On Friday, June 6, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided Ambiance Apparel, a clothing manufacturing factory in the downtown Los Angeles Fashion District, where they arrested more than forty immigrant workers. The workers, more than a dozen of whom were part of the close-knit Zapotec Indigenous community from Oaxaca, Mexico, were detained without access to counsel or ability to contact their families.
Ambiance Apparel was one of four L.A. businesses raided by ICE that day. As scattered reports highlighted a raid at Home Depot in Westlake and the violent arrest of David Huerta, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, outrage rippled across the city. What began as ICE raids in unmarked vehicles has escalated into a militarized standoff between locals and the federal government (including U.S. military personnel), turning the city into a frontline in a broader struggle against authoritarian power. Since June 6, the streets of downtown Los Angeles have erupted with protests calling for ICE’s departure and justice for those detained.
“MAGA aggression has brought a plague of fear and silence into the streets of the city we love,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), in a press statement shared with The Progressive.
The events unfolding reflect a deeper national inflection point in the Trump Administration’s assault on free assembly and expression rights in the face of a democratic crisis—and Angelenos’ refusal to be policed into obedience. The days behind the media headlines are more than sensationalized resistance; they are the lived realities of many Americans facing a system that seeks to dismiss them. One in every five L.A. residents is undocumented or lives with an undocumented family member, and nearly half of the city’s population identifies as Hispanic or Latino. Last November, after Donald Trump won the presidential election and promised federal immigration crackdowns, the L.A. City Council unanimously passed the Sanctuary City Ordinance, prohibiting local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. But across sanctuary cities nationwide, ICE continues to carry out the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant campaign agenda, using intimidation, force, and surveillance to harness fear into control.
“As someone who has had the honor to support and organize alongside low-wage immigrant workers for over twenty years, workers that I get to stand alongside are moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, aunts, uncles, supporting their families,” says Marissa Nuncio, executive director of the Garment Workers Center, a worker rights organization for workers in the garment industry.
These are just everyday folks that are being picked up, rounded up by masked, armed individuals.
On the morning of Saturday, June 7, the streets of Paramount, a city in the southern part of the Greater Los Angeles area, began to make national headlines as a standoff between residents and ICE agents escalated. Social media reports showed ICE officers near a Home Depot where many immigrant day laborers gather outside the store in search of people in need of per diem labor. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson later confirmed in a public statement that no formal ICE raids were planned on Saturday, but agents were instead nearby, gathering in front of DHS offices. Videos showed agents offloading boxes of ammunition and less-lethal weaponry from a military grade helicopter. The agency’s federal office, which has been in the city since 2007, has been used in the past as a gathering place for agents before dispersing to L.A.and Long Beach ports.
Paramount is known for its working-class and Latino population. Census data highlights that 82 percent of its residents are Latino, and 36 percent are foreign-born. The heavy presence of ICE agents within the city, which Paramount Vice Mayor Brenda Olmos called an “unwarranted federal intrusion,” led to protests quickly spreading over social media, with demonstrators waving Mexican flags and signs, blocking government vehicles from driving through the street, throwing projectiles, and officers deploying explosive, non-lethal rounds.
“The presence of ICE agents in Paramount was more than disruptive; it was an assault on our community’s fundamental values,” said Olmos, who was exposed to tear gas and injured by a non-lethal projectile at a protest, in a statement published on Sunday, June 8.
Hours later, Paramount’s protests spread across the Los Angeles area to Compton and downtown, prompting Trump to take federal control of the National Guard and deploy more than 2,000 troops without the support of California Governor Gavin Newsom, calling the protests a “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” In directing the National Guard troops without Newsom’s consent, Trump broke the typical chain of command protocol, by which requests to deploy the National Guard are normally made from the local level and authorized by the governor.
“This brazen abuse of power by a sitting President inflamed a combustible situation,” said Newsom in a June 10 public address,
putting our people, our officers, and the National Guard at risk.
Nearly 300 National Guard troops arrived at the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown and stood in formation at three different sites: the detention center, the federal building, and the Department of Veterans Affairs clinic by mid-morning on June 8. In downtown Los Angeles, hundreds of demonstrators clashed with federal officers and local police near the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary space, where Barbara Kruger’s mural Untitled (Questions)—a building-length installation emblazoned with questions such as “Who is beyond the law?” and “Who is free to choose?”—could be seen in the background.
Echoing the provocative questions posed by Kruger’s mural, Trump escalated his use of military deployment into the realm of spectacle, in a move that Larry Diamond, a senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, describes as being designed to maximize intimidation.
“Spectacle both feeds his narcissism and his love of power,” says Diamond.
Spectacle autocrats like [it] because it’s a visible demonstration of their power and part of a broader effort to intimidate dissent.
On Monday, June 9, roughly 700 U.S. Marines were activated to Los Angeles. As of Wednesday, June 11, the city had more troops on the ground than are currently deployed in Iraq and Syria combined—raising alarm about Trump’s use of military power to suppress dissent.
“I think it’s been obvious from the beginning what Trump is seeking,” Diamond says.
He’s itching to use the military to suppress demonstrations in the United States and to intimidate and suppress dissent, but he can’t do it if the protests are peaceful.
Safeguards to reign in Trump’s power grab have largely failed: A lack of strong Congressional oversight of his actions, limited Supreme Court intervention on his policies, and Trump’s own personal defiance of accountability measures have all contributed to a political landscape in which his overreach has gone mostly unchecked.
As news cameras focused over the weekend on the scale of demonstrations and property destruction, such as the fires being set to self-driving Waymo cars, immigration-related arrests continued region-wide. Amongst the chaos, a subtle victory emerged: The city of Glendale, directly north of Los Angeles, terminated its eighteen-year-old contract with ICE, which allowed the agency to use the city’s jails for arrests and detentions.
By June 9, thousands of protesters were gathered in downtown Los Angeles as immigration raids continued to intensify. According to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, six car washes were targeted by immigration raids across L.A. and Orange counties since June 6, leading to the detainment of twenty-two workers. The families of those detained during the workplace raid still do not know where their loved ones are.
Amid immigration sweeps and military presence, local civil rights organizers, interfaith leaders, and several hundred community members gathered at Gloria Molina Grand Park in front of City Hall for a solidarity vigil. Nestor Pimienta, a vigil attendee, says the gathering was surrounded by a heavy military presence.
“Walking with my candle while seeing the endless line of military vehicles coming down the street felt courageous,” Pimienta says.
I had a feeling [of] awe watching this interfaith group of people continue forward, with candles lit, being vulnerable, knowing whatever risk we take is nothing compared to the people being uprooted, expelled, and displaced.
Now, as the streets grow quiet at night due to a local curfew imposed by L.A. Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday, June 10, cities across the country continue to resist in solidarity with immigrants and against the federal display of militarization on U.S. soil.
From the streets near City Hall to the intersections of South Los Angeles, the presence of federal vehicles and armed personnel has become a striking departure from typical daily life in the city. What began as a fight against ICE has now become a broader fight against Trump’s unchecked executive overreach. Since the unrest, Newsom has sued Trump and the Department of Defense over the federalization of troops, calling the President’s actions “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.”
As the helicopters hover over Alameda and armored vehicles drive by Grand Street, those in and outside of Los Angeles are forced to confront a haunting, harrowing question: When federal power arrives at your doorstep uninvited, to silence your voice and detain your neighbors, is it governance or authoritarianism?
“This extreme vision of executive power is not yet entrenched,” Scheppele says,
which is why it is crucial for people from across the left-right political spectrum to fight together, now that we’re in a democracy-autocracy political battle.