Mayor Accuses Trump of ‘Dangerous Escalation’

Scenes of Chaos as LA Protests Rage

Date: 09 June 2025 - 22:01

News ID: ۱۴۰۴۴۴

LOS ANGELES (Dispatches) -- Los Angeles woke 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 U.S. 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.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass slammed Trump’s deployment of national guard troops in the city as a “chaotic escalation”.
“What we’re seeing in our city is chaos provoked by the Trump Administration,” Bass said in a message to Los Angeles residents late Sunday. “Deploying federalized troops is a dangerous escalation.”
“When you raid Home Depots and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart, and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you cause fear and panic,” she added.
On Monday new rallies against U.S. 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 organization said in a statement.
The rally was 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’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 U.S. 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.
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”.
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.