Dispatch From L.A.: Protesters March, Police Surround, and the Cycle Resets
“They start shooting, I’m taking off,” said Arley Washington, a protester I met on the bus, when he spotted the phalanx of police officers sealing off the corner of Los Angeles and Temple Streets. Protesters who wanted to block the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) headquarters had to walk around.
Washington, who was downtown on an errand and figured the protesters could use some support, passed teenagers waving homemade posters reading, “Tearing Apart FAMILIES is EVIL” and “ICE out of LA,” vendors selling Mexican flags from a pull cart, a half-naked man taking a bath in a fire hydrant, and walls of fresh graffiti riffing on some version of “FUCK TRUMP.”
On the other side of the 101, Washington spotted another line of cops and planned an escape route for when they rushed the crowd. “I got shot with a rubber bullet back in 2020 at the [Black Lives Matter] protests,” he said, lifting his shirt to show a small dent in his gut. “The police, they were lined up and they were shooting far, like two city blocks; he hit me from that far.”
Law enforcement, including the Los Angeles Police Department and the California National Guard, were a lot closer than that on Monday—a few hundred lined every entry and exit point of Los Angeles Street from the freeway and Temple Street, forming a sort of box canyon for the 800 or so people who came to protest the ICE raids that happe
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