President Trump orders National Guard to LA after clashes over immigration raids | BBC News

President Trump orders National Guard to LA after clashes over immigration raids | BBC News

hello I’m Nikki Shell Welcome to the program We start this hour in Los Angeles President Trump has ordered 2,000 National Guards into the city to counter escalating protests in a predominantly Hispanic district of the Californian city It comes after a second day of clashes between residents of Paramount and border immigration officers trying to implement President Trump’s policy to deport unauthorized migrants Now federal ICE agents use tear gas flashbangs and bat-ons to disperse the protesters The White House border policy chief has gone to Los Angeles to personally supervise the operation during which more than 40 migrants were arrested on Saturday He warned that there would be zero tolerance of any violence or damage to private property The mayor of Los Angeles Karen Bass said ICE was sewing terror in America’s second largest city While announcing the order deploying the National Guard the White House said the administration has a zero tolerance policy for criminal behavior and violence especially when that violence is aimed at law enforcement officers trying to do their jobs These criminals will be arrested and swiftly brought to justice The commander-in-chief will ensure the laws of the United States are executed fully and completely Well I want to show you some of the latest pictures from Los Angeles and they come in the last hour They show law enforcement officers wearing protective equipment including helmets coming out of the federal detention center Now several of them fire tear gas towards the protesters And it also appears that some form of explosive stun projectiles which are often described as flashbangs are thrown Now this came after the LAPD issued dispersal orders in some parts of the city They had said that the use of less lethal munitions had been authorized saying they can cause pain and discomfort Well the protesters then did seem to pull back and then law enforcement officers formed a line and they walked down the center of the road You can still see those bangs going off clearing the area They were trying to establish a cordon More tear gas and flash gang uh bang projectiles were thrown Now officers say multiple people have been detained for failing to disperse after multiple warnings Well in the last half an hour President Trump has posted on his truth social platform Let me read to you what he said He said “Great job by the National Guard in Los Angeles after two days of violence clashes and unrest We have an incompetent governor and mayor who were as usual just look at how they handled the fires and now they’re very slow permitting disaster Federal permitting is complete unable to handle the task.” He goes on to say “These radical left protests by instigators and often paid troublemakers will not be tolerated.” He also says also from now on masks will not be allowed to be worn at protests What do these people have to hide and why He says again thank you to the National Guard for a job well done We at the moment can’t yet verify whether the National Guard have actually deployed to LA But earlier one of the protesters described why they had come out onto the streets purpose was to peacefully tell them to not take our people We overheard it’s been shared that the that ICE had came to our towns We’re just here living working They stopped at Home Depot where where they know that people are undocumented So us as a community have came here to try to make peace so that they don’t make families separate one another And what did they do They just started to attack us We were peaceful And all of a sudden they started throwing bombs at us and all a lot of us just unified together on the other side to not let the bus that was coming in with all the police and then instead of them peacefully telling us to back up they just started pepper spraying us There’s a lot of women out there that have pepper spray Well let’s put the area where this is happening into a little context for you Now Los Angeles of course is a huge sprawling city with many different districts with some of them predominantly populated by particular communities Now the Paramount District is about 15 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean and its beaches and even further from areas like downtown LA Santa Monica and Beverly Hills It is a predominantly Latino district and despite the name Hollywood’s Paramount Studios are located more than 20 miles away Well our reporter in Los Angeles is Reagan Morris She brought us this update The area I am there’s a very large law enforcement presence A lot of the protesters have either dispersed or moved on to to other areas but we can still hear flashbangs going off in the distance And there were just some fireworks going off one of the neighbors setting them off But it’s still quite tense And just uh about an hour ago we were walking from one area to another and somebody threw a Molotov cocktail over the uh fence where we were and the the LA County Sheriff’s came rushing out The guy’s leg actually their pants caught on fire briefly as he tried to stamp it out and they were trying to find out who was throwing Molotov cocktails at them Um a flashbang accidentally went off next to the police which made a lot of the protesters laugh but then they just came in aggressively and moved people out Uh but we can hear it’s still going on and it moves around and we’re near an area where earlier today a few hours ago there was a a very large uh presence of ICE agents immigration and customs enforcement in unmarked cars And we’ve been told by some locals that there are factories around here where some migrants are still locked inside uh afraid to come out And that’s something we’ve heard not just over the last few days in LA County but over the last few months that a lot of uh immigrants who do not have legal documents to live here are living in fear ve very real fear of being deported Now LA is what’s known as a sanctuary city Just explain what that means Well it’s not just LA Most of California is a sanctuary and it means that local law enforcement are not meant to cooperate with federal immigration officials So if an undocumented immigrant illegal immigrant was arrested for shoplifting when when they get out of jail the local authorities are not meant to tell immigration and customs enforcement that hey this guy you can pick him up and deport him Whereas that would happen in most places in Texas So a lot of lines are being crossed the last few days though at least the perception of it as people see local law enforcement fanned out on the streets after they were called in to help uh immigration and customs federal officials uh to protect them But uh locally a lot of people just think they blended into one and see it as cooperation and targeting the immigrant community How do you think President Trump ordering in the National Guard is likely to go down We’ve already heard from Governor Nome saying that it is inflammatory and will only escalate tensions I I think that that is what the governor has said and that’s what a lot of the local leaders are saying and people we’ve spoken to here today that uh that would not be wellreceived in a lot of neighborhoods especially immigrant This where I am in Paramount is more than 80% Hispanic Uh it’s a very big immigrant community So it will probably not be very wellreceived We we’ve heard from our partners at CBS that just in the last hour or so that Governor Nuome and President Trump spoke on the phone for about 40 minutes We don’t know the contents of that phone call but maybe something has changed uh throughout that We don’t know And this of course is all because of President Trump’s policy to deport unauthorized migrants Yes that is part of the policy Whereas California policy is more often to protect migrants whether they have legal documents or not Uh you know California is the fourth biggest economy in the world and a lot of the agriculture sectors in particular there’s a lot of migrants working in those jobs that don’t necessarily have legal status in the United States and California and the economy really relies on them So they do try and protect uh law-abiding migrants without proper paper many of whom pay taxes and go to work every day Reagan Morris in Los Angeles Well one in witness to the uh protest that has been going on there over the last few hours spoke to a local reporter at the scene about what they had seen We were at a stoplight on the other side of Panama right over there in Alundra when out of nowhere in the stop immigration agents ICE all that came you know they came dressed up and all their military gear and they stopped traffic when they stopped traffic we started noticing and I told my girl that’s that’s immigration right there what they started doing what was they went in front of a a business a negotio and they started raiding they started bringing people out in vans once they started of doing that That’s when everybody knew you know what was going on And everybody was there in the traffic jam Everybody right You’re stuck in your car in your vehicle When they saw us looking at them doing all that that’s when they started throwing tear gas We were Everybody was still in their vehicles As soon as a as one of the tear um tear gas you said there was Who was behind you Behind us there was a a woman and her and her young daughter She was around 13 I kept in touch with them and as we speak she’s in the hospital because the tear gas bomb hit her right in the face They were right behind us taking taking notice that we’re not there at the protest We were stuck at the light right But we’re witnessing everything happening right in front of our eyes The tear gas explodes They come out crying out of their vehicle and they can’t breathe They’re literally on the ground right I have the video I have the footage Right And so what do you and your girlfriend do at that point We get off and we see everybody else getting off to record peacefully We do not throw anything at them We’re not yelling at them We’re just recording what’s going on because people deserve to know the truth This is why you guys are here This is because you know these things need to be documented This is what they wanted They wanted people to riot They wanted the people to start fireworks They wanted people to start burning out Why Because this is the effect So they can make us look bad So they can make us seem that we’re the ones causing this That we started it As Fernando Delgado witnessed to the protest well Rachel Uranga is the immigration reporter at the LA Times She told us about the latest situation in Los Angeles Less than an hour ago I can still hear some of the shots that were running ringing out in downtown Los Angeles There is some clashes going on in Paramount which is the largely uh Hispanic community working-class Latino community in uh Los Angeles And there’s also another small um small confrontation in downtown Los Angeles just outside of the federal detention center where immigrants are who have been uh picked up in raids this week or at courouses are being held Los Angeles is a notoriously blue area Um and it has a really heavy immigrant population While there’s people here that do think that um if you’ve if you’ve overstayed your visa or if you aren’t here legally you should uh face the law Um a lot there’s a lot of people out here who support the immigrant community and who are tied to it And just to tell you how deeply embedded California is with this community it’s like one out of every two children are immigrants It’s a really high number that live and um in mixed families part you know one one of the family members has a status that that they’re not here legally Los Angeles has turned into ground zero as a test for the limits of Trump’s immigration policy I mean here this economy really depends on immigrant labor and on communities that are tied to immigrants So you know there the Trump administration has really had some highprofile rates here and it’s really tested people Some people would say and and some politicians have said it’s provoked people and I think they are really a lot of the politicians are not happy the local politicians knew some certainly um about them sending over the National Guard that they feel is sort of an overblown show of force

US President Donald Trump has ordered 2,000 National Guardsmen to Los Angeles to deal with unrest over raids on undocumented migrants.

Tear gas was used to disperse crowds as residents of the predominantly hispanic Paramount district clashed with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

As many as 118 arrests were made in LA this week as a result of ICE operations, including 44 on Friday, sparking two days of protests.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has condemned the raids as “cruel”.

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