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      Los Angeles protests: a visual guide to what happened on the streets

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      After a series of immigration raids across the city of Los Angeles on Friday inspired mostly peaceful protests involving a few hundred people, the situation escalated on Saturday when the US president, Donald Trump, took the unprecedented step of mobilizing the national guard – the country’s military reserve units – claiming the demonstrations amounted to “rebellion” against the authority of the US government. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, called the decision “purposefully inflammatory”. Here’s a look at what actually happened on the streets.Most of the events took place in downtown Los Angeles, in a fairly localized area. The vast majority of the gigantic metropolis was not affected.Friday 6 June, morning. Federal immigration officers raid multiple locations across Los Angeles, including a Home Depot in Westlake; centers where day laborers gather looking for work; and the Ambiance clothing store in the fashion district. The Coalition of Humane Immigrant Rights (Chirla) says there are raids at seven sites.Friday 6 June, afternoon. David Huerta, the president of California’s biggest union, is arrested while apparently doing little more than standing and observing one of the immigration raids. Footage shows the 58-year-old head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) being knocked down by a masked agent. He was taken to a hospital, then transferred to the Metropolitan detention center in downtown LA. “What happened to me is not about me; this is about something much bigger,” he says in a statement from the hospital. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening.” In a statement the US attorney Bill Essayli claims Huerta “deliberately obstructed their access by blocking their vehicle” and says he was arrested on suspicion of interfering with federal officers.Friday 6 June, afternoon. Demonstrators gather outside the federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles where Huerta and others are being held. There is a tense but largely non-violent standoff with police.7pm: The LAPD declares unlawful assembly in the area and deploys teargas to break up the crowd.8.20pm: The police force declares a city-wide tactical alert.Saturday 7 June, morning. As border patrol agents are seen gathering opposite another Home Depot location, this time in the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood of Paramount, news spreads on social media of another raid. A couple of hundred protesters gather outside the Paramount Business Center. Sheriff’s deputies block off a perimeter near the 710 Freeway and Hunsaker Ave.12pm. Border patrol vehicles leave the center, with officers firing teargas and flash grenades at protesters. Some follow the convoy of federal vehicles up Alondra Blvd, throwing rocks and other objects; a few others set up a roadblock near the Home Depot.Saturday 7 June, 4pm. The area near the Home Depot confrontation is declared an unlawful assembly and protesters are warned to leave. Approximately 100 people gather further west in the neighborhood of Compton, at the intersection of Atlantic Ave and Alondra Blvd, where three fires are set, including a vehicle in the middle of intersection. Rocks are thrown at LA county sheriff’s deputies, and officers retreat to the bottom of bridge to the east.7pm. The Trump administration announces it will deploy the national guard, claiming the limited protests were a “rebellion” against the US government. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, immediately denounces the move, the first time a US president has mobilized US military forces in a domestic political situation without the request of the state’s governor since 1965.The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, also announces that 500 marines at Camp Pendleton in California have been placed on high alert.Saturday 7 June, evening. Federal agents emerge in a phalanx from inside the Metropolitan detention center to confront approximately 100 protesters, firing teargas and “less lethal” weapons at them.9.30pm. Officers and vehicles force the crowd on Alondra Blvd back west, and by midnight most protesters have dispersed.Sunday 8 June, morning. After curfews are declared across LA county overnight from 6pm-6am, by Sunday morning about 300 national guard troops are deployed to the city. Two dozen appear to news crews outside the federal complex, as though intent only on posing for photographs.10.30am. Protesters begin congregating near the Metropolitan detention center, where national guard troops have arrived to support immigration officials – though they do not appear to be engaging in active policing.1pm. Thousands of protesters gather in downtown LA.Sunday 8 June, afternoon. The LAPD again declares the protest an unlawful assembly, ordering everyone to leave, but still the protests continue. Police patrol on horseback and report several arrests. Journalists and protesters are reportedly struck by projectiles, while LA police say two officers are injured after being struck by motorcyclists attempting to “breach a skirmish line”. Ice officers and other federal agents use teargas and pepper balls in an attempt to disperse the crowds. Throughout the afternoon, there are isolated episodes of vandalism – graffiti sprayed on buildings and vehicles, and a protester who damages the side mirror of a parked car. A line of spray-painted Waymo driverless cars, one with a smashed windshield, are later set on fire.Downtown Los AngelesSunday 8 June, afternoon. Hundreds of protesters block the 101 Freeway. They take over two lanes.Evening. Tensions have risen, with demonstrators throwing garbage and rocks at police. Newsom and the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, double down on their plea to protesters to stay peaceful. “Protest is appropriate to do, but it is just not appropriate for there to be violence,” Bass says, while the LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell, calls the violence “disgusting” and says officers have been pelted with rocks, and shot at with commercial grade fireworks. Crucially, he notes that those engaging in violence were not among the people demonstrating against the immigration raids, but are “people who do this all the time”. More

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      Trump has unleashed something terrifying in the US – that even he may be powerless to control | Gaby Hinsliff

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      She was live on air to viewers back home, her TV microphone clearly in hand, when the rubber bullet hit her. The Australian reporter Lauren Tomasi was the second journalist after the British photographer Nick Stern to be shot with non-lethal rounds while covering protests in Los Angeles sparked by immigration raids. But she was the first to be caught on camera and beamed around the world. There’s no excuse for not knowing what the US is becoming, now that anyone can watch that clip online. Not when you can hear her scream and see the cameraman quickly swing away to film a panicking crowd.It was the scenario everyone feared when Donald Trump took office. Deportation hit squads descending on the kind of Democrat-voting communities who would feel morally bound to resist them, triggering the kind of violent confrontation that creates an excuse to send in national guard troops – and ultimately a showdown between federal and state power that could take US democracy to the brink. Now something like this may be unfolding in California, where the state governor, Gavin Newsom, has accused the president of trying to “manufacture a crisis” for his own ends and warned that any protester responding with violence is only playing into his hands. Suddenly, the idea that this presidency could ultimately end in civil conflict no longer seems quite so wildly overblown as it once did.Or to put it another way, Trump has got what he wanted, which is for everyone to switch channels: to stop gawping at his embarrassing fallout with Elon Musk over unfunded tax cuts, and flick over to the rival spectacle he has hastily created. After a brief interruption to scheduled programming, the great showman is back in control. But in the meantime, the world has learned something useful about who wins in a standoff between two giant egos, one of whom has all the money and the other of whom has all the executive power. In US oligarchies just as in Russian ones, it turns out, it’s presidents who still get to set the agenda.You can’t ride the tiger. That’s the lesson here: once populism has grasped the levers of power, even the richest man in the world cannot be sure of exploiting it for his own ends, or imposing his own agenda on the chaos. Not when a vengeful White House still has the power to destroy even the most powerful business empire, anyway. At the weekend, Musk meekly deleted explosive tweets about the president’s alleged relationship with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and by Monday he was loyally sharing Trumpian messages about the LA protests. His father, meanwhile, tactfully blamed the outburst on Musk Junior being “tired” after five months working round the clock for the White House.That ought to ring some bells on this side of the Atlantic. For oddly enough, it’s the same excuse offered up by Zia Yusuf, the millionaire businessman brought in to professionalise Reform UK’s perennially chaotic operation, who last week quit as chair in exasperation. Trying to get the party into power was no longer a “good use of his time”, he tweeted, after publicly clashing with its newest MP, Sarah Pochin, over her decision to ask a question in parliament about banning burqas (which isn’t officially Reform policy, or at least not yet). Yusuf, a British Muslim, has long been seen as Farage’s trusted bulwark against those inside Reform desperate to pick up where the jailed thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon left off, and to become a full-blown, far-right anti-Islam movement.But this time, it seems, Yusuf may have bitten off more than the boss was ready to chew. A whole two days after storming out, Yusuf ended up storming awkwardly back in, telling the BBC that actually, having thought about it, he probably would ban burqas and other face coverings. He had just been exhausted, he suggested, after barely having a day off in 11 months. (If nothing else, it seems Reform really means what it says about fighting back against modern HR practices.)To be fair to him, even Farage seems to find the process of trying to control his parties exhausting at times, judging by the regularity with which he has taken breaks from them over the years. While Yusuf won’t return as chair, he will now join Reform’s so-called British Doge, supposedly taking a Musk-style chainsaw to council spending – which sounds like a breeze compared with managing Reform MPs. Until, that is, you reflect on how exactly Doge has turned out across the Atlantic.The reason parts of Silicon Valley were quietly enthusiastic about their fellow tech tycoon’s slash and burn approach to US bureaucracy was that they saw profitable method in the madness: a plan to hack the state back to the bare minimum, opening up new markets for digital services and unleashing (or so they hoped) a new wave of economic growth by slashing national debt.Five months on, however, it’s clear that any Doge savings will be utterly dwarfed by Trump’s forecast to send national debt soaring to uncharted and potentially unsustainable highs. Any tech titan hoping for the US equivalent of Margaret Thatcher on steroids, in other words, has ended up with Liz Truss after one too many espressos instead – plus troops on the streets of California and the slowly dawning realisation that, as the billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz put it, they have “no sway” over what they unleashed.There will be plenty of people back in Britain who couldn’t care less about obscure comings and goings in the Reform party, even as its poll lead means it’s starting to make the political weather. Others simply don’t expect it to affect their lives much either way if Reform permanently supplants a Conservative party from which it already seems hard to distinguish, and a few may already be calculating that they can turn its rise to their own advantage.Yet what the last few frightening days in the US have demonstrated is that once populism has its feet firmly enough under the table, chaos wins. There’s no ability to belatedly impose order, no house-training it either. All you can do is deny it a room in the house in the first place. In Britain, at least, it’s not too late for that.

      Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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      US national guard troops deployed in LA after protests over immigration raids

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      US national guard troops were deployed in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday amid an immigration crackdown that saw authorities use teargas on protesters in a move that sent shockwaves though American politics.Troops were stationed outside Metropolitan detention center in downtown Los Angeles, one of several sites that have seen confrontations involving hundreds of demonstrators and federal law enforcement in the last two days, and other areas of the federal complex. Footage captured in the area showed the situation quickly escalated as authorities fired pepper balls and teargas at a growing crowd gathered there, reportedly striking protesters and journalists.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sharply criticized the deployment and urged protesters to “stay peaceful”. “Don’t give Donald Trump what he wants,” he said.Donald Trump ordered the deployment of the national guard in Los Angeles late on Saturday night following days of clashes between demonstrators and US immigration authorities. The decision marked a stunning escalation in a broad crackdown on immigrants in the United States following raids across the country which have triggered protests.Trump’s federalization of the guard troops is the first time an American president has used such power since the 1992 LA riots. At that time widespread violence broke out in reaction to the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King.Trump’s move has been followed by the threat of even more escalation. Earlier Pete Hegseth,Trump’s controversial and hardline defense secretary, had raised the possibility of deploying US marines onto the streets of the Democrat-run state following the protests that erupted in the wake of raids from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) authorities in the state.“Under President Trump, violence & destruction against federal agents & federal facilities will NOT be tolerated. It’s COMMON SENSE,” Hegseth wrote on social media.“If violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert,” Hegseth said. Camp Pendleton is a large military base south of Los Angeles and north of San Diego.Newsom called the potential deployment of US marines “deranged” .“The Secretary of Defense is now threatening to deploy active-duty Marines on American soil against its own citizens. This is deranged behavior,” Newsom wrote on X.Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, criticized Newsom’s stance on ABC’s Face the Nation. “If he was doing his job people wouldn’t have gotten hurt the last couple of days … Governor Newsom has proven that he makes bad decisions. The president knows that he makes bad decisions and that’s why the president chose the safety of this community over waiting for Governor Newsom to get some sanity.”The independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders called the situation a threat to US democracy. “We have a president who is moving this country rapidly into authoritarianism,” he told CNN. “He does not believe in the rule of law.”Tensions in Los Angles had begun on Friday, when protesters clashed with law enforcement officials conducting immigration raids on multiple locations in the sprawling city’s downtown.On Saturday, US immigration authorities extended enforcement action into Paramount, a majority Latino area south-east of Los Angeles, and were met with more protests outside an industrial park.A stand-off developed between border patrol personnel in riot gear and gas masks and protesters. As demonstrations continued law enforcement deployed teargas and protesters also threw objects at them. At least one car was set alight.Trump then promised to send in the national guard – a move that many critics have feared might happen during his second administration amid fears that the US is sliding into authoritarianism.“The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles – not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” Newsom said later. “Don’t give them one.”On his own social media platform, Truth Social, Trump praised the national guard, even before it was reported that troops had arrived. “Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles after two days of violence, clashes and unrest,” he said in a post filled with insults at Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and Newsom.“These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED. Also, from now on, MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests. What do these people have to hide, and why???” he added.Ice officers and police have been wearing face masks during raids and arrests but Noem defended this on Sunday, saying: “It’s for the safety of those individuals.” She did not specify how law enforcement will prevent protesters from wearing masks.Nanette Barragán, who has Paramount in her constituency, said she has been told to prepare for a large presence ofIceagents in California.“We’ve been told to get ready for 30 days of enforcement. Thirty days of ICE enforcement,” Barragán told CNN, adding that their presence is “going to escalate the situation.”“We haven’t asked for the help. We don’t need the help. This is [President Trump] escalating it, causing tensions to rise. It’s only going to make things worse in a situation where people are already angry over immigration enforcement,” Barragán said.Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, or the White House executive associate director of enforcement and removal operations, warned that immigration enforcement will continue “every day” in Los Angeles.“I’m telling you what, we’re going to keep enforcing law every day in LA,” Homan told NBC News. “Every day in LA, we’re going to enforce immigration law. I don’t care if they like it or not.”Homan was asked if his prior warnings to elected state and local officials to not obstruct federal immigration enforcement included Newsom and Bass. Homan said he did not believe Bass had “crossed the line yet”.But, he added, “I’ll say it about anybody. You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”Trump has long promised mass immigration raids across the US after campaigning in part last year on anti-immigrant sentiment. Since he returned to office Ice raids have increased, in particular targeting some areas traditionally left alone such as court houses where immigrants might be attending hearings. More

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      National guard deploys in downtown LA amid eerie calm after two days of unrest

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      On a foggy, unseasonably cold morning in Los Angeles, the national guardsmen suddenly pressed into service by Donald Trump to quell what he called a “rebellion” against his government were nothing if not ready for their close-up.Outside a federal complex in downtown Los Angeles that includes a courthouse, a veterans’ medical centre, and a jail, two dozen guardsmen in camouflage uniforms were arrayed in front of their military vehicles with semi-automatic weapons slung over their shoulders for the benefit of television and news photographers clustered on the sidewalk.They stood with the visors of their helmets up so the reporters could see their faces. Most wore shades, despite the gloomy weather, giving them the eerie appearance of extras from a Hollywood action movie more than shock troops for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.After two days of unrest in response to heavy-handed raids by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in downtown Los Angeles and in the heavily Latino suburb of Paramount, the day started off in an atmosphere of uneasy, almost surreal calm.The skyscrapers and government offices of downtown Los Angeles were ringed by vehicles from multiple law enforcement agencies – Los Angeles police and parking enforcement, county sheriffs, highway patrol and private security guards.Most, though, were deployed for an entirely different event – a festival and two-mile walk organized by the non-profit group the March of Dimes to raise money for maternal and infant health.The streets around Grand Park, across from City Hall, were closed to traffic, but the police seemed less interested in sniffing out anti-Ice protesters than they were in posing for pictures next to a bubble machine with March of Dimes volunteers dressed as Darth Vader and other Star Wars characters.“We had the LAPD’s community engagement Hummer come by earlier and they told us we had nothing to worry about,” event organizer Tanya Adolph said. “They said they’d pull us if there was any risk to our safety. Our numbers are down markedly, I won’t hide that, but we’ve still managed to raise $300,000.”Local activists have called for demonstrations against the immigration crackdown; one demonstration set for Boyle Heights east of downtown and the other outside City Hall. Many activists, though, were worried about continuing Ice raids, particularly in working-class, predominantly Latino parts of the LA area such as Paramount – and worried, too, that any national guard presence heightened the risk of violence.Governor Gavin Newsom’s office reported on Sunday that about 300 of the promised 2,000 national guardsmen had deployed in the LA area. In addition to the small presence downtown, a group of them was reported to have driven through Paramount, scene of clashes between protesters and local police outside a Home Depot on Saturday.Trump congratulated the national guardsmen on a “great job” after what he called “two days of violence, clashes and unrest” but, as several California political leaders pointed out, the national guard had not yet deployed when city police and sheriff’s deputies used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to clear the streets.Both Ice and local activists estimated that about 45 people were arrested on Friday and Saturday, and several were reported to have been injured in confrontations with the police.Nick Stern, a news photographer, said he was shot in the leg by a less-lethal police round and was in hospital awaiting surgery. David Huerta, a prominent union leader with the Service Employees International Union, was also treated in hospital before being transferred to the Metropolitan detention center, the federal lockup in downtown LA.One of many slogans spray-painted on the walls of the federal complex, within eyeshot of the national guard and the news crews, read: “Free Huerta.”Others, daubed liberally on the walls of the complex around an entire city block, expressed rage against Ice and the Los Angeles police in equal measure. “Fuck ICE. Kill all cops!” one graffiti message said. “LAPD can suck it,” read another.Elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, little seemed out of the ordinary. Homeless people slept undisturbed on a small patch of lawn on the south side of City Hall. Traffic moved unhindered past the county criminal court building and the main entrance to City Hall on Spring Street.Alejandro Ames, a Mexican American protester, who had traveled up from San Diego sat at a folding table on the west side of City Hall with a hand-scrawled sign that read: “Republic against ICE and the police”.Ames said he was a Republican and hoped this would give extra credence to his plea for restraint by the federal authorities. “I don’t want ‘em to go crazy,” he said. “I want ‘em to go home.” More

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      How can Trump use the national guard on US soil?

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday he’s deploying 2,000 California national guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of the California governor, Gavin Newsom.Here are some things to know about when and how the president can deploy troops on US soil.The laws are a bit vagueGenerally, federal military forces are not allowed to carry out civilian law enforcement duties against US citizens except in times of emergency.An 18th-century wartime law called the Insurrection Act is the main legal mechanism a president can use to activate the military or national guard during times of rebellion or unrest. But Trump didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act on Saturday.Instead, he relied on a similar federal law that allows the president to federalize national guard troops under certain circumstances.The national guard is a hybrid entity that serves both state and federal interests. Often, it operates under state command and control, using state funding. Sometimes national guard troops will be assigned by their state to serve federal missions, remaining under state command but using federal funding.The law cited by Trump’s proclamation places national guard troops under federal command. The law says this can be done under three circumstances: when the US is invaded or in danger of invasion; when there is a rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the US government; or when the president is unable to “execute the laws of the United States”, with regular forces.But the law also says that orders for those purposes “shall be issued through the governors of the States”. It’s not immediately clear whether the president can activate national guard troops without the order of that state’s governor.The role of the national guard troops will be limitedTrump’s proclamation says the national guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting US immigration officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in military justice and national security law, says that’s because national guard troops can’t legally engage in ordinary law enforcement activities unless Trump first invokes the Insurrection Act.Vladeck said the move raises the risk that the troops could end up using force while filling that “protection” role. The move could also be a precursor to other, more aggressive troop deployments down the road, he wrote on his website.“There’s nothing these troops will be allowed to do that, for example, the ICE officers against whom these protests have been directed could not do themselves,” Vladeck wrote.Troops have been mobilized beforeThe Insurrection Act and related laws were used during the civil rights era to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central high school after that state’s governor activated the national guard to keep the students out.George HW Bush used the Insurrection Act to respond to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of white police officers who were videotaped beating Black motorist Rodney King.National guard troops have been deployed for a variety of emergencies, including the Covid pandemic, hurricanes and other natural disasters. But generally, those deployments are carried out with the agreements of the governors of the responding states.Trump is willing to use the military on home soilIn 2020, Trump asked governors of several states to deploy their national guard troops to Washington DC to quell protests that arose after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Many of the governors agreed, sending troops to the federal district.At the time, Trump also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act for protests following Floyd’s death in Minneapolis – an intervention rarely seen in modern American history. But then defense secretary Mark Esper pushed back, saying the law should be invoked “only in the most urgent and dire of situations”.Trump never did invoke the Insurrection Act during his first term.But while campaigning for his second term, he suggested that would change. Trump told an audience in Iowa in 2023 that he had been prevented from using the military to suppress violence in cities and states during his first term, and said that if the issue came up again in his next term: “I’m not waiting.”Trump also promised to deploy the national guard to help carry out his immigration enforcement goals, and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, explained how that would be carried out: sympathetic Republican governors would send troops to nearby states that refused to participate, Miller said on The Charlie Kirk Show in 2023.After Trump announced he was federalizing the national guard troops on Saturday, the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said other measures could follow.Hegseth wrote on the social media platform X that active-duty Marines at Camp Pendleton were on high alert and would also be mobilized “if violence continues”. More

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      DC rally protests cuts to US veterans programs: ‘Promises made to us have come under attack’

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      A flurry of red, white and blue American flags fluttered across the National Mall on Friday as more than 5,000 military veterans and their allies descended on Washington to protest against the planned elimination of 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the cancellation of hundreds of contracts for veterans services with community organizations.“I hope that in the future veterans will be able to get their benefits,” said David Magnus, a navy veteran who decided to travel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his doctor told him she was quitting during a recent mental health appointment. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January, “the VA was good”, he said, but since then medical staff have faced harassment that puts the entire system at risk.“It used to be, you’d call and get an answer,” he said. “Now, so much is going on that they don’t know where to put you.”Organizers said that in addition to the march in Washington, there were more than 200 corresponding actions across the country, from watch parties to vigils held at VA clinics. Many veterans told the Guardian they came to the nation’s capital on their own after hearing about the rally online.The VA secretary, Doug Collins, has said the efforts are designed to trim bureaucratic bloat and will have no impact on veterans’ healthcare or benefits. Reporting by the Guardian last month found the agency, which provides healthcare to more than 9 million veterans, has already been plunged into crisis. Across the nation, appointments have been cancelled, hospital units closed, the physical safety of patients put at risk.View image in fullscreenDemonstrators said the Trump administration is seeking to destroy the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with 170 government-run hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, and replace it with a private voucher program that will provide substandard care.“We’re a generation of service. We volunteered and stepped up to lead. Now we are seeing the promises made to us come under attack,” said Kyleanne Hunter, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a Marine Corps veteran who flew multiple combat missions as an AH1-W Super Cobra attack pilot.The administration’s proposed budget for the VA, released on Friday, slashes spending for “medical services” by $12bn – or nearly 20% – an amount offset by a corresponding 50% boost in funding for veterans seeking healthcare in the private sector.“We’re already being starved,” said Sharda Fornnarino, a Navy veteran and one of about three dozen nurses brought to the rally by the National Nurses United union. Fornnarino, who works at the VA in Denver, Colorado, said that while politicians in Washington debate permanent staff reductions, essential healthcare positions are being left vacant.With fewer staff on the floor, veterans on hospice “are being left to die in their own piss and shit”, said Teshara Felder, a Navy veteran and nurse at the agency’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, said.A blue-ribbon commission established by the agency last year found veterans received significantly better care at lower cost from the public system. Private providers operated with little oversight, they wrote, and “are not required to demonstrate competency in diagnosing and treating the complex care needs of veterans nor in understanding military culture, which is often critical to providing quality care for veterans”.The VA says the budget submission “prioritizes care for our most vulnerable veterans, including those experiencing homelessness or at risk of suicide” and “eliminates nonessential programming and bureaucratic overhead that does not directly serve the veteran”.View image in fullscreenThe march was held on the 81st anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, a decisive turn in the war against Nazi Germany during the second world war. Organizers said their inspiration goes back even further – to the “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression, when thousands of first world war veterans gathered on the National Mall to demand promised benefits, only to have the US military deployed against them.Christopher Purdy, an Afghanistan war veteran and organizer of today’s march, said the Bonus Army rally helped set the stage for the New Deal social programs and eventually the GI Bill, which provided higher education, healthcare and home ownership to veterans returning from the second world war.Other speakers criticized Trump’s decision to impose a travel ban on visitors from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, where many of the demonstrators served alongside translators who risked their lives for the US. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered a pause on the US refugee admissions program, putting translators’ safety in doubt.“We all left behind people who are now marked,” said Nadim Yousify, who immigrated to the United States in 2015 after working as a US government translator in Afghanistan and later joined the Marine Corps. More

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      How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people’s movements | Rev Dr Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back

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      For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts.As anti-poverty organizers, we’ve often used the slogan: “They say cut back, we say fight back.” It’s a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we’ve been on the back foot. In the world’s richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we’re tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump’s cruelty and avarice, it’s time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises.There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues.In our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country’s most significant poor people’s movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us.We’re reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people’s organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members.In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a multi-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care.At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn’t do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative “projects of survival”. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the “welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood’s first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.”As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed “welfare as a right”, challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a “guaranteed adequate income”, an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history.In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: “For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival … As far as I’m concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women’s freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In “the Johnnie Tillmon model”, poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty.In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s:

      The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements.

      These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life.

      The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival.

      These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development.
      The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with.The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we’re seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start.

      The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025) More

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      in US Politics

      Jewish organizers are increasingly confronting Trump: ‘The repression is growing, but so is the resistance’

      by

      On the morning of Columbia University’s commencement last week, an intergenerational group of Jewish alumni gathered in the rain outside the Manhattan campus’s heavily policed gates, wearing keffiyehs and shirts emblazoned with the words “not in our name”. Two had graduated more than 60 years earlier, and one spoke of having fled the Nazis to the US as a child. Others recalled participating in Columbia protests of the past, including those that led the university to divest from apartheid South Africa.They spoke as alumni and as Jews to condemn the university’s investments in Israel, its repression of pro-Palestinian speech, and its capitulation to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom in the name of fighting antisemitism on campus. They had planned to burn their Columbia diplomas in protest, but the rain got in their way, so many ripped them to pieces instead.“As a Jewish person, I’m really appalled at the idea that they are trying to make it sound as if opposing genocide is somehow antisemitic,” said Josh Dubnau, a professor at Stony Brook University who received a PhD from Columbia in 1995 and led the protest. “There are thousands of us who don’t believe in the right of the Jewish people to ethnically cleanse Palestine. There were Jews thousands of years before Zionism, and there will be Jews when Zionism is in the dustbin of history.”Another alumna, who graduated last year after being suspended over her participation in campus protests, wore a graduation gown and carried the photo of one of nearly 15,000 Palestinian students killed in Gaza during the current war.“We have a particular duty to show up as Jews because we are not being actively targeted in the way that Palestinian students, Muslim students and Arab students are,” said the student, who asked to remain anonymous. “It’s our duty to weaponise our privilege as Jewish students.” New York police arrested her along with another protester after they set their Columbia diplomas on fire.View image in fullscreenNineteen months into Israel’s war in Gaza and the US protest movement it prompted, allegations of antisemitism on campuses have become one of the primary pretexts for the Trump administration’s multipronged attack on higher education, including billions in funding cuts, demands universities submit to a string of measures curtailing their academic freedom, and the detention and attempted deportation of international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views.But increasingly, Jewish students, faculty and alumni are pushing back against the exploitation of antisemitism charges to justify repressive policies they say do not represent their Jewish values. They have written letters, led protests, lobbied legislators and denounced what they say is the systematic exclusion of Jewish perspectives that are critical of Israel from the national conversation over antisemitism.Jewish Americans – some identifying as “anti-Zionists”, others with a range of views about Israel – have been at the forefront of the movement against the war in Gaza. Last summer, some 200 people, almost all Jewish, were arrested at a protest on Capitol Hill a day before a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu. Earlier this year, more than 350 rabbis, along with more Jewish creatives and activists, signed a New York Times ad denouncing Donald Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza.But Jewish-led organising has broadened in recent months. As Jewish Americans continue to protest the war, they are also taking on Trump’s onslaught against higher education in the name of Jewish safety, rallying around detained students and condemning what they view as the exploitation of antisemitism in the service of a rightwing political project. In yet another New York Times ad, several former heads of leading Jewish advocacy groups, including conservative ones like Aipac and Hillel International, criticised US Jewish groups that “have been far too silent about the stunning assault on democratic norms and the rule of law” under Trump.“The repression has been growing, but so has the resistance,” said Marianne Hirsch, a retired literature professor at Columbia University, who researches memory and the Holocaust and is outspoken against efforts to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. “I’m seeing a really cross-generational, Jewish faculty, student, and community mobilisation against this narrative.”A need for nuanceJewish Americans’ views on Israel, the war in Gaza, antisemitism on campuses and the Trump administration’s actions are far more complex than mainstream political discourse may suggest.A recent poll by the Jewish Voters Resource Center found that a majority of Jewish Americans are concerned about antisemitism and say they are “emotionally attached” to Israel, although older respondents poll much higher on both questions than younger ones. But the survey also found that 64% disapprove of Trump’s policies to purportedly combat antisemitism, and 61% believe arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian protesters contribute to increased antisemitism. A rightwing Israeli thinktank found last year that one-third of American Jews believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.While large numbers of Jewish students point to feelings of ostracization on campus in the last year and a half, their views on the campus protests vary widely. A qualitative study of the experiences of Jewish students, published this month, criticizes representations of campus life that “compartmentalize students into either/or categories, diminishing nuances between them”. The authors point to “a need for nuanced discussions about Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish identity that respect generational differences and diverse perspectives”.View image in fullscreenBut tackling complex questions – for instance, about when anti-Zionism veers into antisemitism – has become difficult in an increasingly repressive climate. “It is making it impossible to have discussions in the classroom,” said Joel Swanson, a Jewish studies professor at Sarah Lawrence College.Swanson noted that many Jewish Americans are now mobilising against precisely the kind of repression their ancestors came to the US to escape. “The very liberal principles that have enabled Jewish thriving in the United States are being chipped away at systematically, one by one,” he said.Many of those who identify as anti-Zionist have found a home under the umbrella of Jewish Voice for Peace, a pro-Palestinian Jewish group whose membership has doubled since the war started – to 32,000 dues-paying members – and whose student chapters were banned from several campuses during last year’s protests. In Baltimore, earlier this month, members of the group’s dozens of chapters gathered for a national convening. Over four days of workshops at the heavily secured event, participants talked about organising from campuses to religious spaces to promote a “Judaism beyond Zionism”, as the conference tagline read, as well as address authoritarianism in the US.Leaning on JewishnessAs US universities have become political battlefields, much Jewish organising is happening on campuses and academic spaces.Responding to what they view as a crisis in their scholarly field precipitated by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Hirsch, the Columbia scholar and others have launched a multidisciplinary Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, a group of mostly Jewish academics invoking their expertise to advocate against universities capitulating to authoritarianism.Jewish faculty and students have also organised in defense of pro-Palestinian students detained by the Trump administration. Following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been detained for nearly three months with no charges, more than 3,400 Jewish faculty across the country signed a letter to denounce “without equivocation, anyone who invokes our name – and cynical claims of antisemitism – to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities”. Several Jewish students and faculty wrote letters to the court in support of Khalil. And Jewish groups and synagogues filed a court briefing in support of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was detained over an op-ed critical of Israel and released earlier this month as her case continues.“Jewish people came to America to escape generations of similar predations,” they wrote. “Yet the images of Ozturk’s arrest in twenty-first century Massachusetts evoke the oppressive tactics employed by the authoritarian regimes that many ancestors of [our] members left behind in Odessa, Kishinev, and Warsaw.”View image in fullscreenFaculty and students have also denounced congressional hearings against antisemitism on campuses that they say misrepresent their experiences and exclude their perspectives. As their president prepared to face legislators for a fresh round of antisemitism hearings in Congress this month, Jewish faculty and students at Haverford College issued a statement saying that their voices “have absolutely not been represented in the current public discussion of antisemitism” and questioning the credibility of mostly non-Jewish, Republican legislators leading the battle over antisemitism on campuses.Earlier this month, a group of Jewish students from Columbia University visited Congress to talk to legislators about their participation in campus protests that politicians paint as antisemitic, bringing their views “to lawmakers who are almost never hearing from that specific perspective”, said Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace’s action group, who accompanied the group.As the Trump administration has sought to justify its repressive measures in their names, many American Jews have found themselves invoking their Jewishness in a public way for the first time. “We’ve been criticising identity politics and the way everything gets siloed into identities, and suddenly we find ourselves saying ‘as Jewish faculty’ or ‘as the daughter of Holocaust survivors’,” said Hirsch.“I’ve always tried to steer clear of having a public Jewish identity. I never felt like I had to advertise it,” echoed Joshua Moses, an anthropology professor at Haverford College. “But this moment kind of demands it.” More