Related Articles
Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers swarmed Southern California in concentrated raids of undocumented citizens that are still ongoing. Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in Los Angeles (and in solidarity nationwide), giving President Donald Trump an excuse to send National Guard troops last weekend and move to deploy Marines to L.A..
Trump baselessly implied the protesters are “paid insurrectionists” during a press conference where he revealed he told California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) that “He’s doing a bad job, causing a lot of death and a lot of potential death. If we didn’t send out the National Guard — and last time, we gave him a little additional help — Los Angeles would be burning right now.” (No one has died during the L.A. protests.)
Newsom has said the “chaotic” sweeps “to meet an arbitrary arrest quota are as reckless as they are cruel,” and that, “Donald Trump’s chaos is eroding trust, tearing families apart, and undermining the workers and industries that power America’s economy.” On June 10, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass (D) instituted an 8 p.m. curfew in downtown L.A.
Rolling Stone spoke with several on-the-ground Angelenos, who dispute the notion that L.A.’s “on fire” or being overrun by vandals.
Adrianne Shropshire is the board chair of the grassroots organization Community Coalition. She says the Trump administration and allied politicians are spewing propaganda that inflames tension between citizens and law enforcement.
“When you have federal national leaders from this administration talking about arresting our mayor, arresting our governor, when you have the president himself using the kind of rhetoric describing a reality that is nothing like what is happening on the ground right now, it just increases the tension,” she says. “Nothing here that they’re doing is about de-escalation. It is all about escalating a confrontation with the people of Los Angeles.”
Shropshire spoke at a June 9 rally for David Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, who was arrested during a June 6 ICE raid in downtown L.A. and charged with a felony charge of conspiracy to impede an officer (he’s since been released on $50,000 bail). She also attended a prayer vigil on June 10, noting that both events were “peaceful.” From her vantage point, “People [wanted] to simply show up and say, ‘I do not consent. This is wrong. And my presence here is a demonstration of my right to protest.’”
The same mentality spurred 33-year-old L.A. native Victor Ulloa, aka L.A. media personality Rosecrans Vic, to participate in a demonstration in downtown L.A. on Sunday. “I’m not even sure what my politics are right now, but I just know that I don’t stand for families being torn apart and destroyed,” Ulloa tells Rolling Stone.
On Sunday, Ulloa walked in a demonstration in downtown L.A., which initially took place without commotion. He saw cops on the roof of the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, including Hispanic officers, staring down at them. “I was like, ‘Are they observing in a “We support you” way or “I remember some of your faces” way?’ I couldn’t really call it, to be honest, but we were staring back at each other,” he says.
When Ulloa passed Temple and Los Angeles Street, he saw protesters blocking traffic on the nearby Highway 101, and a “line of cops” pushing back against them; that’s when violence ensued.
One man was “shoeless,” “knocked out cold,” and being “dragged” away by officers, and another man in a Mexico shirt was arrested as well, Ulloa recalls. Then, he says, officers began shooting rubber pellets at protesters. “You start to see that stuff happen and it’s like, ‘Oh, shit, it’s going down now,’” he says.
Shortly after he headed home, he saw viral footage of citizens being tear-gassed and a police car lit aflame in the area where he had been peacefully protesting 20 minutes earlier. While Trump’s administration has framed these moments as evidence of Southern California being on the verge of destruction, Ulloa says that clash happened in a specific area, and it was “business as usual” on the other side of downtown L.A. — the BET Experience was taking place there before the Monday BET Awards showcase. “All of L.A. was not on fire. It wasn’t all shut down,” he clarifies.
Since last week in California, ICE has conducted a series of aggressive workplace raids and courthouse arrests. The ICE campaign began after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reportedly instructed agency officials not to bother trying to target gang members or violent criminals, and instead “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” including by going to Home Depot or 7-Eleven.
Ulloa, a first-generation Mexican-American, says he’s never seen ICE raids on the scale that they’ve taken place over the past week, and even though he and his family are American citizens, he is worried about them, especially his young son, being accosted by law enforcement who don’t know that.
Last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced, “Today, ICE officers and agents alongside partner law enforcement agencies, executed four federal search warrants at three location in central Los Angeles.” The department claimed to have apprehended “approximately 44 people” in the initial raids.
After rampant anti-ICE protests began that night, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth federalized and sent thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles and announced they would deploy 700 Marines there, too. While the National Guard is ostensibly there to protect federal buildings, Hegseth posted a photo on social media showing troops standing guard as ICE carried out an arrest.
Newsom filed an emergency motion blocking the deployment. Yesterday, a federal judge ordered Trump to return control of the National Guard to the governor, but an appeals court quickly put that order on hold. An appeal hearing will be held on June 17.
On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release titled, “ICE Captures Worst of the Worst Illegal Alien Criminals in Los Angeles Including Murderers, Sex Offenders, and Other Violent Criminals,” which contained mugshots of various undocumented citizens they detained.
In the statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, “These rioters in Los Angeles are fighting to keep rapists, murderers, and other violent criminals loose on Los Angeles streets. Instead of rioting, they should be thanking ICE officers every single day who wake up and make our communities safer.”
But the raids aren’t about apprehending sex offenders; they’re affecting everyday Angelenos like a Mexican mother of three who spoke to us under the alias Sofia.
Through a translator, the undocumented woman tells Rolling Stone that the “traumatizing” threat of ICE raids has her South Central community feeling like they’re living in de facto lockdown.
“Stress levels have increased,” she conveys. “There’s a lot of individuals who are not going to work because they fear deportation. It’s not just about, ‘What if I get deported? I need to go to work, how am I going to pay my rent and my bills?’ but, ‘Why are we being surrounded as if we’re criminals?’ Sofia has been concerned that her husband, who works at different L.A.-based sites every day, could be detained while out providing for his family. And the anxiety has extended to her children.
“A few days ago I was at the clinic when my son called me to ask me where I was. He sounded extremely worried, wondering if I was going to be OK because there were ICE raids in the area where I normally commute,” she says. “Instead of my children being able to be at school fully present, they are concerned about my well-being, and that’s not how things should be. We are honorable, hardworking individuals with dreams, goals, and aspirations for a better life and a better future.”
Shropshire says that the Community Coalition is organizing mutual aid for Angelenos like Sofia to ensure their basic needs are met. Sofia also lauded the efforts of L.A. nonprofit Strategic Concepts in Organizing & Policy Education (SCOPE), which has provided her aid and taught her community how to “make use of their voice so that they could empower their friends, family, and neighbors, and together be able to come together as one.”
The ICE raids continued into Thursday. Shropshire believes that the “show of force” isn’t just a concern for Hispanic communities, but all of L.A. For that reason, she says a “mosaic” of people of all identities have been present at the protests, marching in anti-ICE solidarity. Contrary to rampant social media discourse relegating immigration to a Latino issue, she clarifies that ICE’s predation affects immigrants in every community, including Black ones.
“We’re talking about African immigrants, we’re talking about Caribbean immigrants, we’re talking about Afro-Latinos,” she says. “There’s no distinction between a Black American and a Black immigrant. How do you know if I’m Haitian? If I’m Belizean? There’s nothing that says that ‘I am a citizen’ or ‘I’m not a citizen.’ So if you have unmarked vans rolling up in your neighborhood and you are a Black Angeleno, you are going to be concerned … it’s a continuum of the kind of escalation and unnecessary policing of our communities that Black Angelenos have seen for decades.”
Fox 5 DC has confirmed that Trump is preparing to deploy ICE special response teams in Northern Virginia (right outside Washington, D.C.), New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle; Shropshire notes that the latter four cities, as well as Washington D.C., have Black Democrat mayors. “When we think about this being a test case, it’s important that folks in those cities also get prepared,” she says, imploring citizens to “get their members of Congress and their senators to push back on what is happening.”
Shropshire is unequivocal that what ICE is doing should be challenged by all citizens. “I think that people are really, really clear that this is a moral moment in America,” she says. “It is a moral moment in Los Angeles. This is about: Who are we as Americans? Who are we as Angelenos? Who are the better angels, and how do we pull them out in this moment to say, ‘This is not who we intend to be as a country. This is not who we intend to be as a city.’”
