As violence erupted out of immigration enforcement protests in Los Angeles over the weekend, images of protestors waving Mexican flags became a focal point of the coverage and for the Trump administration’s reaction.
“The riots in Los Angeles prove that we desperately need more immigration enforcement personnel and resources,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X, formerly Twitter, Monday morning, alongside a photo of a protestor waving the Mexican flag.
“America must reverse the invasion unleashed by Joe Biden of millions of unvetted illegal aliens into our country.”
Various iterations of the Mexican flag, at times combined with the U.S. flag, were carried by protestors as some streets in Los Angeles turned violent. Protestors were angry at federal agents raiding immigrant communities amid efforts to ramp up daily arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
‘The Greatest Political Gift’
As photos of the flags appeared online, flown amid burning vehicles and law enforcement in riot gear, senior officials within the Trump administration said this proved there had been an “invasion” by illegal immigrants, particularly over the past four years under former President Joe Biden, and that it was necessary to send in the National Guard and deport those in the country without legal status.
“These idiots waiving Mexican flags during the LA riots just gave Donald Trump the greatest political gift,” Republican strategist Matt Wylie, who founded Freedom Project USA, told Newsweek. “It will be ‘Exhibit A’ as proof of an invasion. Those images have done more in the last few days to strengthen his ability to crackdown on illegal immigration than weeks of messaging ever could.”
The Trump administration has been trying to ramp up the number of illegal immigrant arrests in recent weeks after a slower-than-anticipated increase in arrests and removals and multiple lawsuits challenging aspects of the president’s policies, including the use of the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations of alleged gang members.
While Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and others within the administration have insisted that they are going after the “worst of the worst,” Democrats and immigration advocates have said this is not true and that innocent undocumented immigrants are being targeted instead at workplaces and immigration courts, including in L.A.
Assistant Professor Julia Mendelsohn, who researches the intersection of language, politics, and computation at the University of Maryland, told Newsweek that the presence of Mexican and Latin American flags during the protests against these actions should not be taken as “a statement on foreign allegiances.”
“While the presence of these flags does not affect immigration enforcement efforts, it is being strategically weaponized,” she said. “Officials are misrepresenting protestors’ use of these flags by framing them as symbols of foreign allegiance.
“This narrative can serve to delegitimize the protests, justify more punitive enforcement actions, and garner public support for immigration policies that might otherwise be unpopular.”
More punitive actions were initiated by the Trump administration, with the deployment of National Guard troops to tackle the violence that erupted around the protests over the weekend.
Proof Of An Invasion?
Waving flags is, of course, not an uncommon sight. In New York City at the weekend, Puerto Rican flags flooded midtown for the city’s annual parade celebrating that community. Irish flags are a common sight in March as many celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, whether Irish-American or not and flags of other nationalities are proudly flown within neighborhoods dedicated to them in cities across the U.S.
Alvaro Huerta, an associate professor with an immigration focus at Cal Poly Pomona, told Newsweek that every person in America has the right to express themselves and their culture.
“I’m a big fan, like Trump, of the UFC, and the last time I went to a UFC fight and Conor McGregor was there fighting, and there were thousands of his countrymen from Ireland. So now were they invading?” he said. “The fact that they’re white, they’re Europeans, to me, I am skeptical because they are not being attacked. Conor McGregor’s not being attacked. The Irish are not being attacked.”
Huerta and Mendelsohn both said that there were contradictions at play and that national flags were simply a way to show solidarity among the immigrant communities being targeted by ICE.
“When you have a flag, that’s not a threat. They’re not the Proud Boys coming armed for an insurrection,” Huerta said. “The flag is a cultural expression of who they are. This is a free country and we have that right. If they want to take away that right, just say it’s illegal for brown people to wave their flags.”
The protests were peaceful in parts, but those calmer instances of solidarity with the city’s immigrant communities were not the moments captured by photographers and TV crews over the weekend.
The photos of protestors carrying those flags amid teargas, flames, and police tactical gear were the ones that lived on. They were still being shared on social media and featured in leading news articles as tensions persisted between the federal government and local leaders.
“It will be a political gold mine for Trump that not only allows him to pivot away from the Musk breakup and opposition to the Big Beautiful Bill but allows him to double down on two of his strongest campaign promises: border security and ‘law and order,’” Wylie said.
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