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Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass hit back at President Donald Trump’s Marine and National Guard deployments in her city, telling CNN’s Dana Bash “we don’t want them here.”
“I do want to dispel the notion that the military is here. We don’t want them here, they don’t need to be here. Our local law enforcement has complete control of the situation,” Bass said on “State of the Union” Sunday.
Trump deployed an initial round of 2,000 federalized National Guard troops to the City of Angels after chaotic anti-I.C.E. protests – in which demonstrators threw rocks at federal vehicles, brandished Mexican flags, and set Waymo cars on fire – on Saturday, June 7 and subsequently deployed an additional round of 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines.
The Marines detained a former Army veteran, Marcos Leao, 27, who became a U.S. citizen after serving in the military, after he wandered into a restricted area on his way to the Veterans Administration office. Leao told Reuters that the Marines treated him “very fairly.”
“They treated me very fairly, understand, this is a whole stressful situation for everybody, and we all have a job,” Leao said.
Protests continued in Los Angeles over the following week, culminating in a large demonstration as part of the nationwide “No Kings” protest on Saturday. Bass downplayed the unrest in her city, saying that recent protests took place in a “small sliver of our town” and put the blame for any unrest squarely on Trump’s deportation raids. Bass called Saturday’s protests “overwhelmingly peaceful” and said that there were sectors of Los Angeles’ economy that couldn’t survive without illegal immigrant labor.
“There were a lot of people out, about 30,000. Out of that big crowd five people were arrested, about 30 were given citations and there were injuries on both sides. Officers were injured and so were people that were there,” Bass said.
“If the raids hadn’t happened, then that protest would have been a ‘No Kings’ protest, we know that was planned months in advance. But the disruption and the fear that has been caused by the outrage by the raids has really had a devastating effect and has been a body blow to our economy.”
I.C.E has made several high-profile raids in Los Angeles and across the country as part of the president’s campaign promise to deliver mass-deportations. Trump promised to prioritize criminal illegal aliens, but critics allege the administration is separating families and targeting non-criminal workers.
“I don’t think the president understands that we have entire sectors of our economy that cannot function without immigrant labor,” Bass said.
The Trump administration called for a halt on deportation raids on agricultural sites, hotels and restaurants, and not to arrest “noncriminal collaterals” the New York Times reported. The move came out of fears that the sweeping raids were hurting key industries in the U.S.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday.
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