L.A. Burns
Riots in Los Angeles: President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles following three days of clashes between protesters and police. The riots were set off when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided workplaces in pursuit of immigrants here illegally.
Most of the violence has so far been contained to downtown L.A. There, rioters have set self-driving Waymo taxis on fire and vandalized buildings. Protests are also happening some 15 miles south in Paramount, to the east of Compton and north of Long Beach.
Jim McDonnell, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), implied the protests were not occurring organically and that the violence should be attributed to “anarchists” and “people who do this all the time.” More than 150 people have been arrested in the L.A. protests since Friday, with 60 arrested in San Francisco (where similar protests are happening, but with less damage so far).
Got this the other side of the Waymo fires pic.twitter.com/HVOXKZtI3V
— Los Angeles Scanner (@LosAngeles_Scan) June 9, 2025
At one point, it looks like the LAPD shot a journalist with a rubber bullet:
LAPD aims and fires at female Aussie reporter whose back was turned. @LAPDPoliceChief, WTF ARE YOU DOING OVER THERE pic.twitter.com/FAEu98u3BH
— Hear in LA (@hearinladotcom) June 9, 2025
“Trump’s order for the troops was the first time since 1965 that a president had activated a state’s National Guard force for a domestic operation without a state governor’s request for the purposes of quelling unrest or enforcing the law,” reports The New York Times. The paper quoted California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, saying Trump’s move “is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions”; he added that “this is the wrong mission and will erode public trust.” (As for what he thinks the right mission is, I guess I just haven’t listened to enough of his podcasts to be able to say.)
It’s hard to know where this goes: Whether it escalates further, whether the National Guard’s presence will actually quell the unrest, whether public sentiment toward deportations changes based on the conduct of the rioters, and how much property damage Angelenos are willing to tolerate. One thing is clear: The Trump administration appears to relish the opportunity to send in the National Guard. And another: The senseless property destruction that has become commonplace at such events since the summer of George Floyd means normal, uninvolved people sometimes lose their livelihoods when cities descend into chaos.
Shouldn’t she be at school right now? Greta Thunberg and a group of 11 other activists—including Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham and Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian member of the European Parliament—set sail from Sicily about a week ago and have made their way to G
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