On Wednesday morning, the 18-year-old drove from his Ontario home to downtown Los Angeles for an hour Wednesday, protesting the ongoing federal immigrant raid and the deployment of President Trump’s military into the city.
Griffon Woodson, a new high school alumni, grabbed goggles and a black bandana to cover her face. It was her first protest. And after watching a video of the chaos on the streets all week, she thought she would join a crowd of passionate protesters.
But she arrived too early.
Downtown streets were clear as she stood outside a graffiti-covered federal construction on Los Angeles Avenue around 11am. Clusters of police officers were easily standing around courthouses and city halls, drinking coffee and Red Bull, chatting with dog pedestrians, and scrolling through their phones.
“I thought there were more people here,” Woodson said. “I thought people would go out during the day.”
The protesters faced a law enforcement officer near Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday.
(Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
By 6:30pm, it was a completely different scene. Los Angeles police officers were charged with hundreds of people marching from Pershing Square to city hall, where police officers fired rubber bullets at the crowd on foot, knocking some protesters to the ground.
“It’s very destructive to everyday life – raids, protests. Everything will be destroyed!” Saul Burns, 22, said Saul Burns, 22, who owns a nearby hotel, jogged away from police officers on a baton-wielding horse. “Who wants to work in this state?”
It falls in the morning. Rude at night. This was a routine in downtown Los Angeles this week after President Trump and the Secretary of Defense deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines in cities amid scattered protests over US immigration and customs enforcement raids.
1. LAPD officials will take a break at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) 2. Lap kettle and arrest protesters in downtown Los Angeles as protesters continue to clash with law enforcement on Wednesday. (Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
Both police and protesters say the difference between day and night is evident in the city’s already quiet downtown.
The intense but isolated chaos is primarily located in and around the civic centre, including city halls, LAPD headquarters, multiple courthouses and federal buildings. This area is a few blocks within a city that weighs just over 500 square miles.
There, protesters burned unmanned Waymo vehicles, threw rocks and bottles at police and national guard members, and closed the 101 highway. The businesses are being robbed. The window is broken. The phrases “f—Ice,” “F-LAPD,” and “F-Trump” have been spray painted on many buildings, including the 1928 Art Deco landmark City Hall.
The downtown curfew, which began Tuesday, from 8pm to 6am, appeared to quell some of the late-night violence and property damage, along with calls for non-violence from many protesters.
This week, Trump was called the “Garbage Mountain,” the second largest city in the country that needs rescue from so-called foreign invaders and mobs. He wrote in the true social world, “If our troops didn’t go to Los Angeles, they would be burning on the ground right now, just like many of their homes were burning on the ground.”
But if the president visits the city centre during the day, he may be a bit boring.
A veteran LAPD officer sitting outside city hall on Wednesday morning said the day was mostly calm and the protest schedule was predictable.
Officers said they were not allowed to speak on behalf of the department, but said the crowd dripped every day around 1pm. If they were involved in an organized protest — the United Nations rally of service employees who gathered thousands of people at Gloria Morina Grand Park on Monday, or the march led by faith leaders on Tuesday — they were peaceful.
Late in the afternoon and late at night he said “those who are here to be upset” would appear. Most are teenagers.
The 53-year-old LAPD officer sat next to him and smoked a cigar, describing the late-night protester as “Mad Max crowd: people with mini bikes, people with masks, rocks, bottles and fireworks.”
By 7:45pm on Wednesday, June 11th, the protest had dipped to dozens of people in kettles outside the county courthouse.
(Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
A Latino police officer born at USC Hospital, LA County and raised in East LA, sighed that he loved his hometown city.
On Wednesday afternoon, 62-year-old homeless service worker Reginald Wheeler said his work day ended around 3pm and he was present at the protest all week after staying until things got wild. He referenced the 1984 hip-hop song “Freaks Come at Night” to Whodini, saying “That’s the atmosphere” as the sun sets.
“More peaceful protesters tend to leave,” he said. “They’re having dinner to cook.”
Edward Maguire, a criminologist at Arizona State University, said it was a “common dynamic” during a major protest era, and that “criminal criminals” exploit the uproar and often exploit the darkness of the night to wreaking havoc near more ideologically motivated sites of demonstrations.
Federal officers and members of the National Guard stand outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.
(Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
The provocation in Los Angeles appears to have been exacerbated by the presence of soldiers in uniform, Maguire said.
Calvin Morrill, a professor of law and sociology in Berkeley, California, said most modern protests are non-violent and highly organized by activists, labor unions and community organisations.
“In most democratic countries, if the police perceive protests as potentially violent and threatened, in normal circumstances, there is a dance between the police and the protest,” Morrill said. “But that’s not what’s happening in Los Angeles. … This is a sight built by the federal administration to dramatically make fear, a threat to people who are not Angelenos, very far from the real world. It’s been dramatized for media consumption.”
Trump portrays the entire city as a lawless place, but federal agents were “attacked by an out-of-control mob of agitators, troublemakers, and/or rebels,” he writes true socially – the difference between literal night and day has happened all week.
On Monday evening, hundreds of people ignored the dispersal order near a federal building, police — fired non-fatal ammunition and threw rena bullets from a flash van — pushed protesters into Little Tokio, where businesses and the Japanese-American National Museum were significantly destroyed.
1. LAPD will fire a flash bang hand rena bullet at anti-ice protesters on San Pedro Street on Monday. (Carlin Steel/Los Angeles Times) 2. The Skehees store in downtown Los Angeles was hit during an anti-ice protest, and the entire storefront was covered in plywood as a precaution against future damage on Tuesday. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Daylight on Tuesday brought about a completely different scene. Volunteers rub graffiti from the exterior of the museum. This highlights the painful lessons of mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
After seeing images of vandalism on her social media feed, Westrama volunteer Kimiko Carpenter stopped by Anawalt wood to buy $50 worth of rags, gloves, scraping brushes and canisters. She drove downtown and scattered her sleeves.
Carpenter wiped his brows with the elbows of a white button-down shirt and said that although he had no official affiliation with the museum, he was half Japanese and volunteered as a teenager years ago. It felt like something specific she could do for hours before she had to welcome her young children from school, working to remove scrawled spray paint across the window.
A large crowd gathers with faith leaders on Tuesday as a prayer vigil at Grand Park.
(Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
Shortly before the curfew came into effect Tuesday night, hundreds of people led by the Union of Faith Leaders marched from Grand Park to the Edward R. Loibal Federal building on Los Angeles Avenue, stepping into the front of another, more controversial group of protests.
When faith leaders arrived and asked the group to kneel and pray on the stairs of the building, Homeland Security officials trained members of the clergy with pepperball guns, while members of the National Guard tense their riot shields.
“We see you wearing your own masks. You don’t need them,” Pastor Eddie Anderson, pastor at McCarty Memorial Church of Christ and Voice Leader in LA, told officers and security guards. “People came together and reminded us that there is a higher power, to remind us that in Los Angeles, everyone is free and that humans are not illegal.”
The religious group left when the clock was struck at 8pm.
Dozens remained. Someone threw a glass bottle at the policeman from a nearby pedestrian bridge. The horse-riding officers shaking traffic in turmoil and knocked protesters to the ground. Within 30 minutes, the familiar sounds and scream demonstrators of LAPD’s less-than-fatal ammunition launcher were once again filled downtown.
The next morning, Woodson appeared in a quiet federal building. There, she and a few other young women became more and more journalists.
“My plan today was to make as much noise as possible,” she said. “Trump likes to try to suppress our voices. Ice wants to suppress our voices. LAPD wants to suppress our voices.
California State Guard members and LAPD officials will watch protesters gather in federal buildings on Tuesday.
(Jason Armand/Los Angeles Times)
At about 11:20am on Wednesday, five camouflaged National Guard members lined up the stairs in front of the building, standing behind a clear riot shield. Upon their eyes, Woodson tied her bandana around her face and began screaming, “Immigration is not the problem! Immigration is never the problem!”
The shoulders of the Mexican flag, which marched quietly behind her, was 19-year-old Michelle Hernandez, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who lived in East LA and worried about her family and friends during the ice attack.
She spoke softly, but said, “I want to be a voice for those who can’t speak.” She said it hurts to see Latino police officers and federal agents involved in the crackdown on immigration, and it’s “very heartbreaking to see your own people betray you.”
As the young woman marched, several Latino maintenance workers sniffed a power hose across the federal building and blew away graffiti and didn’t pay any attention to heavily armed National Guard soldiers. One 67-year-old worker from East LA said he was happy to see soldiers outside the building he had been employed for the past 20 years, as he thought the vandalism would have been worse without them.
George Dutton, a UCLA professor who teaches history in Southeast Asia, stood alone in front of the stairs of a federal government building as the young woman walked back and forth behind him, holding the signs that read, “It’s called the Constitution, called your Constitution.”
Dutton, who took a break from scoring the final exam, was quietly not surprised.
“It speaks to the various paradoxes around this, it’s a movement that flows in decline,” he said.
“We see soldiers wearing fatigue with guns, so maybe they’re trying to create the idea that this is a war zone,” he added. “And if you do a tight shot with one of these national security guards, you might actually make that impression. But when you pull back, you get the big picture and you realize it’s literally manufactured.”
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