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‘Kidnapped’: families and lawyers desperate to contact LA workers arrested in Ice raids
Gabriel says he has not been able to speak to his brother Jacob, since Jacob was arrested in a raid by armed immigration officials and federal agents at the Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Los Angeles fashion district on Friday.Yurien Contreras doesn’t know how her father, Mario Romero, is doing either.“I witnessed how they put my father in handcuffs, chained him from the waist and from his ankles,” Contreras said at a press conference in LA on Monday morning. “My family and I haven’t had communication with my dad. We don’t know anything.”Jacob and Romero were among dozens of people arrested in immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles this weekend, raids that sparked a roaring backlash and eventually led to the deployment of the national guard in the city. They were “kidnapped” by agents, Contreras said. “I demand due process for my father and the dozens of other workers.”The raids in the fashion district were followed by enforcement actions in the nearby city of Paramount, where federal agents cuffed and detained laborers at a Home Depot. Agents were also spotted outside a donut shop in nearby Compton, and around schools.Some of the families of those detained gathered outside Ambiance on Monday, demanding the release of their loved ones. Some, like Jacob, were the sole breadwinners in their families. Others, like José Ortiz, had worked in LA’s garment district for years – Ortiz had been with Ambiance for 18 years. “He was always here. He was a loyal worker,” his daughter Saraí Ortiz said. “He is someone who gave his life to this community and to his work.”Carlos Gonzalez said his older brother José Paulino was taken away not only from his siblings and mother, but also from “one of the friendliest and most loving dogs I have ever met”.At least 14 of those detained were members of the Episcopalian Diocese of Los Angeles. “Fourteen members of one of our Episcopal churches couldn’t be in church this morning on the Day of Pentecost. Their government ripped them from the arms of their families at home and the body of Christ at church,” said Los Angeles bishop John Harvey Taylor.Loved ones and lawyers are still scrambling to find where all of them were taken.“As police shot flash bangs overhead, I begged officers to let me meet with those who were detained,” said Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen, a legal fellow at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice. “Instead of upholding the constitutional rights of those detained, they prepared to repress those rising up against these atrocities.”The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 118 immigrants were arrested this week, and released the names of some of those in its custody, alleging criminal violations. But the administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, also admitted that the agency was arresting people without criminal records.The raids at workplaces – pushed by Homan and by White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller – come amid a broader push to speed up arrests and deportations. Homan said the LA area is likely to see more enforcement this week, even as thousands of national guard deployed to the city prepared to quell protests against the raids.Lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), found that immigrants apprehended in LA were initially detained in the basement of a federal immigration building. “As attorneys, we are disgusted by DHS’s blatant betrayal of basic human dignity as we witness hundreds of people held in deplorable conditions without food, water, or beds for 12-plus hours,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of ImmDef. “This is an urgent moment for our country to wake up to the terror Ice is inflicting on communities and take action.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) held a rally in downtown Los Angeles demanding the “humane treatment and access to lawyers for all detainees”.At least one of the people arrested over the weekend was almost immediately put on a bus and deported to Mexico, said Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, a deportation defense attorney supporting the impacted families. “And when they were removed, they weren’t given any paperwork, which is highly unusual and irregular,” he said.Others were taken to the immigration detention centers Adelanto, California – more than a two-hour drive from downtown LA – or El Paso, Texas. “All of this smacks of lawlessness – there have been violations of many, many rights.”The workplace raids were especially brazen, lawyers said, after a federal judge in April issued a preliminary injunction forbidding warrantless immigration stops. The injunction applied to a wide swath of California, and came after CBP conducted similar raids in California’s agricultural Kern county in January.“You can’t just racially and ethnically profile people and arrest them and ask questions later,” said Reyes Savalza, noting that many of those arrested had no criminal history and could apply for various forms of immigration relief if they were allowed to contact attorneys.“If the federal government can come and kidnap people without disclosing any information as to the reason for those arrests, every person in this country should be appalled and terrified,” he added. More
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LA cleans up and protests some more after weekend of defiance against Trump
Outside the federal courthouse complex in downtown Los Angeles on Monday morning, two cleaners carrying bins on wheels looked uncertainly at the daunting task in front of them – long walls in several directions covered in spray-painted graffiti after a weekend of vigorous street protest.They donned black plastic gloves and reached for spray bottles and rolls of paper towels, but these seemed hardly adequate even for the black marble plinth bearing the name “Edward R Roybal Center and Federal Building” where they began. Indeed, the rest of the official writing on the plinth was illegible, defaced by three separate graffiti reading “Fuck Ice” and another saying “Dead Cops”.The City of Angels was in recovery and clean-up mode after a fraught, boisterous day of protest on Sunday against Donald Trump’s immigration roundups and his decision to activate the California national guard against the will of the state’s leaders.A mostly peaceful series of demonstrations were marred, as night fell, by more serious acts of vandalism and violence. Some people, who the LAPD chief later said were not affiliated with the protesters, tossed rocks and paving stones off freeway overpasses on to police cruisers and officers below and a line of Waymo driverless vehicles that had already been spray-painted were set on fire.On Monday morning, street cleaning vehicles were out in force on Alameda Street, on the east side of the federal courthouse complex, where the national guard was stationed on Sunday and where thousands of protesters converged, starting in the early afternoon. The sidewalk and the long block of Alameda flanked by the federal buildings were cordoned off to the public.The 101 freeway, which had been occupied by protesters the night before, was open to traffic again, but most of the downtown exits were sealed off by California highway patrol vehicles. A cleaning crew with a pressure washer was hard at work on the outside of the federal building on Los Angeles Street, which houses a passport office, a social security office and other key federal bureaucratic services.View image in fullscreenThe national guard, which played almost no role in policing the protests on Sunday, was once again nowhere to be seen. Federal authorities from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were likewise noticeably absent.With much of the Los Angeles police department recovering from a long day and night, the streets were largely given over to representatives from neighboring police forces drafted in to help – from Pasadena, South Pasadena, Burbank, Vernon and other cities. South Pasadena had the job of guarding concrete blocks set up overnight on either side of LA city hall on Spring Street. Its officers also stood guard on the building’s western steps.Much of the city establishment – council members, local elected officials and union leaders – flocked, meanwhile, to a protest of their own in Grand Park, on a hill overlooking city hall, to demand the release of David Huerta, a leader of the Service Employees International Union who was arrested on Friday while monitoring an immigration raid and was expected in court for his first appearance on Monday afternoon.“David Herta is my brother,” the president of his union, April Verrett, told the crowd to rapturous applause and chanting. “What he would say is, use this moment!”The thousands in attendance blew horns and yelled in approval.Union volunteers acted as marshals for the event and kept a close eye on the perimeter to watch for troublemakers – there appeared to be none. A sole Los Angeles police helicopter hovered overhead, but otherwise law enforcement was entirely absent. More
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RFK Jr to remove all members of CDC panel advising on US vaccines
The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is getting rid of all members sitting on a key US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and reconstituting the committee, he said on Monday.Kennedy is retiring and replacing all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee for immunization practices, he wrote in piece published in the Wall Street Journal.“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote.More details soon … More
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California to file lawsuit over Trump’s ‘unlawful’ deployment of national guard
California plans to file a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Monday, accusing the US president of “unlawfully” federalizing the state’s national guard to quell immigration protests in Los Angeles.Previewing the suit, the attorney general, Rob Bonta, said the extraordinary deployment of troops had “trampled” the state’s sovereignty, overriding objections by the governor Gavin Newsom and going “against the wishes of law enforcement on the ground”. Bonta said the legal action will ask the court to declare Trump’s call deployment of the guard unlawful and will seek a restraining order to halt the use of its troops to manage the protests.“We don’t take lightly to the president abusing his authority and unlawfully mobilizing California national guard troops,” the attorney general said during a virtual news conference on Monday. Later, multiple news outlets reported that the Pentagon planned to temporarily mobilize about 700 marines to Los Angeles while additional national guard troops arrive in the city, a provocative escalation by the federal government.Democratic officials have argued that local law enforcement agencies had been adequately managing the protests, which began on Friday in response to a series of immigration enforcement operations across the LA area.“This was not inevitable,” Bonta said, arguing that the demonstrations had largely dissipated by the time Trump, on Saturday, announced his plans to assert federal control over at least 2,000 national guard troops for at least 60 days, which Bonta said inflamed the situation. On Sunday, roughly 300 California national guard troops arrived in Los Angeles, prompting an outpouring of anger and fear among residents.Trump’s call-up order “skipped over multiple rational, common sense, strategic steps that should have been deployed to quell unrest and prevent escalation”, he said.Bonta said his office would file the suit later on Monday.Newsom has accused Trump of intentionally sewing chaos, claiming Trump “wants a civil war on the streets” and appealing for protesters not to give the administration the spectacle of violence it is hoping to stoke.“This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic,” Newsom said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Every governor, red or blue, should reject this outrageous overreach. This is beyond incompetence – this is him intentionally causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy.”On Sunday, Newsom formally requested that Trump rescind his order and return command of the guard to his office. In a letter to the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the governor’s legal affairs secretary, David Sapp, argued there was “currently no need” for such intervention by the federal government and that local law enforcement was capable of “safeguarding public safety”.“Trump and Hegseth jumped from zero to 60,” Bonta said. “Bypassing law enforcement expertise and evaluation, they threw caution to the wind and sidelined strategy in an unnecessary and inflammatory escalation that only further spurred unrest.”In a rhetorical back and forth between Newsom and Trump, longtime political foes who clashed repeatedly during Trump’s first administration, Trump said he endorsed a threat by his “border czar” Tom Homan to arrest Democratic leaders in California if they impeded law enforcement, including Newsom. “Gavin likes the publicity but I think it would be a great thing,” Trump told reporters on Monday.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom responded to the taunt on Twitter/X, calling Trump’s support for the arrest of a sitting governor “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism”.The Trump administration has said that the immigration protests in Los Angeles amount to a “form of rebellion” against the authority of the United States government.The order does not invoke the Insurrection Act, the 1807 law that allows the president to deploy US soldiers to police streets during times of rebellion or unrest. Instead, it cites a rarely used section of federal law, known as Title 10, that allows the president to federalize national guard units in circumstances where there is a “rebellion or danger of rebellion” or the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.“There was no risk of rebellion, no threat of foreign invasion, no inability for the federal government to enforce federal laws,” Bonta said. He told reporters his office had studied the Insurrection Act and was prepared to respond should Trump later invoke it as a legal authority to deploy the US military. “We’re prepared for all of it,” he said.The statute has been invoked only once in modern history, Bonta noted, in 1970, when president Richard Nixon mobilized the nationalguard to deliver the mail during a strike by the postal service. The last time a president activated the national guard without a request from the state’s governor was in 1965, when president Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.In 1992, George HW Bush sent troops to LA to calm widespread civil unrest following the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King. But in that case both the California governor and the mayor of Los Angeles requested the federal intervention. More
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Talkshow host Dr Phil joined Ice agents for Los Angeles immigration raids
The television personality Dr Phil was embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers as they carried out controversial raids in Los Angeles that led to days of protests in California, his TV network said.Phil, whose full name is Phil McGraw, was with Ice before and after its agents conducted a series of raids on multiple locations across LA on Friday. Immigration advocates said at least 45 people were arrested, and the action was condemned by California’s governor and LA’s mayor.It was the second time McGraw, a former practising psychologist who hosted a TV talkshow for two decades, has been embedded with Ice this year. In January, he joined the US border czar, Tom Homan, in a choreographed immigration raid in Chicago, in a stunt that was criticized at the time.CNN was the first to report on McGraw’s presence at the Los Angeles raids. McGraw was there “to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations”, his conservative TV channel, MeritTV, told CNN. McGraw had “exclusive” access to Homan before and after the raids, CNN reported.During the Chicago raids, McGraw was on the ground with Ice officers and even spoke to some of the people the agency had detained. His experience in LA was less immersive, MeritTV said.“In order to not escalate any situation, Dr Phil McGraw did not join and was not embedded” during Friday’s raids, a MeritTV spokesperson told CNN.On Sunday, he appeared with Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, at a synagogue, as Adams signed an executive order which ordered city agencies to adopt a controversial definition of antisemitism.McGraw, who is not Jewish but has said it was his “duty” to support Israel, has increasingly immersed himself in political issues in recent months, particularly regarding immigration.In April, he McGraw backed Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and in May he described Trump as “a man of deep faith, a man of deep conviction”. More
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Los Angeles protests: a visual guide to what happened on the streets
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
