The Cameras Were Rolling, So They Shot the Cameramen
It wasn’t just the migrants they wanted gone. It was the witnesses.
On June 6, 2025, ICE officers stormed Los Angeles in armored vans and unmarked SUVs. They pulled workers from warehouse floors, detained fathers outside Home Depot, and dragged mothers from grocery store parking lots. No warrants. No warning. Just a federal green light and a presidential tweet. Protest followed like thunder. The streets filled with bodies. Some marched. Some wept. Some documented. And that’s when the shooting started. But not at the looters or vandals, no, at the people holding the cameras.
By June 11th, more than 35 journalists had been attacked with at least 30 of those assaults came directly from law enforcement. The very same agents tasked with protecting constitutional rights. Turns out, the First Amendment doesn’t hold up well against a 40mm rubber round.
They Knew They Were Press. They Shot Them Anyways.
A British photojournalist, visibly credentialed, stood near a peaceful demonstration in California. Protesters waved Mexican flags. He raised his lens. Without warning, a plastic round slammed into the back of his leg. He collapsed. He tried to walk but he couldn’t. With each attempt at a step came paralyzing pain. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t even stand. The pain was too much. So, the community carried him out while blood soaked through his khakis. Field medics tended to him until help could arrive. Once in the hospital, surgeons performed emergency surgery to remove a three-inch projectile ‘bullet’ designed to explode above crowds. It hadn’t. It hit him waist-high. He passed out from the pain. He still can’t walk without help. His name is Nick Stern.
Meanwhile, a different photographer stood alone, filming peacefully above the 101 freeway. There was no crowd around him. Just his camera, rolling. That’s when a rubber bullet flew through the air and struck him in the forehead. He shouted in pain, staggered, and dropped the lens.
This is the last thing he saw before being shot in the head with a rubber bullet. Even from 100 meters away, a 40-gram rubber bullet (0.04 kg) fired at 90 meters per second (about 200 mph) slows only slightly due to air resistance, still hitting at 77.7 m/s with 120.8 joules of force, about as much energy as a hammer swing. That’s enough to fracture a skull.
He would later say, “Where I was hit, I was the only person overlooking the freeway. I was an easy target.”
He had served in the British military. He ended up in a hospital with whiplash, shrapnel holes in his pants, and blood running from his skull. His name is Toby Canham, and he works for the NY Post.
Meanwhile, an Australian reporter stood near the Metropolitan Detention Center, mic in hand, documenting the crackdown. She wasn't shouting. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even facing the police. Yet, one stood behind her, hidden from her line of sight.
He turns. He sees her. He lifts his weapon, takes aim, and fires.
The rubber bullet struck her in the leg. Rubber bullets are shot with the force comparable to that of a baseball bat swung at full speed. Blunt force trauma.
There are no protesters near her. No confrontation. No warning.
She screams. Her leg buckles. She stumbles out of frame. A voice off-camera shouts, “You just shot the reporter!” She gasps, “I’m good.”
But the footage tells another story. She had been speaking calmly. She had identified herself. She had done her job. And for that, she was marked. Her prime minister called the footage horrific. The Australian foreign ministry issued a statement demanding journalists be protected.
In Parliament, Australian Senator Sarah Hanson-Young called the shooting shocking, unacceptable, and said plainly what no one in Washington has dared to: the president of the United States must be told to stop shooting at the press.
Another reporter Sergio Olmos from CalMatters wasn’t in a war zone but it sure felt like it when he was shot by what he believes was a 40mm sponge grenade.
He wasn’t alone.
Reporter Lexis‑Olivier Ray of L.A. Taco shared footage on Bluesky: a wall of riot cops pushing forward, unloading pepper balls into the crowd. Journalists. Protesters. No distinction. Just bodies in the way. The small rounds, each packed with powder meant to burn your eyes, blister your skin, and steal your breath.
He shared, “I thought I would be safe if I positioned myself with all the cable news crews off to the side away from all of the protesters. But nope. I was wrong. The feds shot pepper balls at us, forcing us down Alameda Street with everyone else.”
Even a New York Times reporter would not be spared from the wrath of the LAPD. NYT reported that one of their reporters was struck with a “non-lethal” round while on the scene.
Not Crossfire. Crosshairs.
Journalist injuries have always happened. Tear gas does not discriminate. But this? This is different. This is a tenfold uptick, and it isn't random. It is the press that is being zeroed in on, the press that is being punished.
What we’re seeing is not the collateral damage of panic. It is the logical conclusion of power unchecked and narratives unwelcomed.
By June 10, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the First Amendment Coalition, and Freedom of the Press Foundation issued a letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem: federal officers appear to be deliberately targeting journalists who are doing nothing more than their job.
And the White House’s response? Silence, then spin. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, took the podium not to address the wave of assaults on reporters in Los Angeles… but to declare the protests “shameful,” to accuse “left-wing radicals waving foreign flags” of attacking ICE and LAPD, and to praise Trump for ordering the “mob” to be “stamped out.”
She accused California officials of siding “with illegal alien criminals” and defended the use of active-duty Marines and National Guardsmen to “protect the federal mission of deporting illegal criminals off of our streets.”
But protect what, exactly? Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act. So, they are not working with law enforcement to “stamp out” the protestors. They're not performing arrests. So what are they doing? Trump justifies sending them by stating they’re protecting federal buildings, but what do the photos show? Standing watch beside ICE agents in blacked-out SUVs? Lying on concrete floors in shuttered warehouses? Cradling rifles while journalists bleed in the streets?
We also need to talk about that words she chose to use. She didn’t say dispersed. She didn’t say that the crowd needed to be broken up. She said the “mob” needed to be “stamped out.”
Stamped out. Eradicated. Cease to exist.
As if human beings expressing opposition are cockroaches to be crushed. That’s not just dystopian, it’s genocidal logic in a press-friendly package. History screams what happens when leaders start using pest-control metaphors for protest.
Leavitt’s words didn’t erupt in a vacuum. They echoed a growing script, one her boss Führer has rehearsed before. In 2023, Trump told a New Hampshire crowd: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
That language wasn’t a fluke. It was part of a fascist tradition.
It should not surprise you to learn that Adolf Hitler used these terms relentlessly. In 1938, he praised the purge of those he called “parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland.” A 1941 Nazi propaganda poster in occupied Warsaw showed a louse with a caricatured Jewish face beside the slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.”
And Trump? He warned that any protest against his birthday military parade would be “met with very big force.”
Then said it again. Protesters, he added, are simply “people who hate our country.”
Not one mention of the journalists beaten. Not one question answered about the photographers hospitalized. Not one word of concern about the First Amendment being trampled under boots and shields. Just applause for the crackdown, blame for the victims, and a promise of more force to come.
That promise was echoed by Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who warned that ICE raids in Los Angeles would continue “every day,” and threatened that even elected officials like Governor Newsom and Mayor Bass could face arrest if they “cross that line” or interfere.
This is not about law and order.
This is not about safety. This is about making dissent feel dangerous, and journalism feel disposable.
We Are The Last Line
This is what the slow death of democracy looks like. It does not declare itself with a bang. It creeps in with silence, cloaked in uniforms and press releases. It fires on the people with cameras. It jails those who speak. It paints protesters as parasites, reporters as rioters, and immigrants as infections. And then it thanks the troops for protecting the homeland.
But let us remind those troops, those Marines, those Guardsmen now standing on American soil with rifles in hand: your oath was not to a man. Not to a party. Not to a parade. Your oath was to the Constitution. To the people.
To protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The free press is not the enemy. Protest is not treason. Civil unrest is not an insurrection. January 6th, 2021? That was. And when the orders you receive contradict the rights you swore to defend, history will ask whether you followed your orders… or your oath.
This is so much more than what is happening in California right now. But if they can crush protest in Los Angeles, the second-largest city in America, with cameras rolling and lawsuits looming, then no place is off-limits.
And for the rest of us: the revolution does not begin with fire in the streets. It begins here. With truth-telling. With witness. With the courage to speak what others are too afraid to say. This is not the time to look away. This is not the time to be neutral.
The bullets have already been fired. The cameras have already fallen. The question is not whether this is happening. The question is who will still be standing to tell the story.
So write. Speak. March. Refuse to be silent. Refuse to be stamped out. We are the resistance history has been waiting for. And we are not done yet.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
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Thank you for being here.
— Dissent ♥
They do the unbelievable thinking people won’t believe, but we do, largely because of the evidence left behind and writers like you who continue to shine light on it. Thank you for your fine work; I truly appreciate it.
Btw on an earlier post you asked for info about the girl that got trampled in the video. @teal.in.tinseltown on tik tok if you still want to do a story. She’s in the hospital posting