The significance of the protests in Los Angeles and the Trump administration’s responses remains to be seen. Presumably the accelerated ICE raids will continue and people will continue to protest. Trump appears to think that “sending troops” will benefit him, either as a news diversion from his many failing policies or as a way of rallying his racist base, haters of “immigrants.” Presented below are a few observations and some useful/interesting news reports that may add some clarity to what is coming at us.
IN THE BEGINNING ….
From the outside, it appears that the “riots” were precipitated by a crisis of confidence in the ICE/anti-immigrant leadership. The number of immigrants being “detained” and deported was not that large. There was suddenly talk of “quotas.” Career stability and advancement for the leadership and management of ICE, Border Patrol, etc. was jeopardized. Just as General Westmoreland’s obsession with “body counts” in Vietnam altered the US military strategy to achieve satisfactory metrics of “success,” ICE changed it strategies for rounding up immigrants from retail – warrants and home raids – to wholesale – raids of workplaces where many migrants might be found. And so in LA, Home Depot or places where day laborers would congregate became targets. Warrants with names and addresses were out; swooping down on low-wage work places was in. Two good articles illustrate how this went down:
What really happened outside the Paramount Home Depot? The reality on the ground vs. the rhetoric
By Rachel Uranga and Ruben Vives , LA Times [June 8, 2025]
---- It began as another Saturday morning at the Home Depot in Paramount, a working class, predominantly Latino suburb south of downtown Los Angeles. Typically, the store that is nestled along the Los Angeles River bed would be filled with weekend warriors tackling home improvements, workers collecting supplies and immigrants in search of work. But that morning, border patrol agents were spotted across the street from the Home Depot, gathering around 9 a.m. Word quickly spread on social media. Passersby honked their horns. Soon, protesters arrived. Home Depot eventually closed. The clashes between authorities and protesters lasted for hours in both Paramount and nearby Compton, though it was far from widespread. The chaos covered the area directly around the Alondra Boulevard store, but it was enough to provide for dramatic TV video. And it was a major trigger for the Trump administration to send 2,000 National Guard troops to L.A. to deal with disturbances and assist in immigration actions. So exactly what happened in Paramount? Two Times reporters spent much of the day and night there Saturday. Here is what they saw. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “Immigration Protests Threaten to Boil Over in Los Angeles,” by E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker [June 9, 2025] [Link].
TRUMP INTERVENES
To my knowledge, there is no credible “inside” account of why Trump decided to take over the California National Guard or to send a contingent of Marines from nearby Fort Pendleton. Was this Trump’s idea? Was it initiated by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and long-time inflicter of cruelty against immigrants? Was this part of the planning for the Project 2025 playbook? Was a militarized intervention into a state government a plan sitting on the shelf waiting for an auspicious moment? Someday (soon?) we may know, but now we tentatively conclude that Trump saw an opportunity to put himself in the spotlight and took it. Here are some useful first takes:
(Video) L.A. Under Siege: Trump Sends in National Guard as Protests Continue over Militarized ICE Raids
From Democracy Now! [June 9, 2025]
---- In Los Angeles, mass street protests have broken out in response to immigration raids. Local police and Border Patrol are cracking down on protesters, while the Trump administration has called in the California National Guard. “They shot thousands of rounds of tear gas, flashbang grenades, all kinds of repressive instruments,” says Ron Gochez, community organizer with Unión del Barrio who helped organize some of the protests. He notes many of the protests have also been successful at turning back immigration agents, preventing ICE arrests and detention. “If we organize ourselves, if we resist, we can defend our communities from ICE terror, from the Border Patrol or from any federal agency that wishes to separate our families.” [See the Program]
(Video) Chaos & Cruelty: Trump Deploys Thousands of Soldiers to Put Down Anti-ICE Protests in Los Angeles
From Democracy Now! [June 10, 2025]
---- President Trump has inflamed tensions over immigration raids in Los Angeles, which his top adviser Stephen Miller described as an insurrection. “They want protesters to react violently to distract from what is really happening, which is that families are being separated, our communities are being devastated, and the people of Los Angeles are standing up to say, 'We will not stand for this,'” says Jean Guerrero, New York Times contributing opinion writer and author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Meanwhile, she notes Trump’s budget bill would fund a massive expansion of federal immigration enforcement and turn it into a threat to the civil rights of everyone. [See the Program]
THE LEGAL PROBLEMS
Much of the mainstream media reporting focuses on the legal issues involved in Trump’s actions of “federalizing” California’s National Guard and deploying US military forces to a US city. Both have separate issues regarding legality, and both depend in part on factual issues regarding what was/is going on in Los Angeles. California authorities maintain that the anti-ICE protests were relatively isolated and were adequately controlled by California police forces; no outside help was necessary. And the deployment of the Marines requires, if done legally, a set of conditions that did not exist – for example, an “invasion.” Again, it would be nice to know if Trump’s intervention was simply grandstanding, or if a defacto realignment of the relations of state’s rights and federal power was the primary motivation of the operation. Below are a few essays that address the legal issues:
(Video) “Absolutely Unprecedented”: Trump Deploys National Guard to L.A. & Hegseth Threatens to Send in Marines
From Democracy Now! [June 9, 2025]
---- As protests against ICE raids spread across the city, President Trump has deployed the California National Guard to Los Angeles, the first time in decades that a president has deployed the National Guard without a governor’s request. Trump’s border “czar” Tom Homan threatened to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, while Newsom says he plans to sue. “This is absolutely unprecedented. It’s extremely dangerous,” says legal expert Elizabeth Goitein. “It’s going to escalate tensions rather than deescalating them.” [See the Program]
(Video) California AG Bonta Sues Trump for Deploying Troops, Warns President Is Trying to Provoke Violence
From Democracy Now! [June 10, 2025]
---- The Trump administration is sending 700 marines and an additional 2,000 members of the National Guard into Los Angeles following four days of protests against militarized immigration raids. Rob Bonta, attorney general of California, sued to block the use of National Guard troops on Monday. “Unfortunately, I think [Trump] wants conflict,” said Bonta. “He wants something to erupt so that that provides the basis for him to try to grasp and seize additional power.” Bonta’s office is pursuing more than two dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration. [See the Program]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “What the Hell Is Posse Comitatus Anyway?” by Elie Mystal, The Nation [June 11, 2025] [Link]; and “A Brief History of U.S. Military Interventions Within the United States,” by Zoltan Grossman, Znet [June 11, 2025] [Link].
PERSPECTIVES
There are too many variables to predict where this is going. As Rumsfeld would say, we have known knowns and known unknowns. As Jonah Raskin suggests below, this could be the beginning, the catalyst, for a more organized nationwide movement against Trump and fascism, joining as it will with the No Kings! Demonstration Saturday. Or this could be the next be step in the consolidation of a police state, with martial law and all the trimmings, as Robert Reich warns us below. We should know more in a few days.
L.A. is Burning
By Jonah Raskin, Counterpunch [June 11, 2025]
---- Isn’t this what many of us have been waiting for? It is indeed. Coordinated protests against Trump, ICE, and the war that has targeted immigrants who have kept the economy going and kept themselves alive in the belly of the beast. L.A. was on fire and burning earlier this year. Neighborhoods were destroyed. It’s on fire and burning again. And so are cities around the country, from San Francisco to New York and from Chicago to Atlanta. America is burning. The United States is on fire. Wherever there are undocumented workers and wherever there are citizens opposed to tyranny and the assault on civil rights and civil liberties, there has been civil unrest. [Read More]
The Los Angeles Protests Are an Act of Self-Defense
By Melissa Gira Grant, The New Republic [June 10,2025]
---- Residents of L.A. aren’t merely protesting ICE; they’re attempting to protect their communities from ICE’s raids. It is very difficult to believe that Los Angeles’s political leadership—or California’s governor or other state officials—truly wish to stop ICE raids when they are willing to arrest the only people who are actually standing in ICE’s way. The politicians want to define protest as merely voicing a demand without disrupting anything; they don’t want to recognize the value of putting one’s body between the state and the scapegoated. There is apparently no “peaceful” way to do that in Los Angeles. And for those of us elsewhere, who would like these raids on immigrants to end, who want to end Trump’s abuse of power—we will fail if we defer to such “leadership” and line drawing. What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is not only a protest; it is self-defense. [Read More]
Trump’s Police State: It endangers all of us
By Robert Reich [June 9, 2025]
---- Now that Trump’s tariffs have been halted, his One Big Beautiful Bill has been stymied, and his multibillionaire tech bro has turned on him, how does he demonstrate his power? On Friday morning, federal agents from ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted raids across Los Angeles, including at two Home Depots, a doughnut shop, and a clothing wholesaler, in search of workers they suspected of being undocumented immigrants. They arrested 121 people. … History shows that once an authoritarian ruler establishes the infrastructure of a police state, that same infrastructure can be turned on anyone. Trump is rapidly creating such an infrastructure…. We are not at martial law yet, thankfully. But once in place, the infrastructure of a police state can build on itself. Those who are given authority over aspects of it — the internal militia, dragnets, detention camps, and martial law — seek other opportunities to invoke their authority. [Read More]
I’m the daughter of immigrants. The LA I know isn’t in the news.
By Gabriela Fernandez, VOX [June 10, 2025]
---- The LA I know, the city I grew up in and care deeply about, hasn’t been “invaded” and isn’t a “lawless” place that requires federal force. While so much media focuses on protests, further legitimizing Trump’s war zone narrative, an important story is being overlooked: immigrants, like many detained outside of their workplaces, and like my mom, have quietly built this city. … here is no LA without Latinos. The city was originally a part of Mexico, and Latino influence remains a cornerstone of its identity. Its namesake, neighborhoods, and street names (Los Feliz, San Pedro, La Cienega, La Brea, and more) reflect its Spanish-speaking origins. Olvera Street, the colorful marketplace, and Union Station, a transit hub that combines modern and Latin architectural styles, are only two examples of culturally significant landmarks. Latinos comprise almost half of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ fan base and have endearingly called the team “Los Doyers” for decades. The late baseball star Fernando Valenzuela was a pitching pioneer in Major League Baseball. The city, known as a major culinary destination, boasts all kinds of regional Mexican and Central American cuisines. You can find Oaxacan tlayudas, Sinaloan aguachiles, Salvadoran pupusas, and Guatemalan tamales all within a 30-minute radius. … Contrary to what some might suggest, headlines, the backlash on LA’s streets and displays of support online are unsurprising. There’s a long history of social justice activism here: demands for educational equity in the East Los Angeles walkouts in 1968, solidarity with farmworker strikes demanding better labor conditions in the ’70s, the 1992 Rodney King uprising against police brutality, and protests in 2020 following George Floyd’s murder. What’s being demonstrated now is a city united with people who aren’t invaders or occupants, but who are LA. [Read More]
FURTHER READING?
Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence
By Rebecca Solnit [June 9, 2025]
---- I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air. It's begun in Los Angeles, the city of angels, a city of almost four million people, almost half of them Latino, in a region of almost twelve million that two thousand California National Guards cannot and will not subjugate. All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they're violating their mission and maybe the law. In the nonwhite-majority state of California, which recently advanced to become the fourth largest economy in the world.
[Read More]
Freedom of Movement and Global Apartheid: The United States and Israel
By Aviva Chomsky, Informed Comment [June 11, 2025]
---- In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot. Some of history’s worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people’s movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement. … Perhaps we could better define modernity as the European drive to control mobility, forcing others to accept their intrusions while denying free mobility to the rest of the world. The United States and Israel offer a spectrum of examples of how the right to deport, the right to transport, the right to enclose, and the right to exclude tend to complement one another on this strange planet of ours. Both countries claim to be liberal democracies and celebrate their commitment to equal rights, while reserving those rights for some and excluding others. [Read More]
And also of interest
One of the most useful places to learn about the US-Mexico border region is The Border Chronicle, led by Todd Miller, whose writing has often been linked in the CFOW Newsletter. The “Weekly Roundup” for June 6th has Todd describing his work re: “the migrant trail,” the path taken by people crossing the border in Arizona and heading to Tucson [Link]. A recent post included in the CFOW newsletter was “Upside-Down World: Climate Change and the Border-Industrial Complex in the Trump Era. For those not living in/from the Southwest, the Border Chronicle is an excellent introduction to this complex space.
Especially useful for the US-Mexico border region, is the Washington Office on Latin America. (WOLA). WOLA has a weekly feature called "the Border Update" about the United States and Mexico. A recent article relevant to Trump’s deportation regime is “$160 Billion to Detain and Deport: Congress’s “Reconciliation” Bill is a Betrayal of Priorities and Will Harm the Most Vulnerable.” [Link].
Another place for enlightenment and self-education is NACLA (The North American Congress on Latin America), which publishes a monthly journal in English and Spanish. Scholarly but reader-friendly. A recent article, for example, is “The Modern Surveillance State: Mexico and the CIA during the Cold War” [Link].
A NOTE ON GAZA AND THE UN – THIS WEEK!
As Noam Chomsky often observed, if something occurs at the United Nations that does not please the United States, it is a non-event, failing to “make the news” and consigned to Winston Smith’s memory hold. For eample, perhaps tomorrow - On June 4th the United States vetoed a Resolution in the UN Security Council calling for an “immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” in Gaza. 14 member states voted in favor of the Resolution. Only the USA voted no. According to The Guardian [UK], “the vetoed resolution also called the situation in Gaza “catastrophic”, and demanded the “immediate and unconditional lifting of all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and its safe and unhindered distribution at scale, including by the UN and humanitarian partners”. This was the fifth UN Security Council Resolution addressing Israel’s war on Gaza that the USA has vetoed. As is now common procedure, when a member state of the Security Council vetoes a Resolution, the General Assembly, representing all 193 UN member states, can initiate their own Resolution and call on the Security Council state (in this case the USA) to explain and defend their use of the veto. (The report below is from Pass Blue, “an award-winning, independent, women-led nonprofit news company that closely covers the US-UN relationship, women’s issues, human rights, peacekeeping and other urgent global matters playing out in the world body.” h/t MB)
UN General Assembly to Vote on ‘Accountability’ by Israel in Gaza
By Damilola Banjo, Pass Blue [June 25, 2025]
---- The United Nations General Assembly will vote soon on a draft resolution that calls on countries to take steps to force Israel to comply with international law and the UN Charter in its war on Hamas. The text also calls for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave, alongside other sweeping demands in the multipage document.
The draft seen by PassBlue might change as negotiations continue until the scheduled vote on Thursday, but it currently stresses Israel’s obligations under international law to, among other aspects, ensure the immediate and “unhindered” delivery of humanitarian aid, including food and medical supplies, “to all Palestinian civilians as well as fuel, equipment, shelter and access to clean water. . . in coordination with the United Nations.”
The document, sponsored by Spain, is a far more comprehensive version of the failed draft resolution that the United States vetoed in the Security Council on June 4.
For the first time since the Israeli military operation started in Gaza after Oct. 7, 2023, this new draft text of the General Assembly includes strong language about Israel’s role as the occupying power in Gaza. It stresses, for example, “the need for accountability in order to ensure Israel’s respect of international law obligations.”
Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group think tank in New York City, said the renewed push by Security Council members to pressure the US through the June 4 vote on the Gaza draft resolution signals that countries no longer fear possible retaliation by President Donald Trump if they take formal action related to the Palestinian enclave.
“In the last few weeks, we saw the mood shift, we saw the spell break,” Gowan said during a press briefing on June 10, adding that the General Assembly vote on Thursday is expected to garner support from most of the 193 member states. A “no” vote each by the US and Israel is a given.
If adopted, the nonbinding resolution will mark one of the most powerful collective statements by the Assembly since the hostilities between Israel and Hamas started 20 months ago. The draft references the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures from January, March and May 2024 warning of a “real and imminent risk” of genocide in Gaza.
That’s all from me, for now.
Frank Brodhead
For Concerned Families of Westchester
