Los Angeles Is Burning. But the People Are Rising Like Smoke.
Over three days, Los Angeles became a battleground... federal agents raided, but the people roared.
June 6, 2025. It was the kind of L.A. morning that lied to you, the sky washed clean, breeze soft off the hills, the sun painting everything gold.
On the corner of Sunset and Alvarado, day laborers leaned against the wall of Home Depot, sipping coffee from paper cups, shoulders stiff from yesterday’s work. A few men shared a bag of pan dulce. One tightened the straps on his steel-toe boots, hopeful today he’d get picked up early for a roofing job. His son really needed a new pair of shoes after the school year tore his up.
Ten miles south, in the Fashion District, Carmen stood at the folding table inside Ambiance Apparel, hands raw from detergent and denim. The industrial fans were busted again, the air thick with fabric lint and sweat. She’d already boxed up three pallets for shipment. Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. Payday was still four days away & she just had to make it through.
At the day laborer center off Santa Fe Avenue, Jorge rubbed the sunblock into his neck, watching as trucks rolled past. He hoped for tree work. It paid better, even though last time a branch nearly took off his hand.
None of them saw it coming.
The SUVs didn’t screech in. They drifted, slow and calm, like sharks in shallow water. Blacked-out windows. No license plates. No flashing lights. Just menace wrapped in steel.
Doors flung open and the boots hit pavement. Heavy, tactical, synchronized. Not ICE uniforms. No visible insignia. Just black armor, Kevlar helmets, mirrored visors. One man had something that looked like a military patch but it was unfamiliar, like a symbol from a country that doesn’t exist on any map.
Then came the shouting. No warning. No explanation.
“Hands where I can see them!”
“On the ground! Now!”
“Get down, get down!”
At Home Depot, Miguel’s first thought was: cartel. He dropped his wrench and ran. He didn’t make it five feet. They tackled him face-first into the curb. Blood poured from his nose, soaking into the concrete. He tried to scream, but a knee crushed his back. Zip ties cut into his wrists like wire.
A man next to him, no older than 20, was tased mid-sentence. His body seized. He crumpled, head smacking the concrete with a sound like a dropped cantaloupe. No one checked if he was breathing.
Inside the clothing warehouse, Carmen ducked behind a metal rack when she heard the boots. The drone came in first.. silent but for the faint electric whine. Red light blinking. Then gas canisters rolled across the floor, hissing. The air turned sour. People screamed. Someone slipped and cracked their skull against a sewing machine. Carmen tried to crawl toward the back exit, but two agents grabbed her by the elbows and yanked her out like luggage. Her shirt tore. Her shoe came off. No one said where she was going.
At the day laborer center, Jorge saw a man punched in the stomach so hard he vomited on himself. Another was dragged from the back of a landscaping truck by his hair, zip-tied face-down on the asphalt. People shouted "Papeles! Por favor!" but the agents didn’t respond. One barked back in English, “This is federal now. You don’t have rights.”
Drones circled above all three sites, watching from the sky like vultures. Some agents carried iPads, using Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, swiping through profiles. Photos. Faces. A man’s name was called. He tried to run. They released a dog. They sealed off entire blocks. Yellow tape around buildings. Streets shut down like a crime scene. But there had been no crime.
Just brown skin.
They loaded them into vans; dozens at a time. No space to breathe. No windows. Someone passed out and no one helped. Phones were confiscated. Belts, shoelaces, IDs… all gone.
They were taken to a federal facility beneath the city. A basement with fluorescent lights and no clocks. Concrete floors. No blankets. No beds. No food for eight hours. A woman screamed for her insulin. A teenager sobbed for his mother. The guards told them to shut up.
They asked for lawyers. None came. One said, “You’re not American. You don’t get one.”
Outside, Los Angeles went on pretending nothing had happened. Coffee shops opened. Kids walked to school. Music spilled out of car windows. Tourists took selfies in front of murals that said libertad and justicia.
But in the warehouses and day labor centers, they came for the people who hold this city together. They came for the hands that build it, clean it, feed it, patch its roofs and mop its hospital floors. And they came with silence, masks, and guns.
They came for us at work. Not in the shadows. Not at night. Not in secret. But in the heat of a summer morning, with cameras rolling and neighbors watching.
This was not immigration enforcement. It was an abduction, and it wasn’t an accident. The raids were planned. Coordinated. Federally sanctioned. What follows is a detailed investigation into what happened on June 6 in Los Angeles.. the agencies involved, the laws ignored, the people disappeared, and the rising architecture of state terror that made it all possible.
Day One | June 6th, 2025:
It was a coordinated, multi-agency operation carried out without warrants, without judicial oversight, and without regard for civil rights. Federal agents stormed workplaces across Los Angeles: two Home Depot stores, a clothing warehouse, and multiple day labor centers. They came armed with rifles, flash bangs, smoke grenades, tear gas, drones, and zip ties.
The targets: undocumented workers.
The justification: administrative immigration violations.
The execution: paramilitary.
By noon, word had spread. Videos began circulating on Instagram and WhatsApp: brown-skinned workers on their knees, hands bound, guns pointed at their heads. Mothers sobbing. Drones buzzing. Black SUVs peeling off with terrified men inside.
By 1:00 p.m., the crowd began to gather at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building. At first it was just family members, wives, brothers, friends, holding homemade signs and demanding information. Then the students came. Then the union reps. Then the neighbors. By 2:00, hundreds had flooded the plaza. By 3:00, they were chaining themselves to the gates.
They chanted the names of the missing. They demanded to see lawyers. They screamed that this was America, not a war zone.
ICE wouldn’t come out. So the crowd stayed. People brought water, bullhorns, banners. A mariachi band showed up, playing protest songs louder than the helicopters overhead. Someone spray-painted “NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL” in four-foot letters across the concrete steps.
Then came LAPD.
They arrived in riot gear, claiming they weren’t part of the raids but were “maintaining order.” They declared the protest an unlawful assembly. They fired tear gas into a crowd of teenagers. They shot rubber bullets at nurses in scrubs. They tackled a woman holding a picture of her detained husband.
By sundown, the city was locked in confrontation. Protesters lit dumpsters on fire in Boyle Heights. Streets were shut down in Westlake. Tactical alerts were issued citywide. David Huerta, president of SEIU California, was arrested and hospitalized after allegedly “obstructing” federal agents… his real crime, witnesses say, was standing in the way.
The official count? 44 immigration arrests & 1 “obstruction” arrest of David Huerta. The truth? Over 80 people were missing.
That night, over 80 people were missing. Detained. Disappeared into a system with no transparency and no paper trail. Parents did not come home. Phones rang unanswered. Lawyers were turned away at the gates.
ICE agents mowed down protestors with cars.
That’s not hyperbole. That’s what the footage shows. Protesters locked arms to block deportation vans. An ICE SUV accelerated, hit a demonstrator, dragged them, and kept going. No aid rendered. No pause. Just state-sanctioned violence in an unmarked vehicle.
Just days before, ICE agents raided a child’s birthday party, arresting 47 people including 9 children, by claiming it was a “gang” meeting.
This was not enforcement. This was fear, weaponized.
And the people of Los Angeles responded the only way they knew how: they showed up. They stood between the trucks and the cages. They took the tear gas. They made damn sure the world saw what happened.
How could we allow somethin' like this without pumpin' our fists? Now this is our final hour — Eminem, 2004.
Day Two | June 7th, 2025:
By sunrise on June 7, Los Angeles was still smoldering from the shock of what had happened the day before. They now knew that over 100 people had been arrested by ICE, snatched from day labor centers and work sites, disappeared into vans, and held incommunicado. But now, it wasn’t just fear that filled the air. It was rage.
The flashpoint was Paramount, a heavily Latino city southeast of downtown, where ICE and Border Patrol had staged near a Department of Homeland Security office next to a Home Depot. By midday, that parking lot had become a battlefield.
Hundreds gathered: workers, neighbors, students, clergy. Some held signs. Others brought water and first aid. A few brought goggles and bandanas, already expecting gas.
What started as a spontaneous outcry had morphed into a full-scale uprising. Protesters had spotted DHS agents staging at the building next door to a home depot. The agents weren’t hiding. They wanted to be seen.
By noon, more than a thousand people had gathered. They came with shopping carts and trash bins to block off streets. They banged pots, waved Mexican flags, and chanted “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!” (“The people united will never be defeated!”)
A few set small fires in the street: burning flags, burning fear. The air was thick with sweat, smoke, and the unspoken knowledge that the police would come.
And they did.
Border Patrol and DHS agents advanced first, suited in riot gear and gas masks. They unleashed flash-bang grenades and pepper balls into the crowd, injuring at least two people. One woman was dragged away, bleeding from her mouth. A journalist with the World Socialist Web Site was shot in the back with a rubber bullet while holding a press badge.
At 2:30 p.m., LAPD issued a dispersal order over loudspeakers. The crowd roared in defiance. Moments later, Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies flooded the area with tear gas.
Protesters coughed, screamed, stumbled blindly. Some fled. Others stood their ground and fought back. Bricks flew. Rocks shattered a federal SUV windshield, cutting an ICE agent’s hand. By 5:00 p.m., a car was engulfed in flames. By 6:00, American flags were burning. By 8:00, arrests had begun.
One man was arrested for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail, injuring three deputies. Two others were arrested for allegedly assaulting officers. Most of those taken in weren’t fighting. They were filming, chanting, refusing to run.
At the same time, outside the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, another crowd assembled. They demanded access to those arrested the day before. Families, clergy, and immigrant rights advocates faced off with a federal skirmish line. Tensions cracked like static in the air.
Shortly before 11:00 p.m., someone hurled an object at a departing police cruiser. Sirens screamed. More arrests followed.
In Compton, protests hit a new peak. Glass bottles filled with gasoline were hurled into the streets. DHS armored vehicles rolled in like tanks. Flashlights swept rooftops. Helicopters churned the sky.
The Trump administration called it a riot.
What they didn’t call it was a response.
Because the response was immediate. And it was loud.
By nightfall, Trump signed a memorandum deploying 2,000 National Guard troops under Title 10 authority, stripping control from the state and placing himself in command.
Governor Newsom called Trump’s seizure of the California National Guard “purposefully inflammatory.” But the federal government had already moved.
It was the first time since the Selma marches of 1965 that a president had nationalized the Guard without a governor’s approval. Bypassing the U.S. Constitution.
And he did it from ringside at a UFC fight, flanked by Mike Tyson.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted that Marines at Camp Pendleton were on high alert and would be utilized if “necessary.”
It is illegal to enact the U.S. military on U.S. citizens without invocation of the Insurrection Act which has not been invoked as of now.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to prosecute “agitators” and praised agents who had already injured civilians.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s policy architect, known white supremacist, escalated even further: “Deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection,” he wrote. “If these protests continue, the United States will cease to exist.”
When Mayor Bass posted, “We will not stand for this,” Miller replied: “You have no say in this” after she opposed the ICE raid in Los Angeles.
The protests continued. They multiplied. They flared. They refused to die.
By the end of Day 2, 118 undocumented people had been arrested. Hundreds more remained unaccounted for. At least four protesters were seriously injured. Two were hospitalized.
Eleven of the arrested were Mexican nationals, according to the Mexican consulate, which pledged legal support. California officials visiting the detention center reported that detainees had no scheduled access to food, water, or medication.
Still, the federal machine pressed on. This was not enforcement. This was dominance. Los Angeles continues to stand between that machine and the people it came to crush.
Day 3 | June 8th, 2025:
The National Guard came marching in during the dead of night. They arrived before dawn. By 3:30 a.m., federally deployed National Guard troops were rolling into Los Angeles under Title 10 orders, boots hitting pavement in the name of border enforcement. Streets were sealed. Helicopters hovered low. ICE raids sparked by protests were still underway as the city slept, or tried to.
At 4:11 a.m., President Trump posted his edict on X:
“MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests.”
No exceptions. No irony. Just a president banning masks for the public; while his federal forces marched through neighborhoods in gas masks, balaclavas, and nameless black riot gear.
This is not legally true or enforceable, btw.
By midday, word spread fast. A city still choking on yesterday’s tear gas now had a new directive to defy. Organizers called for a 2 p.m. demonstration in front of City Hall. The war cry: “National Guard go away, ICE out of L.A.”
This was the shape of June 8: A militarized dawn. A defiant afternoon. A mask ban thrown like a grenade at the vulnerable, even as the enforcers stayed fully cloaked. It wasn’t about public safety. It was about spectacle. It wasn’t about law. It was about power.
And for the third day in a row, Los Angeles continues to stand its ground.
This story isn’t over.
The raids continue. The protests grow. The arrests mount. I’ll keep tracking every piece of it: every broken law, every broken window, every broken family. Because what’s happening in Los Angeles right now isn’t a footnote. It’s a warning. And I intend to follow it all the way to the courts, the streets, and wherever else this brutal machinery rolls next.
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Thank you for being here.
"The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves." ~ George Washington
Fight or die, people.
Thank you for keeping us informed about the violent and lawless attempted takeover of Los Angeles and the brutalization of immigrants and protesters by this fascist regime.