(Los Angeles) Clashes oppose Los Angeles on Sunday in Los Angeles to demonstrators against the migration policy of the American president Donald Trump, who claims to be ready to send troops to the country wherever necessary.
Several dozen demonstrators block a motorway from the Californian megapol on Sunday afternoon in a tense face-to-face with the police, which made some arrests and uses tear gas, including against journalists. Protesters also burnt down several cars.
Donald Trump, who deployed 2,000 members of the National Guard to try to contain these demonstrations against his migration policy, promised on Sunday “a return to order” and added that he did not exclude the sending of troops elsewhere to the United States if necessary.
“You have violent people and we’re not going to let them get away,” said the Republican president.
The deployment of the National Guard comes after two days of demonstrations marked by clashes and violence in Los Angeles, where a large Hispanic population resides, inhabitants trying to intervene in the face of the muscular arrests of immigrants led by the Federal Immigration Police (ICE). About 300 guards arrived on Sunday morning.
Photo Mike Blake, Reuters
National Guard soldiers deployed in Los Angeles
The National Guard, reserve armed force, is most often mobilized during natural disasters.
The governors of the Democratic States also castigated an “abuse of alarming power” after Donald Trump unilaterally ordered this shipment of soldiers, against the advice of the local authorities and the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom.
“President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard in California is an abuse of alarming power,” the governors insisted in a joint statement.
“Not criminals”
According to former head of the NGO Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, this is the first time since 1965 that a president deploys these soldiers without prior request from a governor of state.
Mexican nationals were arrested in recent operations, Mexico President, Claudia Sheinbaum, announced on Sunday, calling on the United States to treat them with dignity.
It was “men and honest women who went to seek a better life (…) They are not criminals,” she insisted during a public speech.
Evoking an “invasion” of the United States by “criminals from abroad”, Donald Trump erected the fight against illegal immigration in absolute priority, and communicates abundantly on the arrests and expulsions of immigrants.
Led even in courts of the country, the latter have plunged into terror millions of immigrants without legal status.
In Los Angeles, important operations Friday and Saturday agents of the ICE, sometimes in civilian clothes, gave rise to first opposition rallies and violent clashes between demonstrators and police.
“We must defend our people,” a woman told AFP, herself a daughter of immigrants, refusing to give her name. “Whatever we are injured, they are gassed, they will never stop us. All we have left is our voice. »»
Photo Eric Thayer, Associated Press
A protester holds a sign while members of the border police in rugged outfit and equipped with gas masks are sticking to the outside of an industrial park in the paramount section of Los Angeles.
Stand -off
The images of clashes, barricades, projectile jets and charred cars have been widely left on social networks.
“For me, it is only politics,” castigated Mayor Karen Bass with a local television while the governor of California Gavin Newsom denounced him a “deliberately incendiary” measure which only “worsens tensions”.
Photo Daniel Cole, Reuters
Protesters are held on a car destroyed during a confrontation between the police and the demonstrators following multiple immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the city of Paramount, in the County of Los Angeles, California, United States, June 7, 2025.
The federal government is engaged in an showdown with California, bastion of the progressive opposition, and “sanctuary state” protecting migrants.
On the spot, the presence of these soldiers worries more than it reassures, according to Jason Garcia, resident of Los Angeles. “I was in the army, and I know that the climbing of strength will just crescendo,” regrets this 39 -year -old man with AFP.
The strength of all these soldiers in trellis, “it is more an intimidation tactic,” said Thomas Henning, a protester.
Marshall Goldberg, 78, told him to AFP that the deployment of the guards gave him the feeling of being “terribly offended”: “We hate what they did with undocumented workers, but there, they pass to another level by eliminating the right to demonstrate and the right to come together peacefully,” he regretted.
