them. Even when resistance is real, the threat it poses is in the eye of the beholder—in this instance, those armed agents of the state.
But the focus on downtown misses the big picture. The story that best expresses what’s really going on in Los Angeles right now came from the Los Angeles Times’s longtime education writer, Howard Blume. This week, Blume reported, is graduation week in the L.A. Unified School District, in which roughly 557,000 students (73 percent of them Latino) attend the more than 1,300 schools. Here’s the opening sentence of Blume’s story:
“Los Angeles school police will set up a safety perimeter around campuses and school events—including graduations—to keep federal immigration agents away from students, employees and families, school officials said Monday.”
The schools have reason for this concern. In April, ICE agents turned up at two L.A. grade schools, seeking “interviews” with some students, the oldest of whom was in sixth grade, the youngest in first grade. They were denied entry by the school principals. ICE doubtless views this week’s graduation ceremonies as a target-rich environment.
This is the signature initiative of Donald Trump’s presidency and Stephen Miller’s sociopathic sadism: Striking fear into high school, middle school, and elementary school graduates and their parents and siblings. And if the Marines aren’t up to the task, Trump could always send in some tanks.
