Eric Thayer/AP Photo
California National Guard troops confront a protester on Sunday, June 8, in downtown Los Angeles.
Let’s be clear about who, exactly, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been arresting in and around Los Angeles. On Friday, they raided downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where seamstresses and retail clerks, some of them undocumented immigrants, are clustered. On Saturday, they made arrests outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a working-class L.A. suburb where day laborers, some of them undocumented immigrants, assemble daily to get work on small-scale construction projects.
The microscopically thin pretext behind the Trump administration’s deportation policies is that they’re targeting criminals and gang members. The problem is, groups of seamstresses and construction workers are not commonly construed as gangs. That’s why, despite having made hundreds of arrests, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security can only claim, without evidence, that five detainees are gang members. For now, what they have is a whole mess of seamstresses and odd-job construction workers in their lockups.
When ICE agents swarmed the downtown fashion district on Friday, there was no discernible protest. The same was true at a West L.A. Home Depot that received three ICE trucks on Saturday, something that has gotten no attention locally or nationally, but which my colleague David Dayen learned about from talking to laborers there. (The laborers scattered and the trucks left without incident.) But when ICE swarmed the Home Depot in Paramount on Saturday, there was a backlash.
Paramount is one of the almost entirely Latino small cities abutting the Long Beach Freeway, which connects the port to East Los Angeles. A number of those cities consist almost wholly of immigrants, some naturalized, some documented, some not. Politically, these cities tend to elect moderate Democrats to the legislature and small-business owners to their local governments. As someone who chaired the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America during the last decades of the previous century, I can attest that we had few if any members from the Long Beach Freeway towns, and I suspect that those towns still don’t harbor a significant number of radicals.
At least during the first hours of Saturday’s protest, I think it’s highly likely that most of the protesters were simply residents who didn’t want to see their family members, friends, and neighbors seized and deported. The Los Angeles Times reported that passing motorists honked in support of the protests. To them, the guys who’d regularly turned out for day-labor work represented a significant share of their community. (On Sunday, the ranks of protesters swelled around L.A.’s Civic Center to include clergy, elected officials, and union activists. Thousands spilled along downtown streets and onto the 101 Freeway by Sunday afternoon.)
If you listen to Trump and his governmental and media minions, you’d think these protesters were rioters. Trump actually said they were rioters who were looting. Neither ICE nor any of the police agencies on the spot have reported a single instance of looting, however, and if this was a riot, it sure didn’t look like one. I led the coverage and did extensive on-the-ground reporting, for both L.A. Weekly and The New Republic, of the huge 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Those riots continued for days, with or without the police. This, by contrast, is purely a protest of the presence of federal agents.
At Gov. Pete Wilson’s request, the National Guard was activated in 1992 to patrol riot-torn areas. But this time around, where will the National Guard—called in not by the governor but by the president—be activated to patrol? The resistance that’s being mounted only comes into existence when and where ICE pops up to make its catchall sweeps, in communities that will turn out to protest due to their relationships with those arrested. In other words, unlike virtually any previous riot, either real or imagined, in American history, the feds can turn them on and off at will, simply through their actions.
Neither ICE nor any of the police agencies on the spot have reported a single instance of looting, and if this was a riot, it sure didn’t look like one.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP and his grand inquisitor, Stephen Miller, have worked assiduously to engineer. Their politics—in Miller’s case, his raison d’être—is based on demonizing the other. In this case, the object of Miller’s demonization are those immigrants he presumes to be unpopular, and, he hopes, the Democrats who defend them, or at least defend their right to a day in court. Trump and company have long argued that they’re responding to an invasion of some sort. To that end, they’ve highlighted the actual convicted felons or gang members they’re rounding up. When the invaders turn out to be seamstresses and roofers, they’ve felt an even greater need to fabricate an emergency. Deploying the National Guard helps to give the appearance of an emergency, perhaps sufficient to eclipse the absence of an actual emergency against which the Guard is supposed to defend.
In Los Angeles and California, they’ve certainly targeted terrains where there’s sure to be a backlash, including among the Democratic pols they so wish to demonize. Latino immigrants, both documented and not, have become an integral part of the L.A. economy and community over the past nearly 40 years; in some ways, the center, the established order. That’s why both the LAPD and Los Angeles County sheriffs have made clear they will do nothing to help the feds make immigration arrests. On Saturday, the LAPD released a statement that began, “Today, demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful, and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly.” The cops would never have made that statement if they’d believed it ran afoul of L.A. public opinion. (Protesters are another matter, and the situation on the 101 Freeway is likely to result in substantial arrests.)
The LAPD’s Special Order 40, which forbids L.A. cops from cooperating with ICE and its ilk, was promulgated in 1979, for the simple reason that if contacting the cops brought with it the prospect of deportation, a lot of immigrants in need of assistance wouldn’t reach out, and a lot of crimes would go unreported. The LAPD chief under whom that order was promulgated, by the way, was the famously right-wing Daryl Gates, who led a brutal and racist department, but who nonetheless realized that crime suppression required no cooperation with the forces of deportation.
So it would require federal cops, as Trump and Miller understood, to provoke the confrontations from which they hoped to politically profit. If the predictable community backlash were to take the form of nonviolent civil disobedience as practiced by Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, that would present them with a higher hurdle to credibly cry “riot!” That level of discipline in protest, of course, is hard to observe if it’s the protesters’ brothers and fathers who are being hauled away.
Even as demonstrators have assembled around the building where those seized for deportation are incarcerated, and their anger has reached the level of the occasional thrown rock, the protest is confined largely to that one area, and that one xenophobic, authoritarian policy. If these “paid troublemakers,” as Trump characterized them on social media, are to be quelled, it shouldn’t require thousands of National Guard troops—much less the Marines, whose deployment Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has considered—to police the roughly two-block area where they’re protesting.
Even when the resistance has come straight out of the King-Rustin playbook, that hasn’t deterred Trump’s cops from accusing the resisters of violence. At Paramount, ICE made 44 arrests of people they accused of being in the U.S. illegally, and one arrest of a citizen for allegedly forcefully obstructing them. In fact, that arrestee stood in front of one of their vehicles as it sought to move forward.
A day earlier in downtown L.A., a man was pushed to the ground by an ICE agent, hitting his head on the concrete pavement and requiring hospitalization. He turned out to be David Huerta, a veteran of SEIU’s storied janitorial locals who has since become the president of SEIU’s California State Council, which represents 750,000 California workers. They decided to arrest Huerta, either because they sought to transfer blame to the one protester whom they had actually injured, or because it’s Trump policy to arrest prominent Democrats (union leaders are close enough) in an attempt to associate them with the forces of disorder. Or both.
Eric Thayer/AP Photo
A man is detained after federal immigration operations in Paramount, California, on June 7, 2025.
WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. In the decade preceding the Civil War, the residents of Northern states resisted the efforts of the federal government to compel them to help Southern slave owners capture former slaves who’d escaped to the North. In 1850, the Southern-dominated Congress and a pro-Southern President Millard Fillmore enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring not just Northern police officials but all Northern citizens to aid in the seizure of Blacks who’d successfully escaped chattel slavery.
The North actively resisted these efforts. Boston abolitionists formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League, which hid escaped slaves and sought to impede the slave-hunters and the federal troops whom Fillmore deployed to help them out. But the resistance wasn’t confined to the abolitionist minority. According to historian H. Robert Baker, there were whole neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston that became “no-go zones for slave catchers,” so great was the level of local resistance. As I wrote in these pages seven years ago, “Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted ‘personal liberty laws’ forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.”
In the 1850s, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution's Tenth Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. What Trump and his troopers are engaged in now is the same kind of violent enforcement at complete variance with the local, state, and regional sentiment. The Tenth Amendment, however, doesn’t reserve immigration issues to the states; they clearly fall under the purview of the federal government, as does the president’s right to declare an emergency enabling him to employ troops domestically—a consummation for which Trump and Miller have long devoutly wished. If California Gov. Gavin Newsom is to take them to court, I suspect it will have to be on the grounds that there’s no emergency, or at least no emergency that Trump and his minions aren’t fomenting themselves.
Whether that argument will prevail in the courts is far from certain; my hope is that it prevails in the court of public opinion.
