Los Angeles was waking up on Monday to another day of high tensions with Donald Trump’s administration after a weekend of protests over immigration raids in the city, with the president controversially ordering in the national guard and the governor of California saying the state planned to sue in response.
Federal agents the day before clashed with demonstrators in Los Angeles as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” to disperse crowds of people who were mostly peacefully protesting against immigration raids across the city and Trump’s deployment of the California national guard against the will of Governor Gavin Newsom and the state’s other elected leaders.
On Monday new rallies against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detentions were planned for noon in downtown Los Angeles, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announcing an event “to demand justice for detained immigrants and an end to the ongoing human rights abuses by Ice”.
“We will not be intimidated. We will not be silenced,” the civil rights organisation said in a statement.
The rally is set to demand the immediate release of David Huerta, a union leader who it said “was unjustly arrested and is still being held by the government, and all unjustly detained individuals”.
But the political rhetoric over the protests has not cooled.
Trump, who congratulated the national guard troops for a “great job” even before they had arrived in the city, posted on his Truth Social platform on Monday that deploying them was a “great decision”, saying the city would have been “completely obliterated” otherwise.
Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, told Fox News early on Monday that Ice “took a lot of bad people off the street”.
“We arrested a sexual predator, we arrested gang members, we arrested somebody that had an armed robbery conviction,” Homan said, without providing specifics. “We made LA safer … but you’re not hearing any of this. All you’re hearing is rhetoric about Ice being racist, Ice being Nazis and terrorists – and Governor Newsom feeds that, just like [Democratic US House minority leader] Hakeem Jeffries says he’s going to unmask Ice agents.
“We’re not going to stop.”
Homan also told NBC News that more raids were coming. “I’m telling you what – we’re going to keep enforcing law every day in LA,” he said. “Every day in LA, we’re going to enforce immigration law. I don’t care if they like it or not.”
The tensions between elected state and local officials and the federal government showed signs of escalating further after Newsom said he planned to sue the federal government and dared Trump to arrest him.
In an interview on MSNBC, Newsom said the lawsuit would challenge Trump’s federalizing of the California national guard without the state’s consent.
“Donald Trump has created the conditions you see on your TV tonight,” Newsom told the outlet. “He’s exacerbated the conditions. He’s, you know, lit the proverbial match. He’s putting fuel on this fire, ever since he announced he was taking over the national guard – an illegal act, an immoral act, an unconstitutional act.”
Federal law, he said, “specifically notes they had to coordinate with the governor of the state.
“They never coordinated with the governor of the state.”
On Fox News, Newsom said Trump was “reckless and immoral, and he’s taken the illegal and unconstitutional act of federalizing the national guard and putting lives at risk”.
Newsom added that he was confident that California’s legal challenge would succeed.
On Sunday thousands of Angelenos had swamped the streets around city hall, the federal courthouse and a detention center where previously arrested protesters are being held. They also brought a freeway to a standstill.
Vocal and boisterous, the crowd for large parts of the day was mostly peaceful. But tensions flared several times. On Sunday afternoon, police used teargas to disperse groups of protesters gathered near the detention center. And in the evening, officers fired round after round of flash-bangs in an attempt to push the protesters back up the freeway off-ramps. Los Angeles police leaders said officers had been shot at with commercial grade fireworks, and had rocks thrown at them.
Trump’s decision to deploy national guard troops into Los Angeles, against the wishes of state and local officials, has sent shock waves through American politics. Newsom and other Democratic governors have sharply criticized the move, describing it as an “alarming abuse of power”.
The deployment marked a stunning escalation in a broad crackdown on immigrants following raids across the country. Trump’s federalization of the guard troops is the first time an American president has used such power since the 1992 LA riots – when widespread violence broke out in reaction to the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating the Black motorist Rodney King – and the first without the express request of the governor since 1965.
