MEMBERS OF THE US National Guard fired tear gas at protesters in Los Angeles yesterday, hours after the troops arrived in the city on President Donald Trump’s orders.

The confrontation broke out in front of the Metropolitan Detention Centre in central Los Angeles, as a group of demonstrators shouted insults at troops lined shoulder to shoulder behind plastic riot shields.

About 300 National Guard troops arrived in Los Angeles yesterday on orders from President Trump, in response to clashes in recent days between federal immigration authorities and protesters seeking to block them from carrying out deportations.

Trump has said he is deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell the protests, which he called “a form of rebellion”.

Demonstrators told AFP the purpose of the troops did not appear to be to keep order.

“I think it’s an intimidation tactic,” Thomas Henning said. “These protests have been peaceful. There’s no one trying to do any sort of damage right now and yet you have the National Guard with loaded magazines and large guns standing around trying to intimidate Americans from exercising our First Amendment rights.”

Marshall Goldberg, 78, said that deploying the troops made him feel “so offended.”

“We hate what they’ve done with the undocumented workers, but this is moving it to another level of taking away the right to protest and the right to just peaceably assemble,” he said.

Members of California’s National Guard had assembled at the Metropolitan Detention Centre, one of several sites that have seen confrontations involving hundreds of people in the last two days.

A social media post from the Department of Defence that showed dozens of National Guard members with long guns and an armoured vehicle.

The deployment was limited to a small area in central Los Angeles. The protests have been relatively small and limited to that area. The rest of the city of four million people is largely unaffected.

Their arrival follows clashes near a Home Depot in the heavily Latino city of Paramount, south of Los Angeles.

As protesters sought to block Border Patrol vehicles, some hurling rocks and chunks of cement, federal agents unleashed tear gas, flash-bang explosives and pepper balls.

Tensions were high after a series of raids by immigration authorities the previous day, as the weeklong tally of immigrant arrests in the city climbed past 100.

A prominent union leader was arrested while protesting and accused of impeding law enforcement.

Yesterday, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said the National Guard would “keep peace and allow people to be able to protest but also to keep law and order”.

In a signal of the administration’s aggressive approach, defence secretary Pete Hegseth also threatened to deploy active-duty marines “if violence continues”.

The move came over the objections of governor Gavin Newsom, marking the first time in decades that a state’s national guard was activated without a request from its governor, according to the Brennan Centre for Justice.

In a directive on Saturday, Trump invoked a legal provision allowing him to deploy federal service members when there is “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”.

Newsom, a Democrat, said Trump’s decision to call in the National Guard was “purposefully inflammatory”. He described Hegseth’s threat to deploy marines on American soil as “deranged behaviour”.

In a statement yesterday, assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin accused California’s politicians and protesters of “defending heinous illegal alien criminals at the expense of Americans’ safety”.

“Instead of rioting, they should be thanking Ice (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers every single day who wake up and make our communities safer,” McLaughlin added.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders said the order by Trump reflected “a president moving this country rapidly into authoritarianism” and “usurping the powers of the United States Congress”.

Trump’s order came after clashes in Paramount and neighbouring Compton, where a car was set on fire.

Protests continued into the evening in Paramount, with several hundred demonstrators gathered near a doughnut shop, and authorities holding up barbed wire to keep the crowd back.

Crowds also gathered again outside federal buildings in central Los Angeles, including a detention centre, where police declared an unlawful assembly and began to arrest people.

With reporting from AFP

Source: The Journal.