I Was at the L.A. Protests. They're Nothing Like What You're Seeing on TV.

Yahoo

11-06-2025

On Sunday afternoon, I drove to the Los Angeles ICE protest down by Temple and Alameda. It's around 14 miles from my house and miraculously only took 35 minutes that day. Maybe people were already down at the protest, or maybe they were at the L.A. Pride Parade, or maybe they were just at brunch, but even the chronic arterial blockage on the 101 at Silver Lake Boulevard was moving pretty nicely. I pointed myself to the southeast side of where I knew the protests to be because I know a cheap parking lot down there. I situated myself right near the Geffen wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art, with the Barbara Kruger Untitled (Questions) mural on the exterior wall: Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? I went and chanted and was home safe and sound by 7 p.m. And now the Marines are here.
As with the fires earlier this year, people from all corners and chapters of my life have been texting to check in ever since. Also like the fires, everything happening in Los Angeles right now is happening around the corner and a world away. If you didn't know, if you didn't want to know, you could pretty easily keep not knowing. Los Angeles is crazy vast. It feels more like a patchwork of little cities than the great big city it is. That Sunset Fire was five miles away from where we live, from where we sat watching it on local news. We didn't even smell it until long after it had been contained. Our go bags didn't even move from the entryway to the car. We were protected by a freeway, by a distance that isn't actually that far.
For Sunday, I had made a loose plan to meet up with a couple of friends who were also heading downtown. They'd gone to City Hall, and up where they were, at that end of it, the LAPD were trying to move the crowd, to kettle them using flashbangs and rubber bullets. I was a seven-minute walk from where this was happening and wouldn't have known if we hadn't been texting and trying to find each other.
Where I was, things were peaceful and as orderly as these things get. As I crossed 1st Street on Alameda to approach a denser area, protestors were directing traffic. Warning cars that they might end up stuck in a crowd of people, giving them alternate directions to the freeway. Warning us pedestrians, 'Have an exit plan. They're about to declare this unlawful.' There was a skirmish line of officers, a bunch of protestors just close and just far enough. There were chants and signs, American flags and Mexican flags. There were abuelitas handing out cold bottles of water. There were dogs. There were people asking to pet the dogs. It was as peaceful and orderly as these things get, but there was the unshakable sense that it could all go to shit in an instant. It did not.
After an hour or so, I went back toward my car, and there was an L.A. Pride block party around Angel City Brewery at 2nd and Alameda. I went in and another one of my friends made his way over to meet me. We each had a couple of pints of its limited-edition LGBTQ-IPA and roamed. DJs, face-painting, knockoff labubus, sweet and savory crepes. A block and a half from the unrest that was so violent and dangerous that the National Guard had been deployed, there was a packed and positive block party. Once you tuned out the white noise of the three choppers circling low overhead, you wouldn't have known anything was happening at all.
There was black smoke in my rear view mirror on the drive back, and I thought, Well, that ain't good. It wasn't until I got home and turned on the local news that I found out it was Waymo driverless cars being burned. Five of them. When I turned on the national news after dark, that was pretty much all I saw: The black smoke and flaming carcasses of five empty cars owned by Google or something. Not the concerned citizens that showed up for their neighbors just to be greeted by flash grenades and rubber bullets. If you got all of your information from cable news, burning cars were all you'd think happened.
Donald Trump called in the Marines the next morning, and they drove in from Twenty Nine Palms. They're here now, I guess. Right now, the local news is doing a segment on Father's Day gift ideas. The president thinks the situation is dangerous enough to require the military, but KTLA does not think it is important enough to preempt a piece on backgammon sets and coffee mugs repurposed from MLB game bats. They're here now, I guess, 700 strong, and nobody seems to know what they're going to do, nor even where they're going to stay or what they're going to eat, because now we know that nobody budgeted for the lodging or meals of the 2,000 National Guard members who've been sent here, who woke up on the cold stone floor of some federal building.
The ICE activity we are protesting is allegedly being directed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Miller called a meeting of ICE officials last month and directed them to 'just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.' Not to target 'the worst of the worst,' as the president had indicated. Not even to target criminals or gang members at all. But to roll up to a Home Depot where day laborers gather. To post up outside of a grammar school graduation in a neighborhood with a high percentage of undocumented residents. Just go and grab them and pull them away from their homes and their babies and their lives. Just lock them up. Now, that's what they're doing. That's what we're protesting. And if it turns out their papers actually are in order, which it has more than a few times, then tough shit.
As with New York, just about everyone who tells you Los Angeles is a crime-ridden hellhole has never actually spent time here. That's why it's so surprising that Stephen Miller is a Los Angeles native—well, kind of. He's from Santa Monica, twelve miles and anywhere from a forty five- to ninety-minute drive from here. To have a friend who moves to the West Side is to have a friend you never see anymore. To have an afternoon meeting on the West Side is to have your whole day spoken for. It's not that far, but it's a world away.
There's a video that made the rounds in the early days of the first Trump administration, when Miller was a lower-level spokesghoul. It's our boy as a Santa Monica High School student and worth taking a fresh look at now that we know he's one of the architects of this ICE campaign of random terror. Look at this:
There he is. The sneer for which he'd come to be known is already fully formed. His beard is largely too embarrassed to have anything to do with his face. He's got the general look of someone you'd see juggling outside of a Barenaked Ladies show because he's afraid to go inside the Barenaked Ladies show because someone in there might be doing pot. He's arguing for his right to leave his trash behind. And he seems to want to be cheered for it.
Los Angeles is crazy vast. Santa Monica High School is twelve miles from where I sit writing. If I left right now, I'd be there in an hour. But do you know what's one half of one mile, one ten-minute walk away from Santa Monica High School? The beach. A really nice, clean, and well-maintained beach, as a matter of fact. Miller could have been taking a surf lesson, eating some Dippin' Dots, or watching a majestic sunset over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, he's sneering to a crowd about his right as a white person to leave his mess behind for a brown person to clean up.
This behavior is rancid. This rancid behavior is motivated by a rancid worldview that is the kind of rancid you really don't grow out of. This is rancid, and now it's backed up by the United States government, and now the United States government is backed up by the United States military. These raids are the acting out of that entitled and bigoted and absolutely rancid worldview. That's what we're protesting. And on the whole we're doing it more peacefully than most groups of people who take to the streets after their city's team wins or loses the Stanley Cup.
We do not need your help.
Anyway, the Marines are here, and we're all just kind of waiting. Around the corner and a world away. And I'm thinking of Barbara Kruger's questions that hung above the protest I attended on Sunday. Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?
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