The Trump administration said it planned to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles on Saturday after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.
In Paramount, Calif., about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, protesters clashed with federal immigration agents by a Home Depot near a residential area where many Latinos live. Law enforcement officials used rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades to disperse protesters. People were coughing, and one woman poured milk on herself after she was hit with pepper spray. The authorities also blocked off exits to prevent people from reaching the area.
The efforts to dismantle the protest appeared to work only in waves. After being tear-gassed, some demonstrators would retreat, pour milk on their faces to treat the burn and continue protesting.
Thomas D. Homan, President Trump’s border czar, told Fox News on Saturday that the administration was planning to bring in the National Guard that night to respond to the protests. “We’re already ahead of the game,” he said. “We’re already mobilizing.”
Other federal officials warned protesters of the legal repercussions for interfering with immigration agents.
“A message to the LA rioters: you will not stop us or slow us down,” Kristi Noem, the U.S. homeland security secretary, wrote in a social media post. “And if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Immigrant advocates said federal agents were in Paramount on Saturday to conduct a workplace raid at the Home Depot. But a Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that there were no immigration arrests there. The official said that agents from other federal agencies, including Border Patrol, the F.B.I. and the U.S. Marshals Service, came to help ICE in the Los Angeles region.
By afternoon, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which said it was not involved in any federal operations, had ordered protesters to leave the area, declaring the demonstration an unlawful assembly. Officers threw flash-bang grenades toward people who were defiant.
Gabriel Garcia, 26, a teacher in Paramount Unified School District, was standing a few feet from the front line of Los Angeles County Sheriff Department officers armed with shields.
“Be brave!” he shouted to protesters. “I know you’re scared but so are undocumented families!”
The standoff on Saturday followed a series of immigration raids that swept through Los Angeles on Friday, which resulted in chaos outside a federal building downtown where people detained in the raids were being processed. The protests, which drew scrutiny from White House officials, set the stage for continued tensions between federal authorities and Southern California residents and local officials who oppose the immigration operations.
In downtown Los Angeles on Friday, the streets swelled with protesters, and buildings and vehicles were vandalized with spray paint. Some people threw objects at federal agents, who then responded with flash-bang grenades. This week, agents arrested nearly 120 people, federal officials said. But processing those arrests was delayed because of the protests.
On Saturday, Trump administration officials denounced the city’s response to the Friday operations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, criticizing Los Angeles officials for not helping the federal agents as well as blaming Democrats for the unrest. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the protests a “violent insurrection.”
Officials with the Homeland Security Department took aim at those in the Los Angeles Police Department, saying that they had not responded in a timely fashion as protesters surrounded the federal building in the city.
“What took place in Los Angeles yesterday was appalling,” Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said. He added that Los Angeles police officers had taken “over two hours” to respond to the unrest, “despite being called multiple times.” The Police Department has not responded publicly to Mr. Lyons’s remarks.
On Friday, Jim McDonnell, the chief of police, said that his agency was not involved in civil immigration enforcement. He noted that the Police Department has a decades-old policy that bars its officers from stopping residents for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status. It was unclear whether any protesters were arrested by the Los Angeles Police on Friday night.
California officials, including Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Gov. Gavin Newsom, both Democrats, condemned the raids. The governor took particular issue with the arrest on Friday of David Huerta, the president of the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union.
The U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Bill Essayli, said Mr. Huerta was arrested and accused of obstructing federal agents conducting a raid by blocking their vehicle. Mr. Huerta is set to be arraigned on Monday, Mr. Essayli said.
This week’s operations came as ICE officers have been ramping up enforcement across the country. Mr. Miller, the White House official, recently told Fox News that ICE was aiming to arrest 3,000 immigrants a day. In the first 100 days of the Trump administration, officers arrested, on average, more than 600 immigrants daily. But those numbers have risen sharply this past week.
Since President Trump took office, demonstrators in California have been protesting ICE operations. So the response by protesters to the operations on Friday was not entirely surprising, said Chris Zepeda-Millán, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies mass immigrant movements in the United States.
“Arguably, the birthplace and central place of the modern-day undocumented immigrant rights movement is California, and Los Angeles in particular,” Mr. Zepeda-Millán said.
Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.
Jesus Jiménez is a Times reporter covering Southern California.
Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.
The post Trump Administration Says National Guard Will Be Deployed to L.A. Protests appeared first on New York Times.
