On a chilly grey Monday morning in June, in cloudy light, a group of city workers quietly gathered outside Los Angeles City Hall to assess the damage.
After thousands of demonstrators gathered in downtown over the weekend to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown on domestic immigration without documents, the granite walls of the city’s towering Art Deco seats were marked with fresh graffiti, with the same four-letter depiction before the word “ice” in about four people’s locations.
Around 12 windows have been destroyed on the south and west side of City Hall. At least 17 glass-covered lightboxes surrounding the structure were arrested, and fragments of blue-gray glass covering the lighting fixtures were broken.
At the forefront, spray paint-covered insults have been directed at both Mayor Karen Bass and President Trump.
Vandalism and graffiti stretched the block after the block across downtown Los Angeles: “Deleting Trump’s Head!!” scribbled in front of the Los Angeles County Law Library. The T-Mobile store on South Broadway had several windows on board, and glass was still scattered across the sidewalk. The used canisters labeled “precise impact” lie on the ground at various intersections.
The former Los Angeles Times building was scribbled in an exp with the words “immigrants rule the world.” The door to the lobby of that historic glove is shattered, with doodles inside the front of the building and on the whole large earth, “Please return the Homies” and “Trump is scum.”
However, few Angelenos was enraged by the destruction.
“It’s like usual. We’re always protesting,” Eileen Roman said, walking his dog near Grand Central Market.
As the daughter of a Guatemalan immigrant, she said she understands why people are protesting. She had no intention of joining them on the streets, but she would be involved in social media, she said.
“I think we’re all worried about what’s going on,” Roman, 32, said of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
Thomas Forland, a downtown Los Angeles Mission College resident and art history professor, said he wasn’t particularly concerned about the graffiti and destruction he saw on Monday morning.
“I wanted to know what the aftermath of this morning was,” Forland said. But so far, he hasn’t made him worried, but he said the apartment building has begun to get into the windows in anticipation of what will happen later this week.
“I’m not mad at the graffiti,” Forland said. “This is at least a representation of a real community.”
Sunday marked the third day of the protest in downtown Los Angeles after arresting migrants in Home Depot parking, the LA clothing district and several other locations on Friday.
Tensions escalated Sunday when President Trump ordered the deployment of hundreds of National Guards into the city. Protesters blocked 101 highways, burned self-driving cars, and threw agitators, or in some cases concrete chunks at law enforcement officials. Police wielded tear gas and rubber bullets around.
On Sunday at 8:56pm, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a social media post that “the agitators have burst” throughout downtown, and that illegal rallying had been declared in the Civic Center area.
“Residents, businesses and visitors to the downtown area must be vigilant and report criminal activity,” LAPD Central Division said in X.
About 30 minutes later, LAPD expanded its illegal rally in downtown Los Angeles. By 10:23pm, police said the employer was reporting that he was robbed by breaking into stores in the Sixth Avenue and Broadway areas.
“All DTLA businesses or residents are required to report vandalism, damage, or looting to the LAPD Central Division, and can be documented by official police reports.” “Please photograph all vandalism and damage before cleaning.”
Eric Wright and his wife, Margaux Cowan Bunker, a vacationer from Knoxville, Tennessee, paused on a Monday morning morning jog to take a photo of the graffiti-covered federal building at 300 N. Los Angeles St., which houses the office for ice.
On the exterior wall there was an egg and a slogan painted with expbates.
One graffiti, “When tyranny becomes law,” said “rebellion becomes mandatory.”
During this time, the couple laughed at being a Red State resident in LA and said that peaceful protesters who saw many Sunday nights did not bother them.
“Doodles are tough, but I appreciate the emotions, but someone has to clean it up,” said Wright, a 37-year-old physiotherapist.
“But a few graffitiers don’t protest, right?”
When dawn broke Monday, city crews were already incited across downtown to clean up the aftermath.
Several yellow city street cleaners drove up and down Los Angeles Street, between the purple Jacaranda and police vehicles scores of various social cities, in front of federal court.
Just before 9am, C. Two workers from the Irwin Piper Technical Center carried plywood boards to city hall and got into the window. When they were finished they told the Times, they planned to head across the street to repair the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters.
National Guard members were stationed outside downtown Los Angeles-Va. Clinic on Alameda and Temple Streets, with police vehicles blocking the roads around federal buildings.
A man in a silver SUV – whose head is completely covered in white balaclava – drove by the barricades on Commercial Street and Alameda Street under the window. They flipped the officer standing nearby.
Several stores that were open normally on Monday morning remained closed, including blue bottled coffee. However, others, including Grand Central Market, were already bustling with customers.
Octavio Gomez, the supervisor of the DTLA Alliance, quickly rolled black paint onto the wall next to Grand Central Market, which was newly covered in graffiti.
“Today is… a bad day for last night,” Gomez said. His team said he had been working to deal with the damage around town from 5am. “It’s all coming back, right? Because there’s still protests.”
For the Knoxville couple, the juxtaposition between the weekend in Los Angeles and the news coverage of the protest felt strange.
They had an idyllic Los Angeles Sunday – a food festival, a Lapride March in Hollywood, and a visit to Grand Central Market.
However, on television and social media, Los Angeles was portrayed as a place of total disruption.
“It’s totally scary when we go back to where we live,” said Cowan-Banker, a 42-year-old personal trainer. “I’m sure they think it’s a war zone here.”
But Wright said he thought people should protest the Trump administration: “They are stealing people from their families on the streets,” he said. “This is America. Sending the National Guard was intentionally inflammatory.”
“This feeds his voters directly,” Wright said of Trump.
“And they’re the people we’re going home,” his wife added. “No one is going to hear, but I’m kind of happy that we’re here to carry information.”
The couple continued to take photos past the police car line, halfway through the five-mile morning run.
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