The city of Los Angeles is on fire. Once again, the progressive left has resorted to political violence – this time, using mass arrests of illegal aliens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as an excuse. The Los Angeles Police Department was practically stood down, not allowed initially to help when the ICE facility was surrounded. The situation got so out of hand that the National Guard has now been deployed. If there was ever such a thing as a safe bet, this is it – that this orchestrated civil unrest will soon spread beyond Los Angeles and beyond California. In 2020, George Floyd died in an altercation with police in Minneapolis, MN. His death gave leftist extremists an excuse to loot, burn, and vandalize several American cities. This year, it looks like ICE is their latest scapegoat.
Mostly Peaceful Los Angeles Riots
What is coming was inevitable from the moment President Donald Trump won the 2024 election. If not the ICE arrests, then some other event or Trump administration policy would have been overdramatized to produce the desired outcome.
A particularly insulting echo of 2020 is the claim coming from at least one elected Democrat that Los Angeles is experiencing “peaceful protests.” Federal agents are being attacked, cars spray-painted and set on fire, and rocks hurled at ICE vehicles – but Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is doing television interviews and – it must be said – lying through his teeth about what is transpiring. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on June 8, Booker told Kristen Welker: “The reality is, we see peaceful protests launching in Los Angeles and, again, any violence against police officers should not be accepted – local authorities can handle that.”
Booker wasn’t done. “But remember, a lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings,” Booker continued. He even put emphasis on the word “peaceful,” assuming, perhaps, that Americans would dismiss the photos and film of the destruction and instead take his word for it.
A Tale of Two Reactions: Democrats and Trump
Establishment journalists and other far-left activists fueled the trouble by spreading a harrowing but fictional tale of ICE agents sweeping through Los Angeles neighborhoods and raiding a branch of Home Depot, rounding up illegals. The Home Depot raid didn’t happen. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security claim the arrestees were specifically targeted for criminal activity or because they had final deportation orders.
It is always possible, of course, that the inevitability of a 2020 redux is blunted by a much harder line from the administration than we saw during that chaotic time five years ago. Then, the first Trump administration chose to see the riots as a state’s problem. Also, the central issue driving the unrest wasn’t an administration policy with grave implications for national security. This time around, Trump likely views this as very much a federal problem to be dealt with by federal authorities.
On Saturday evening, the president posted a warning on his Truth Social platform, using his favorite slur of California’s governor. "If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”
This is not a good look for the Democratic Party, to say the least. It is another sign that elected Democrats have lost control to the radical progressive wing – and they appear to be unalarmed by that, refusing, once again, to issue any strong and sincere condemnations of the violence. If regaining the trust of the American people is the goal, this is not the way. If – or, rather, when – these anti-ICE riots spread beyond Los Angeles, Democrats looking for a 2026 electoral comeback will find themselves in an increasingly tough spot.
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