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    How the 2020 George Floyd Protests Are Haunting Democrats in 2025

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    No longer demanding cuts to police budgets or straining to show solidarity with protesters, Democrats are taking a far more cautious approach.Five years ago, as grief and anger over George Floyd’s murder ignited national protests, top Democrats joined the demonstrations, called for cutting police budgets and, in a ham-fisted effort at solidarity, even knelt in kente cloth at the Capitol.Now, as President Trump spoils for a fight by sending unwanted troops to Los Angeles to stamp out protests and help with immigration raids, Democrats scarred by recent elections have a starkly different message for demonstrators:Don’t play into his hands.Five years after the 2020 racial justice movement prompted a wave of cultural changes and then an enduring political backlash, many Democrats are signaling that they now recognize how skillful Republicans can be in using scenes of unrest — whether limited or widespread, accurate or not — to cast liberal lawmakers as tolerant of lawlessness.Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lead fellow Democrats in moment of silence for George Floyd in 2020.Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times“Many of the 2020 protests played out in ways that Democrats did not see and they did not foresee,” said former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid that year. At the time, he said, some did not grasp that “once you got to a certain critical mass of protesters, that some bad things were going to happen.”“I think they do now,” said Mr. Jones, who stressed that Mr. Trump was needlessly escalating tensions. “I also think that they appreciate the fact that any violence is one, is uncalled-for, it needs to be prosecuted. But it’s also playing into the narrative of Donald Trump.”So far, the demonstrations now — relatively small, scattered and generally peaceful — bear little resemblance to the mass protests of 2020, which in some cases devolved into destructive riots.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why did Angelenos swiftly resist Ice raids? Look to LA’s deep immigrant roots

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      Nerves are frayed in Los Angeles, as the second largest city in the US is flooded with more than 2,000 federal troops tasked with protecting immigration enforcement officials after thousands of people hit the streets to protest against deportation raids.That this weekend’s immigration enforcement actions sparked a fierce response in LA will not come as a surprise to many Californians. LA’s immigrant roots, and its deep ties to neighboring Mexico, are central to the region’s identity.Long before it was part of the US, LA was Indigenous Tongva and Chumash land. It later came under Spanish and then Mexican rule. The name “California” itself comes from a Spanish novel, Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), and appeared on maps as early as 1541. But it wasn’t until 2 August 1769, that the Spaniard Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest accompanying the first European land expedition through California, described in his journal a “beautiful river from the north-west”. He named the river, which would later become the LA River, Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de la Porciúncula (Our Lady of the Angels of the Porciuncula). Twelve years later, in 1781, the settlement would emerge with the shortened and anglicized name of Los Angeles.After Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821, Los Angeles – indeed the whole region– remained Mexican territory until it was ceded to the US in 1848 after the Mexican-American war. California became the 31st state in 1850, entering the Union as a free state.Today, one in three people of LA county’s more than 10 million residents are immigrants, and 1.6 million children in the region have at least one immigrant parent. They come from countries around the world. It’s common for Angelenos to have been born in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, China and Hong Kong – but also Russia, France, the UK and elsewhere.Their experiences are diverse, shaped by race, class, legal status, education, languages spoken and more. And they fill vital roles in the region’s economy. Immigrant workers make up 40% of the LA metro area’s workforce.View image in fullscreen“In Los Angeles – more than anywhere – the relationship between immigrant and non-immigrant is interdependent,” says LA city councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, the son of Mexican immigrants and street vendors.Soto-Martínez represents council district 13, which includes some of LA’s most diverse neighborhoods: Echo Park, Silver Lake, Koreatown, Thai Town, Historic Filipinotown and Little Armenia.“Angelenos know that it doesn’t matter where you are – if you’re eating at a restaurant, chances are your food is cooked by an immigrant,” Soto-Martínez said. “If you’re having work done on your house, it’s often an immigrant. Many nannies are immigrants. And if you go to the hospital, chances are you’re being treated by an immigrant.”View image in fullscreenLA has long celebrated its immigrant culture, and in recent years city leaders have worked to protect its immigrant population from the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. In 2023, ahead of a possible second Donald Trump term, LA declared itself a sanctuary city, barring local personnel and resources from being used in federal immigration enforcement. California, too, has passed a string of laws to protect immigrant workers – regardless of legal status – from retaliation, wage theft and other forms of exploitation.“We are a city of immigrants, and we have always embraced that,” Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, said in a press conference on Monday.With immigrants such a strong part of its culture, Friday’s arrest of 118 immigrants, and claims from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that many of them were criminals, has galled the community. The DHS’s website featured photos of 11 people arrested in the raids, with a headline that read: “ICE Captures Worst of the Worst Illegal Alien Criminals in Los Angeles Including Murderers, Sex Offenders, and Other Violent Criminals.”Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesperson for the non-profit Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (Chirla), says his organization has been in direct contact with many of the families of those arrested and has deployed legal counsel in multiple cases. So far, he says: “We’ve found no credible evidence to back homeland security’s claims. These were not targeted arrests. They weren’t based on judicial warrants. And the lie won’t survive for long.”The raids at workplaces – pushed by Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff – come amid a broader push by the administration to hasten arrests and increase deportations. Homan warned LA is likely to see more enforcement this month. And he’s also admitted that the agency has arrested people with no criminal records.Cabrera says given the situation, Angelenos are reacting with justified anger, hurt and civic determination. People in LA with power will stand up for their immigrant friends and family members, he argued.“Angelenos are good about ensuring their voices are heard,” he says. Still, he urges peaceful protest only. “If we give the government reasons to repress us, they will use their maximum power to do so.”Advocates and city leaders also warn that people everywhere should be chilled by what’s happening in the City of Angels.“I think we’re an experiment,” said Mayor Bass. “Because if you can do this to the nation’s second largest city, maybe the administration is hoping this will be a signal to everyone everywhere to fear them. Your federal government … can come in and take over.” More

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      California Leaders React to Governor Gavin Newsom’s Speech

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      Elected officials, as well as social media influencers, had wide-ranging opinions of the governor’s prime time address warning that democracy is in danger.For months, Californians weren’t sure what to make of Gov. Gavin Newsom.There was the new podcast on which he interviewed right-wing influencers and said he felt trans athletes shouldn’t participate in women’s sports. There was the meeting in February with President Trump in the White House. And there were occasional snipes at Republicans, but nothing like those Mr. Newsom had dished out in years past.Then came a blistering nine-minute speech on Tuesday in which Mr. Newsom warned Americans that Mr. Trump was destroying democracy and acting as an authoritarian who would eventually send the military to states across the country.Many liberals in California cheered Mr. Newsom, finally seeing in him the leader of the resistance that they had been missing. Those feeling confused and fearful since Mr. Trump started his second term were looking for someone to stick up for them and said they appreciated Mr. Newsom’s forcefulness.“In a time of rising fear and growing threats to democracy, he spoke not just as a governor, but as a moral leader,” said Representative Lateefah Simon, Democrat of California. “He named the danger plainly.”But others, while supportive of his message, were not entirely convinced. They said testing the political climate ahead of a potential run for president.“Even if you’re late to the party, you know, welcome to the fight,” said Hugo Soto-Martinez, a progressive City Council member in Los Angeles, who appreciated what Mr. Newsom said but wished the governor had stood up to the president sooner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      US immigration officials raid California farms as Trump ramps up conflict

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      US immigration officials carried out further “enforcement activity” in California’s agricultural heartland and the Los Angeles area as the conflict between the state and Donald Trump’s administration intensified on Wednesday.Immigrant advocacy groups reported multiple actions across the state, where an estimated 255,700 farm workers are undocumented, and said agents pursued workers through blueberry fields and staged operations at agricultural facilities.The raids have been sharply criticized by advocacy groups and local officials, who said they were “outraged and heartbroken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) activities targeting immigrant families”.“When our workforce’s lives are in fear, the fields will go unharvested, the impact is felt not only at the local level, but it will also be felt at the national level,” said Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios, the mayor of Ventura, a coastal city just north of Los Angeles. “Everything will be affected and every American who is here and relies on the labor of these individuals will be affected.”Immigration activities have continued in the Los Angeles area as well, where officials say people have been detained outside Home Depots and in front of churches. Karen Bass, the Los Angeles mayor, said the raids have created a deep sense of fear in the region and that the White House has provoked unrest. The nighttime curfew she put in place this week will stay in place as long as needed, including while there are ongoing raids and a military presence in the city, Bass said at a press conference on Wednesday.Hilda Solis, an LA county supervisor, said Wednesday evening she was concerned about a “deeply disturbing incident” in the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood involving two unmarked vehicles operated by Ice agents crashing in to a civilian car with two children inside and deploying teargas to apprehend an individual. She said she had also learned of an incident of Ice attempting to detain a member of the press.The nearly 5,000 US military personnel in the city now exceeds the number of US troops in both Iraq and Syria.The increasing raids come as Ice ramps up its efforts to meet a reported quota of 3,000 detentions a day set by Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff. The city has seen days of protest over Trump’s immigration crackdown and the subsequent military deployment.Los Angeles police announced they arrested more than 200 people in the city’s downtown area on Tuesday, after crowds gathered in defiance of the overnight curfew in the neighborhood. The LAPD said it had carried out more than 400 arrests and detentions of protesters since Saturday.The crackdown came after California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, filed an emergency request to block the Trump administration from using military forces to accompany Ice officers on raids throughout LA.Trump has ordered the deployment of 4,000 national guard members and 700 marines to LA after days of protests driven by anger over aggressive Ice raids that have targeted garment workers, day labourers, car wash employees and members of immigrant communities.Across the country, NBC reported that Ice was preparing to deploy tactical units to several more cities run by Democratic leaders, citing two sources familiar with the plans, who named four of the cities as Seattle, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.On Wednesday, dozens of mayors from across the Los Angeles region banded together to demand that the Trump administration stop the stepped-up immigration raids that have spread fear across their cities.“I’m asking you, please listen to me, stop terrorizing our residents,” said Mayor Jessica Ancona of El Monte, who said she was hit by rubber bullets during a raid in her city.Speaking alongside the other mayors at a news conference, Bass said the raids spread fear at the behest of the White House.“We started off by hearing the administration wanted to go after violent felons, gang members, drug dealers. But when you raid Home Depots and workplaces, when you tear parents and children apart, and when you run armored caravans through our streets, you’re not trying to keep anyone safe,” she said. “You’re trying to cause fear and panic.”Newsom and the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, have alleged in a pair of lawsuits filed on Monday and Tuesday that Trump’s takeover of the state’s national guard, against the governor’s wishes, was unlawful. On Tuesday, a federal judge declined to immediately rule on California’s request for a restraining order and scheduled a hearing for Thursday.In a speech, Newsom condemned Trump for “indiscriminately targeting hard-working immigrant families” and militarising the streets of LA, recounting how in recent days Ice agents had grabbed people outside a Home Depot, detained a nine-months-pregnant US citizen, sent unmarked cars to schools, and arrested gardeners and seamstresses.“That’s just weakness masquerading as strength,” the governor said. “If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant based only on suspicion or skin colour, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.”In past days, thousands of troops have been deployed to LA over the objections of Democratic officials and despite concerns from local law enforcement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUS military troops in the city do not have the authority to arrest people, but they are allowed to temporarily detain individuals until law enforcement agents arrest them, Maj Gen Scott Sherman, who is leading the deployment, said on Wednesday. National guard troops on the ground in Los Angeles have already done so, he said.View image in fullscreenThe 700 US marines who will be deployed are receiving training on civil disturbances and will not have live ammunition in their rifles while in the city, Sherman said.The Los Angeles county sheriff, Robert Luna, said on Wednesday, however, that federal troops do not have the power to arrest or detain: “So if they are out in the field, they may be there, but they are working in conjunction with federal authorities. It could be Ice, border patrol, there’s a whole host of acronym federal agencies that they’re working with.” Luna also said he was unaware whether Marines were already on the ground in the city, but that local law enforcement was trying to “improve communication” with the military.Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said he expected the military would remain in the city for 60 days at a cost of at least $134m.Trump defended the military deployment on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday morning, writing: “If our troops didn’t go into Los Angeles, it would be burning to the ground right now, just like so much of their housing burned to the ground. The great people of Los Angeles are very lucky that I made the decision to go in and help!!!”The deployment of the national guard and marines is strongly opposed by California Democrats, as well as by every Democratic governor in the US. Alex Padilla, a California senator, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that protests against Ice and the subsequent legal showdown between his state and the government was “absolutely a crisis of Trump’s own making”.He said: “There are a lot of people who are passionate about speaking up for fundamental rights and respecting due process, but the deployment of national guard only serves to escalate tensions and the situation. It’s exactly what Donald Trump wanted to do.”Padilla said the Los Angeles sheriff’s department had not been advised of the federalisation of the national guard. He said his office had pressed the Pentagon for a justification, and “as far as we’re told, the Department of Defence isn’t sure what the mission is here”.Meanwhile, officials in Los Angeles have sought to reassure the public that the situation in the city remains largely peaceful and calm. At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Nathan Hochman, the district attorney of Los Angeles county, pointed out how images of unrest on television and social media have misled many Americans about the nature and scale of the mayhem.“If you only saw the social media and the media reports of what’s going on over the last five days, you would think that Los Angeles is on the brink of war,” Hochman said.“But let me put this in perspective for you. There are 11 million people in this county; 4 million of which live in Los Angeles city. We estimate that there’s probably thousands of people who have engaged in legitimate protest, let’s say 4,000 people,” Hochman said.“That means that 99.9% of people in Los Angeles city or generally Los Angeles county have not engaged in any protest at all,” he continued. “Now, amongst the people who have engaged in protest, we estimate that there are hundreds of people, let’s say maybe up to 400, to use rough percentages, who have engaged in this type of illegal activity.”“So what does that mean?” Hochman asked. “That means that 99.99% of people who live in Los Angeles … have not committed any illegal acts in connection with this protest whatsoever.”Lauren Gambino, Sam Levin, Lois Beckett, Joseph Gedeon and agencies contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      ‘This isn’t an isolated incident’: Trump’s show of military force in LA was years in the making

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      Donald Trump is targeting Los Angeles, the biggest city in deep-blue California – a sprawling metropolis shaped by immigrant communities that the president described on Tuesday as a “trash heap” – with a show of force many years in the making. After his first term, Trump expressed regret for not taking a more heavy-handed approach to the 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder by police. So when demonstrations against his immigration crackdown erupted last week in Los Angeles, he turned to the playbook he wished he had used then – federalizing the national guard and deploying hundreds of US marines to confront what Democratic officials insist was a manageable situation, escalated by a president who the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has warned is increasingly behaving like a “dictator”.It’s the made-for-TV clash Trump has been waiting for: visually gripping scenes of unrest in a Democratic-run city furious over his administration’s mass deportation agenda.“Chaos is exactly what Trump wanted, and now California is left to clean up the mess,” Newsom said on Twitter/X.Trump has said he “would have brought in the military immediately” if he could redo 2020. And, former defense secretary Mark Esper told NPR in 2022, Trump asked if protesters could be shot. “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?” Trump asked, according to Esper.The showdown in Los Angeles brings together longtime overlapping goals of the Trump regime: bringing state and local officials to heel; trying to tap as many resources as possible for his deportation program; and going after protesters who speak or act against him, all while stretching the boundaries of legality.Sending troops into an American city to stifle largely peaceful protests is a “test case” that, depending on how it plays out in Los Angeles, could be a strategy the administration replicates in other cities, said Sarah Mehta, the deputy director of government affairs at the ACLU.“This isn’t an isolated incident,” she said. “I think what we’re seeing in Los Angeles is this culmination of several weeks of incredibly aggressive immigration policing, the federal government asking the military to get further involved in immigration enforcement, including the transportation of unaccompanied children and attention and riot control, and then on top of that, again, these really targeted attacks against cities and states that are not going along with Trump’s aggressive deportation regime.”Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said her city was being used as a proving ground for how the federal government might exert its authority over other local governments that resist the president’s agenda. “I feel like we are part of an experiment that we did not ask to be a part of,” she said, speaking at a press conference in downtown Los Angeles on Monday.While Trump sows chaos in the streets, the mayor said, the city’s immigrant communities were gripped by a “level of fear and terror” over the administration’s escalating enforcement efforts, with some undocumented workers staying home and mixed-status families afraid to attend school graduation ceremonies.In January, Trump returned to power with what he says is a popular mandate to carry out the largest deportation campaign in US history. Amid growing frustration over the pace of removals, the White House is turning to increasingly forceful tactics, including stepped up raids on workplaces.On Friday, scattered protests broke out in response to a series of immigration sweeps, in some instances by federal agents wearing tactical gear, at businesses across the Los Angeles area. Newsom and Bass said local and state law enforcement were fully capable of handling the demonstrations, but as images of cars on fire and clashes with police spread online, the Trump administration ignored the state’s wishes and brought in the national guard – an extraordinary move that state officials said brought even more protesters into the street over the weekend. Then on Monday, a day of larger, mostly peaceful protests, Trump ordered additional national guard troops and hundreds of US marines to the city.“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” Trump vowed, in a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday.Democratic cities, in particular, have long drawn Trump’s ire. On the campaign trail, he frequently pointed to liberal cities, painting them as hellscapes devoid of capable leadership that would be better run with him in White House. Speaking in Iowa in 2023, Trump said he would use federal troops to “get crime out of our cities”.“The next time I’m not waiting [for local approval]. We don’t have to wait any longer. We got to get crime out of our cities,” Trump said. He, and the conservative allies behind Project 2025, have pushed for withholding federal funds from states and cities that don’t aid federal immigration enforcement.Democrats expected him to make good on these threats. In August 2024, the New York Times reported that Trump’s allies spent the four years between his presidencies finding legal justifications for using the military in these situations, often in the immigration context, but sometimes against protesters.In a statement provided to the Guardian, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “President Trump has rightfully highlighted how poorly Democrat cities are run – including emboldening criminals, providing sanctuary to criminal illegal aliens, and putting Americans at risk. In LA, illegal aliens and violent criminal protesters spent the last several days attacking law enforcement, waving foreign flags, lighting cars on fire, and unleashing a state of outright anarchy. Anyone downplaying this behavior, or describing it as a ‘manageable situation’, is either an idiot or a propagandist for the Democrat party.”California, the biggest blue state in the country, has long been Trump’s favorite foil. On issue after issue – from climate to immigration to education – Trump cast the state as a hellscape “ruined” by “radical left” lunacy. In defending his national guard deployment, Trump decried Los Angeles a “once great American City” that “has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals”.Newsom and attorney general Rob Bonta on Monday sued Trump over what they said was an “unlawful” deployment of the national guard over the governor’s objections. Bonta noted that it was the state’s 24th legal action against the Trump administration in 20 weeks.Democrats say the timing of his crackdown on Los Angeles was no coincidence. Trump had just endured a days-long stretch of bad news: his political partnership with Elon Musk imploded, the US government returned a Maryland man wrongly deported after weeks of insisting they would not bring him back and the president’s “big, beautiful bill” stalled on Capitol Hill.“What’s happening in Los Angeles is straight out of the Trump playbook,” California senator Alex Padilla said, “manufacture a crisis and provoke violence to distract from terrible headlines.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSince January, Trump’s administration has targeted universities and college students on visas who had participated in pro-Palestinian activism. The crackdown comes as states have advanced a host of anti-protest bills in the last few years to expand criminal punishments for protesting.On Monday, Trump called for Newsom’s arrest – a move the governor called an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.“The President of the United States just called for the arrest of a sitting Governor,” Newsom said after Trump’s threat of arrest. “This is a line we cannot cross as a nation.”Trump was unable to identify a crime he thought Newsom had committed. House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested Newsom should be “tarred and feathered”.The Trump administration has already gone after several elected officials who resist his administration’s crackdown. On Tuesday, congresswoman LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, was indicted on federal charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers after a clash with law enforcement at a May protest outside of a detention facility in Newark. During the incident, the city’s mayor, Ras Baraka, was arrested, though charges against him were dropped. And a Wisconsin judge was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly helping a man evade immigration agents seeking his arrest in her courthouse.Stephen Miller, the hardline architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, used a simple term to describe the protests last week: “insurrection”.Miller, who was raised in the seaside city of Santa Monica on Los Angeles’s west side, called his home state “the largest sanctuary state in America”, underscoring its status as a trial balloon for other communities. He has described the militarized response in Los Angeles as a “fight to save civilization”.“When the rioters swarmed, you handed over your streets, willingly,” he retorted to Newsom on Monday. “You still refuse to arrest and prosecute the arsonists, seditionists and insurrectionists. This Administration is fighting to save the city and the citizens you have left to struggle and suffer.”Trump, who notably pardoned all those who were convicted for their roles in the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, has been debating whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, the 18th-century law that would give him the power to activate the military or national guard to quell rebellion or unrest.For now, he is using a different legal justification, though the threat of the act looms. The right to peacefully assemble is guaranteed by the first amendment. Protests in LA have largely been peaceful, not amounting to an insurrection.Engaging the military is a tipping point, Mehta said, because it is “striking and terrifying” to see the president use every tool he can to punish his critics. But, she said, it also reveals the administration’s weakness – they have to use all of these tools to compel compliance.“They’re doing this because they need to make a show of force, and because people are resisting and people are pushing back,” Mehta said. “People are outraged, and they’re very angry about the way that their civil rights are being stripped away, and the aggressiveness with which immigration agents are responding to members of our community.”Mass “No Kings” protests are expected across the country in response to the multimillion dollar military parade Trump has planned in the country’s capitol for Saturday, his 79th birthday and the US army’s 250th anniversary. Organizers expect protests in more than 1,800 locations, though not in Washington DC. About 100 of the events have been added since Trump sent troops to Los Angeles.“Now, this military escalation only confirms what we’ve known: this government wants to rule by force, not serve the people,” the coalition behind the 14 June protests said in a statement.Speaking from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said he wasn’t aware of any planned protests against the event, but claimed that any participants “hate our country”.Then, he issued a dark warning: “For those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” More

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      in US Politics

      As military is deployed to LA, rightwing media decry protesters as ‘invaders’

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      There were unsavory scenes in Los Angeles over the weekend, as police used teargas and “less-lethal munitions” on thousands of people gathered to protest against the arrest of undocumented immigrants.The events playing out on rightwing TV channels and in the conservative podcasting realm were almost as miserable, as excitable media figures decried protesters as “invaders”, called for both the mass arrest of elected officials and the invocation of a two-century old laws and used the chaos to push racist conspiracy theories.It came as the Trump administration said the military will remain on the ground in LA for two months, after Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. About 700 US marines deployed to the US’s second largest city on Tuesday, after LA’s police chief effectively said their presence would complicate law enforcement’s efforts.The clamor for arrests mainly focused on Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, as rightwing media followed the lead of the US president, who first made the suggestion over the weekend. Trump didn’t seem to know under what law Newsom should be arrested, and the conservative commentariat wasn’t sure either. Still, it didn’t stop them crying for the California governor to be placed in handcuffs.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, claimed Newsom “should be arrested for obstructing US immigration law”, even as Tom Homan, the border czar, said Newsom hadn’t done anything to warrant detention. Wayne Root, a host on the rightwing channel Real America TV, suggested Newsom should be charged with “treason” and be detained at Guantánamo Bay while he awaits trial. “Be sure he showers with MS-13,” Root added, a take that, even for the rightwing media cesspool, was particularly macabre.But the right wasn’t just calling for the caging of Newsom. Some wanted Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, to be arrested too, including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist adviser-turned-podcast host.“Right there, LAPD,” Bannon announced on Monday, apparently under the impression that the entire LA police force was listening to his War Room show.“The mayor is involved in this and having the stand down [sic]. She ought to be arrested today. Immediately.”Bannon went on to call for “hard actions,” whatever they are, adding: “Not even question we’re on the side of the righteous.”The bad takes were everywhere. Chris Plante, a host at rightwing TV channel Newsmax, said on air: “The Democrats are just – I mean, at what point are they declared to be a terrorist organization – with all of the affiliations and all the violence and the shootings and the fire-bombings and the targeting Jews and on and on?”Laura Ingraham, who often seems to be trying just a bit too hard to be offensive, went further. On her Fox News show she accused Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas, the former secretary of homeland security, of having “opened the border” and given “benefits to 10 million illegal aliens”.“The goal was to resettle America with new people in order to transform it completely in ways that you really can’t do at the ballot box, at least when you’re that radical,” Ingraham said.She was referring, not very subtly, to the concept of “great replacement”, a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims there is an ongoing effort by liberals to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. It’s a concept that started on fringe websites before making its way to Fox News.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOthers were upset by more prosaic matters, including the sight of people at the protests flying flags other than the stars and stripes. It really set off Charlie Kirk, with the influential rightwing declaring that the US has “a parasitic relationship with Mexico, and we have for quite some time”.He added: “If you loved the promise of America, you wouldn’t wave a Mexican flag when American police tried to remove criminals. This should be a wake-up call. If you did not realize it before, guess what? Pat Buchanan and President Trump were right. We are a conquered country that has been invaded by a force in certain areas.”Kirk is uniquely placed to comment on such matters. His Turning Point USA organization sent 80 busloads of people to Washington on the day that hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, and Kirk has celebrated Trump’s mass pardon of people who attacked police officers that day.When it came to the treatment of people protesting in LA, however, Kirk was of a different mind, as he called for US troops to be used in policing US civilians.“Los Angeles does not feel like a protest, what’s happening there. It’s an entire city that’s declaring open rebellion to American sovereignty and authority,” he said. “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.” More

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      in US Politics

      Protesters have a right to wear masks – despite Trump’s double standard | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Do protesters have a right to hide their faces? Donald Trump, who likes to show and see his own face as often as possible, clearly does not think so. One demand to universities has been that they outlaw masking at demonstrations; in response to protests in California, the US president demanded on social media that anyone wearing a mask be arrested immediately.Never mind the apparent double standard, as Ice agents refuse to take off face coverings and hide their name tags, defying any accountability; there is a widespread sense that standing by one’s identity is a crucial part of standing up to unjust power. In fact, that intuition is at the core of civil disobedience. But it is not plausible in our present moment; what’s more, there is a long countervailing tradition of validating citizens’ right to anonymity. As recently as the mid-1990s, it was affirmed by none other than the supreme court.Lawful protest is categorically different from civil disobedience, though much current commentary conflates them. In civil disobedience, citizens openly – or even, as Martin Luther King Jr put it, “lovingly” – break the law; they make themselves identifiable to the authorities and are willing to accept punishment (but hope that they will not be treated like ordinary criminals). This strategy serves multiple purposes: it demonstrates moral seriousness, it flags “highest respect for the law” in general (MLK again) and it counts on a majority coming to see the injustice these loving lawbreakers are flagging – and then change things.To be sure, the requirement to reveal one’s identity has not been accepted by all philosophers of civil disobedience: for some, what matters is that whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning were doing the right thing. Their identity was not crucial for the public to comprehend scandalous facts they revealed (in the end, at great personal cost).Past lawful protests, meanwhile, occurred in a different media context. The civil rights movement assumed that its messages about injustice would reach a majority of US citizens – as well as people of good will in Washington DC. After all, activists appealed above the heads of racist governors such as Alabama’s George Wallace to the federal government. Today, such assumptions are doubtful. As everyone knows, we no longer live in an age of three large TV networks, which, despite various failings, could be expected faithfully to transmit images of civil rights protesters being brutally treated by southern police. In our deeply distorted, often outright dysfunctional, media landscape, messages are either not transmitted at all (just watch Fox at moments that could be embarrassing for Trump); or they are reframed such that the original message is turned on its head (those peacefully protesting against lawlessness become the law-breakers).Beyond these risks, there is the by now clear and present danger of the Trump administration engaging in personal retribution and making examples of individuals – think of student detentions and deportations. Under such conditions, hiding one’s identity is an understandable act of caution, and such caution should not be criminalized. While democracies such as Canada also have anti-masking laws, these aim at rioters and those assembled unlawfully, not people exercising their right to free expression. We are clearly at a moment where protest is beginning to take courage – a point driven home to me when I politely asked some older women holding up posters outside the main gate at Princeton University whether I could take their picture. Several said that I should not show their faces.As in debates about privacy, someone sooner or later will say that anyone who has nothing to hide should not hide their face. But in an age of ubiquitous surveillance, now supplemented with rapidly advancing facial recognition technology, you do not know what will be done with evidence of your presence at a protest. We have a secret ballot because we do not want people to be intimidated, but also because we don’t want powerful people – not necessarily always the state; it could be the boss who does not like your vote for democratic socialism – to know about our stances.The supreme court saw this logic three decades ago. It defended the right to stay anonymous of an elderly lady handing out leaflets opposing a school tax levy in Ohio. The court reminded Americans that the authors of the Federalist papers had used pseudonyms; the justices declared anonymity a means “to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation”, going so far as to ennoble it as a “shield from the tyranny of the majority” (of course, today’s protesters are not standing against a real majority – what Trump and Miller are doing is precisely not popular).To be sure, when protest is meant directly to engage others, there is something not right about an asymmetry of the masked speaking to the unmasked: freedom of assembly, among other things, ensures that we can get into each other’s faces. Already in the 19th century, revolutionaries hoped that those manning barricades and soldiers would end up talking and fraternizing. Teargas – first used against barricades, even before deployment in war – renders that vision impossible. Today, what risks they take, and, specifically, how much they want to reveal to authorities and fellow citizens, should be up to individuals engaged in lawful protest.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      in US Politics

      Trump is waging war against his own citizens in Los Angeles | Judith Levine

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      On Monday, the Pentagon sent 700 active-duty marines to Los Angeles and doubled the number of national guard troops deployed there to 4,000, to quell protests Donald Trump said on Sunday were already “under control”, “still simmering … but not very much”.The same day, the US president used the word “insurrectionists” to describe demonstrators against the unprecedentedly large and fierce immigration deportation raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) that started on Friday in that city. The remark echoed his long-held desire to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would authorize him to send the military anywhere in the country to put down dissent.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, sued the Trump administration, arguing that it is unconstitutional to use the armed forces inside the US, except in the most extreme situations.Put another way, the government is not allowed to wage war against its own citizens. But this is what it is doing.In its first months in office, the Trump administration enacted what could be called soft authoritarianism: rhetorical glorification of white masculinity and derision of frailty and difference; intimidation of liberal democratic institutions – universities, law firms, the press, and the arts; weaponization of the judicial system against Trump’s perceived foes.Laced through this non-violent aggression are real violence and reward for violence toward selective populations: the denial of life-saving medical care for transgender people and pregnant women in distress, in deference to the “personhood” of their fetuses; the pardon of the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and killed officers on 6 January 2021. And most prominent, the kidnap, deportation without due process, and rendition of immigrants to foreign gulags.But in the last week or so, a second phase has begun unfolding: the literal weaponization of the government to contain dissent. It is no hyperbole to call this, and the less visible mechanisms that reinforce it, fascism.This weekend in Los Angeles, protests broke out over Ice raids across the city, especially at workplaces including a clothing warehouse and Home Depot, where migrants muster for day labor. The raids were aimed at meeting an unattainable quota of 3,000 arrests a day. In this diverse city, which immigrants are rebuilding after the devastating fires, the outrage Ice provoked was inevitable.Some of the resistance was not peaceful – objects were thrown at cars, for instance – but the LA police got matters in hand. Still, over the objections of Newsom and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, Trump deployed 300 national guard troops to the scene. They carried long guns and shields and fired “less-lethal munitions”, including flash-bangs, teargas and rubber bullets into the crowds; they also wielded their batons.At the same time as repressing citizens’ free speech, Ice is preventing elected officials from fulfilling their responsibility to oversee federal detention facilities in their jurisdictions. On Sunday, two US representatives from New York were denied entry to the federal building in downtown Manhattan where about 100 immigrants had been kept for days in small, short-term holding cells, some sleeping on bathroom floors. A month earlier, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, was arrested outside a federal detention center for attempting to do the same thing.Speaking on Friday with NBC News, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, would not rule out arresting Newsom or Bass if they interfered with the deportation raids. “I’ll say it about anybody,” he proclaimed. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It is a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”Homan later walked back his threat to arrest Newsom, who had dared him to do so. Trump expressed no reservations. “I think it’s great,” he told the press.Like every authoritarian regime, this one justifies doing its “job” as a defense of public safety necessitated by lawlessness. “Despite what you may be hearing, the record checks show that we arrested illegal aliens with criminal histories including CHILD CRUELTY, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, DRUG TRAFFICKING, ASSAULT, ROBBERY, HUMAN SMUGGLING,” Homan posted on X. Did they? Ice always says it is arresting only criminals, but it conflates undocumented status with criminality. Yes, it is a felony to conceal or harbor an “alien” – but giving sanctuary, as churches have long done, was rarely penalized until now. Being in the US without documentation, meanwhile, is not a crime. It is a civil, administrative offence.Nor is it a crime to peacefully resist the government’s torment of one’s family and neighbors. “Our officers and agents continued to enforce immigration law in LA, despite the violent protesters,” Homan continued. Some news outlets have called the protests “riots”, a characterization that local observers, including the governor, the mayor and radio host Charlamagne the God, reject. They counter that the demonstrations were loud, angry and almost entirely nonviolent before the national guard arrived to escalate the tension.This sequence of events is not accidental. On Facebook, Katherine Franke, a tenured Columbia law school professor who was forced to resign after defending student protesters against the war on Gaza, recounted a recent conversation with “a prominent Democratic attorney general”. Asked where things were going, he predicted, on “good information”, Franke paraphrased, that in May or June the federal government would intensify the crackdowns to provoke resistance, “then use that provocation as a justification for declaring martial law”. The declaration, she continued, could free the administration not just to deploy troops but also to suspend elections or the writ of habeas corpus.Trump seems to be affirming these predictions. “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” he told reporters. “If we see danger to our country and to our citizens [the response] will be very, very strong.” He nattered on about protesters spitting on police. “They spit, we hit,” said the poet-president, looking pleased with himself.While manufacturing peril, authoritarian regimes seek to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky put it – or, better, enthusiasm – for the exercise of their power. To do so, they stage mass rituals of adulation and spectacular displays of the military might at the beloved leader’s command. On the US army’s official Facebook page, the ad campaign for the 14 June military parade celebrating the army’s and Trump’s simultaneous birthdays is unceasing. Repeatedly refreshed is a video of him at his desk. “I am thrilled to invite everyone to an unforgettable celebration, one like you’ve never seen before,” he reads woodenly. “This is your army. This is your country. This is America250,” says the quietly awed narrator of another video. The first eight seconds of the one-minute spot feature Trump.But enthusiasm is not easily won, and trying to compel obedience through force creates backlash. Better to attain anticipatory consent through fear. This is where surveillance comes in. To complement the FBI, the National Security Agency and myriad state-level snitching mechanisms for everything from abortion to teaching Black history, the administration has, perhaps unintentionally, created a sophisticated spying apparatus at the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.The Heritage Foundation wrote the plan to reduce the administrative state to the size of a supply closet; thus, Doge was born. But Trump never cared about waste, fraud and abuse (he believes in them all). For him, the aim was to build a force of unswervingly loyal apparatchiks. In fact, as the Washington Post reports, the department is now scrambling to rehire federal employees. It turns out that things the government does, such as process tax filings and fly weather balloons, need people who know how to do them.But Doge is not obsolete. Now that the supreme court has turned over the nation’s personal data to Big Balls and the boys, and AI is connecting every dataset with every other dataset, it may have a more useful function: coordinating the surveillance state. Homeland security is already spidering through IRS data to locate undocumented immigrants through their tax filings ($96.7bn in federal, state and local taxes in 2024).While the shock troops do the dirty work and the marching bands inspire the masses, Doge may expand from enforcing fealty in the federal workforce to exacting it from everyone. Violence, propaganda and surveillance: the triumvirate makes fascism.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist, and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      in Elections

      Newsom Says Trump Is Destroying U.S. Democracy in Speech on L.A. Protests

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom, in an address called “Democracy at a Crossroads,” called on Americans to stand up to President Trump.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California criticized President Trump’s decision to send the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles and asked people to “reflect on this perilous moment.”Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressGov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decisions to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles have put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism.The California governor urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a “perilous moment” for democracy and the country’s long-held legal norms.“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.Mr. Newsom spoke on the fifth day of protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration raids that have sent fear and anger through many communities in Southern California. He said Mr. Trump had “inflamed a combustible situation” by taking over California’s National Guard, and by calling up 4,000 troops and 700 Marines.The governor is considered a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, and his Tuesday night speech, called “Democracy at a Crossroads,” sounded national in scope. It aired on some national networks and on Mr. Newsom’s social media accounts, with audio problems in the opening minutes.The current political standoff has made it possible for Mr. Newsom to have a wider platform, and he has jousted with President Trump and Republicans for several days in interviews and on social media.“Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves,” Mr. Newsom said in his speech. “But they do not stop there. Trump and his loyalists thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control.”The address was an unusual move for Mr. Newsom, who has dyslexia and dislikes reading from a teleprompter to deliver formal speeches. But he has been using every communication channel possible to raise alarms about the extraordinary measures Mr. Trump has taken to mobilize the military for domestic uses.Not since the civil rights movement in the 1960s has a president sent National Guard troops to quell unrest without the support of the state’s governor.“I ask everyone to take the time to reflect on this perilous moment,” he said, “a president who wants to be bound by no law or constitution, perpetrating a unified assault on American traditions.” More