On the afternoon of June 14, Mayor Karen Bass looked exhausted. She had spent much of the day running around in red, white and blue sneakers — a gracious nod that marked Flag Day — so by the time she zipped a City of Los Angeles-logoed jacket up over a cobalt blouse to step up to a bank of press microphones with a passionate plea for her people, it had already been a very long day. Flag Day happened to fall on President Donald Trump’s birthday. But rather than celebrating, Angelenos were planning to take to the streets to protest the authoritarian and hostile takeover of the city by National Guard soldiers and U.S. Marines sent into Downtown L.A. by the White House, an occasion that had been dubbed “No Kings Day.”Bass had been dealing with unrelenting chaos for eight straight days by then: city residents scooped up without warning, injured cops, vandalism, looting. The mayor desperately needed the No Kings Day protests to be passionate but peaceful — for its participants to behave in a way that would debunk the tiny snippets of mayhem that were being broadcast nationwide, that only told a tiny sliver of the story unfolding in her city. That chaos, she announced, was the direct result of the President’s unfettered cruelty toward undocumented immigrants.“The eyes of the world are on Los Angeles,” Bass warned. After all, she reminded her constituents, the city will be home to FIFA’s 2026 World Cup games and the Summer Olympics two years later — two major international events that will bring much-needed tourism and revenue into a city facing a seemingly insurmountable budget shortfall. She was flanked that afternoon by the Los Angeles Police Department’s top cop, Chief Jim McDonnell, the son of Irish immigrants, who quickly echoed his boss’ concerns: “Violence and destruction do not make your voice louder; they distract from your cause,” he said.
The start of L.A.’s descent into seemingly endless disorder began hours after federal judge Margo A. Rocconi, a magistrate for California’s Central District, signed four search warrants on June 5 that targeted “business premises suspected of unlawfully employing illegal aliens and falsifying employment records related to the status of its employees, among other federal crimes,” according to a court affidavit.The first stop for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents the following morning was 2415 East 15th St., a warehouse for Ambiance Apparel on the outskirts of DTLA’s trendy Arts District. Ambiance is a sprawling international clothing company which bills itself as a “manufacturer, importer and wholesaler of casual basic apparel for women & juniors,” and its owner was very well-known to federal officials in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. The company’s owner — a wildly wealthy Bel Air man named Sang Bum Noh, who went by the name Ed after emigrating to the U.S. from South Korea as a young man — pleaded guilty in October 2020 to eight criminal counts, including conspiracy, money laundering and customs offenses. His crimes, mostly centered on his avoidance of paying both tariffs and taxes, the government says, helped him buy his Westside mansion, where he parked a horde of luxury cars. He even stashed away $36 million in cash that the federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security found “squirrelled away in shoeboxes and garbage bags.” Noh, now in his late 60s, was hit with a year in federal prison when he faced a U.S. District Court judge in December 2021 and was ordered to pay a staggering $118 million in fines. He was allowed to keep his company, but only by agreeing to federal oversight.
Clearly Noh’s plea deal put Ambiance Apparel on the administration’s radar when Trump’s minion, California native and unabashed nationalist Stephen Miller, began compiling target lists to achieve a seemingly impossible number of arrests — 3,000 a day. Before federal agents arrived at Ambiance Apparel on the morning of June 6, undercover agents had already fanned out around the warehouse to keep watch on potential dangers when the raids jumped off. But those undercovers were noticed, and “word quickly spread on social media,” a senior DHS agent wrote in court records, that “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids” were happening downtown. Within minutes, the building was swarmed by protesters who rallied against the bundling of workers into unmarked vans. At 11:49 a.m., court records show, a powerful longtime labor leader, Service Employees International Union President of California David Huerta, was on scene. And he was pissed. Words were exchanged between Huerta and ICE agents. At one point, Huerta took a cross-legged seat on the ground outside the gate, the government claims, and yelled: “Everybody sit down, sit down!” The confrontation between protesters and federal police intensified, and when a government van tried to access the warehouse parking lot, Huerta stepped in front of it. Within minutes, he was hurled to the ground and handcuffed — the first high-profile arrest in what is now months of unrest in Los Angeles, and one that sent Huerta to the hospital before he was held in a federal lockup until the following Monday afternoon. Huerta’s arrest ignited a firestorm. As he sat in a cell, hundreds of people gathered at Grand Park and marched toward the Metropolitan Detention Center — peacefully — and to the federal courthouse, where the search warrants had been signed to demand his release. Tensions were already escalating. Waymo cars were set ablaze downtown. Nearby buildings were defaced. Soon, there was looting and highly publicized attacks on police officers. All of it emboldened Trump to take over the California National Guard and send in the U.S. Marines in a highly unusual show of force. But Angelenos — most of whom behaved peacefully — fought back against the intrusion by taking to the streets in civil actions and marches that pushed back against what many viewed as unnecessary cruelty being inflicted on their neighbors. How could Los Angeles not be horrified by the Home Depot raids; seeing children being ripped from the arms of their foster parents, car washes without workers, store shelves bare as employees became afraid to show up for work, street meat carts abandoned across the city? How could they not respond by taking to the streets with expressions of love for the diversity that has long been the very lifeblood of L.A.?
In Little Tokyo, which had been hard hit by agitators, volunteers worked to scrub graffiti from small businesses. “We are in this together,” said Yuko Tanaka, 55, as she painted over an expletive painted on the side of a boba shop. “Everyone.” In the Valley, Christy Vega, owner of the family-owned Casa Vega, the famed Sherman Oaks Mexican eatery, got behind Immigrant Defenders, an organization that supports families who have been ripped apart by the raids, after she saw heartbreaking examples of what she described as “a combination of fear and malaise,” adding that most people thought ICE was focused on rooting violent criminals out of the U.S., not “racial profiling.”Along the Venice Beach Boardwalk, a man on a skateboard handed 10-dollar bills to Latino hot dog vendors, street artists and a young woman waving a Mexican flag with two kids in tow, and kept rolling. Artist Darick Breland, 51, who works in Venice and lives in Culver City, said he’s been through L.A. tumult before and has no doubt his neighbors will not be afraid “to rise up” — but, he added, the ongoing demonstrations in his city now have a deeper meaning. “This is about community. Protecting our people,” he said. “Trump took this shit too far.” Near City Hall, a parked bus outfitted with a basketball hoop invited protesters to take shots. In Beverly Hills, a protester dressed as a dinosaur held a sign that read “I eat fascists.” Pasadena, Santa Monica, Echo Park, Silver Lake — nearly every neighborhood in Los Angeles County — showed up in droves at protests in support of their neighbors. “What the White House is doing is inhumane, and it is only going to bring Angelenos closer together,” said Martin Feldman, 42, of Huntington Park, the neighborhood that saw a terrifying sight when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem donned a bulletproof vest and rode with federal agents, looking for a man who was the subject of an arrest warrant…