Predator vs. Aliens: Trump fuels clashes in Los Angeles — and it’s working in his favor

At least six smashed police cars sit on the highway. Protesters armed with cobblestones occupy the overpass above. Underneath, police try to hold their ground. Every time another squad car attempts to reach the besieged officers, it is pelted with rocks, tree branches, garbage, and firecrackers.

This is the scene in Los Angeles, where riots erupted following raids by officers of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service in immigrant heavy neighborhoods, during which people were detained indiscriminately on the streets. In recent days, President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard and military forces to suppress the protests.

California authorities filed a court complaint, accusing Trump of inciting tensions and unlawfully attempting to seize command of the state's National Guard. In response, the president did not rule out the possibility of arresting local officials — up to and including the governor — and of pulling federal funds from California's budget.

The federal government and the country’s most populous and economically powerful state are locked in a standoff that could set a precedent for Trump’s future clashes with other sub-national Democratic leaders who oppose his agenda.

The Home Depot raid

On the morning of June 6, a group of Latino men had gathered as usual near a Home Depot store in the Paramount neighborhood of Los Angeles. For people without papers or work permits, stores like this — selling tools and supplies for construction and gardening — have become informal hubs for finding day labor.

Suddenly, someone shouted in Spanish — “Immigration!” — and men in military-style gear spilled out of a minivan parked nearby, arresting those they deemed suspicious.

“They just grab people. They don’t ask questions,” a woman who witnessed the scene told the Washington Post. Over 40 people were detained in the raid, and some were deported almost immediately.

It later emerged that the adoption of such tactics was the result of pressure from the Trump administration, which had ordered immigration agencies to meet quotas for detentions and deportations.

After returning to the White House this past January, Trump quickly achieved his first objective. Although the number of encounters between would-be illegal immigrants and officers of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service had been falling dramatically throughout Joe Biden’s last year in office, the number of such encounters reached historic lows in February. But efforts to fulfill his campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented residents have so far fallen flat. In its first 100 days, the new administration detained 66,500 undocumented immigrants — slightly more than were taken into custody under Biden over the same period in 2024 — and deported slightly fewer than his predecessor.

ICE has imposed arrest quotas, enlisted the FBI and other agencies, and used various other tricks to boost the numbers. One tactic involved closing immigration court cases prematurely, allowing ICE agents to grab people leaving the courthouse and deport them without a hearing.

Trump, however, kept demanding more arrests — up to 3,000 per day. His chief immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, gathered ICE leadership and ordered them to shift their focus from targeted operations against gang members and criminals towards the mass detentions of undocumented immigrants in the streets. According to the Wall Street Journal, Miller boasted he could personally snatch at least 30 undocumented people off the streets of D.C. on the spot.

As a result, ICE raids grew harsher — and, critics say, increasingly senseless. Officers stormed restaurants, detaining all workers. A Danish father of four, legally in the U.S. for years, was deported over paperwork errors. In San Antonio (California), ICE agents stormed a minivan carrying a family with two kids and arrested the father. Some U.S. citizens reported being detained and held without a chance to prove their legal status.

Protests escalate

Clashes broke out almost immediately after the raid in Paramount. Protesters, masked and unmasked, hurled rocks at high-speed vehicles marked as Border Patrol.

Trump supporters were quick to claim the protests were orchestrated, and the president himself repeatedly framed the unrest as the work of far-left activists trying to derail his agenda. In reality, there's no evidence of that. The unrest was clearly spontaneous, erupting in neighborhoods targeted by the raids. At first, only locals took part, with activist groups joining later — but none of these outsiders steered events in a decisive manner.

By June 7, the clashes had nearly died down. That afternoon, there were no reported incidents. Then Trump ordered 2,000 California National Guard troops into the city, and another 2,000 later joined them.

Each state has its own National Guard, which answers to both state authorities and the Pentagon. Trump cited a legal clause allowing the president to take command of a state’s Guard if “the state is unable to maintain public order.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Marines stationed nearby the site of the protests had been placed on high alert. Governor Gavin Newsom countered that Trump had not come to restore order, but to “manufacture a crisis.”

After Trump’s escalation, the situation deteriorated again. By June 8, Los Angeles police had declared “tactical readiness” and began making arrests. Rubber bullets were used, and videos show officers shooting people in the back. Federal agents deployed stun grenades and tear gas in Paramount. Two motorcycles rammed into a police line guarding buildings — both riders were detained and several officers were injured.

By June 9, up to 700 Marines — troops whose training is not meant to equip them for missions involving domestic crowd control — had joined the National Guard, further angering protesters. Demonstrators chanted: “Trump out of L.A.!” “ICE out of L.A.!” “National Guard out of L.A.!”

Trump, meanwhile, kept raising the temperature. “If they spit [at police], we’ll strike, and I promise they’ll be struck harder than ever before,” he wrote on TruthSocial. He accused Governor Newsom of “inspiring” the protests and trotted out the nickname he had used for the prominent Democrat last year, when he referred to Newsome as “new scum.”

The feud peaked after Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan threatened to arrest state officials who obstructed troop deployment. “He can arrest me too,” Newsom shot back. Trump replied that arresting Newsom would be “great,” since the governor “loves attention.” He added that he actually liked Newsom, even if he said he considered the Democrat to be “grossly incompetent.”

As of June 10, protests and unrest were limited to specific areas of sprawling Los Angeles, which covers 1,300 km². Still, the National Guard and military remained in place.

War on the state

By June 11, the conflict had boiled down to a standoff between the president and the California governor. At the center is Trump’s move to place the National Guard under federal command over the objections of the state. This sidelined California authorities and made the Guard effectively a federal force.

The move is not without precedent, but each time it happened before, it caused fierce debates. In perhaps the most famous example, in 1964 President Lyndon Johnson ordered the Alabama National Guard to protect civil rights marchers from segregationists.

As for deploying federal troops in cities, the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act limits the federal government’s domestic use of force. Specifically, it prohibits using federal troops for law enforcement.

Trump sidestepped the issue by claiming the troops would only be protecting federal buildings in Los Angeles. Still, both he and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth have referred to the unrest as an “insurrection” — hinting they might invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which allows the president to suppress domestic rebellion using the military.

So far, Trump has used terms like “form of uprising” in official documents, rather than “insurrection” — a legally significant distinction. The Insurrection Act was last used in 1992, when California authorities actually requested military aid from President George H.W. Bush in connection with the Rodney King Riots — a far more violent wave of unrest that led to 63 fatalities over the course of five days.

This time, however, California’s government remains firmly opposed to federal intervention. Newsom said Trump’s actions were taken illegally and for no reason. “Donald Trump is creating fear and terror by failing to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and overstepping his authority. This is a manufactured crisis to allow him to take over a state militia, damaging the very foundation of our republic,” the governor said.

California has now filed a federal lawsuit demanding a reversal of Trump’s order to federalize the state’s National Guard. But the court declined to issue an immediate injunction, with the judge giving the Trump administration time to submit its evidence. There’s no doubt the legal battle will be long and drawn out — and it may even end up in the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Los Angeles officials imposed a curfew downtown in an effort to quell any remaining unrest.

The conflict has made Newsom the face of resistance to the powers-that-be in Washington. He argues the president’s actions amount to “causing chaos, terrorizing communities, and endangering the principles of our great democracy. It is an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.”

There is a reason why California became the first battleground in the national fight over the new administration’s agenda. It is the largest U.S. state, home to over 39 million people, with an economy exceeding $4 trillion. If California were a country, it would rank sixth globally by GDP. And its demographics hint at America’s future: while white Americans made up nearly half of the state’s population 25 years ago, they now account for just over a third, while the Latino population has grown to nearly 40%.

At this point, the original cause of the clashes— how best to restore order in L.A. — has faded into the background. At the heart of the conflict is a fundamental question about states’ autonomy in the American system. Newsom warns that Trump is threatening the sovereignty of the U.S. states and has called on others to support California — at least 22 Democratic governors have done so.

But while Newsom’s goal is to stop Trump from imposing order by force, Trump appears to want something more — to establish a precedent for implementing his agenda via military means in any state that dares to defy him. The federal crackdown has sparked nationwide protests against harsh deportation policies, with demonstrations already taking place in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago, among other cities.

Even if Trump manages to prevail over California, he will still face resistance from numerous other far-flung urban areas full of citizens who largely reject his agenda. In other words, the confrontation between federal authorities and the states is only just beginning.