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13-06-2025
LOS ANGELES: An uneasy calm has descended over Los Angeles after the first night of a curfew lifted on Wednesday, as cities across the US brace for more protests.
In Los Angeles, nearly 400 people have so far been arrested including 330 undocumented migrants and 157 people arrested for assault and obstruction, including one for the attempted murder of a police officer.
Federal prosecutors have so far charged two men for throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers in two separate incidents.
A total of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines have been deployed to help quell the unrest. Some of those National Guard troops are now authorized to detain people until police can arrest them.
Speaking alongside 30 regional mayors at a news conference on Wednesday, LA Mayor Karen Bass blamed the protests on US President Donald Trump’s immigration raids, which she said “provoked” residents by causing “fear” and “panic”.
“A week ago, everything was peaceful,” she said. “Things began to be difficult on Friday when raids took place.”
Bass suggested Los Angeles was “part of a national experiment to determine how far the federal government can go in taking over power from a local government, from a local jurisdiction”.
She has previously called on the administration to end the raids.
Overnight on Tuesday into Wednesday, Los Angeles police said they made “mass arrests” after a fifth day of protests over the immigration action.
In a series of statements, the city’s police department said that those detained included 203 people arrested for failure to disperse, 17 for curfew violations, three for possession of a firearm, and one for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.
Two officers were injured in the skirmishes, the statement added.
On Tuesday, Bass declared an overnight curfew within a relatively small area of the city’s downtown district, saying businesses were being vandalized and looted.
After the LA curfew came into force at 20:00 local time on Tuesday (03:00 GMT on Wednesday), police moved through downtown areas, firing rubber bullets to try to disperse crowds.
Explaining the curfew on Tuesday, Bass said she wanted “to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting”, saying the city had reached a “tipping point”.
The curfew order affects an area of about one square mile in the second-largest city in the US.
Police chief Jim McDonnell said; “some of the imagery of the protests and the violence gives the appearance as though this is a city-wide crisis, and it is not.”
Pam Bondi, the US Attorney General, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the curfew “helped a bit”.
Elsewhere, the immigration raids have continued, alongside the National Guard troops.
The National Guard and Marine forces deployed to Los Angeles do not have the authority to make arrests, only to detain protesters.
“They are strictly used for the protection of the federal personnel as they conduct their operations and to protect them to allow them to do their federal mission,” said Maj Gen Scott Sherman, who is leading the deployment, on Wednesday.
Some 500 National Guard troops have already been trained to accompany agents on immigration raids and some troops have already temporarily detained people in LA protests, Sherman told US media outlets. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
