Los Angeles Under Guard

The helicopters came first, skimming the skyline so low their rotors peeled campaign posters off brick walls, their blades rattling the windows of downtown high-rises like some incoming biblical reckoning. Then came the beige Humvees, their suspensions creaking under the weight of turret-mounted guns, rumbling down Figueroa as if Los Angeles had morphed overnight into Fallujah. The city, glittering, erratic, performative, now looked like a war zone broadcast on CNN, stitched into Instagram Stories, looped on TikTok over drill beats and distorted sirens.

I watched it unfold from Mexico.

From a borrowed house in Mexico City, I refreshed timelines and live streams while cold pasta congealed in the kitchen. On my screen, a National Guard soldier kicked aside a protest sign that read “NO ESTÁN SOLOS”, a message I’d last seen painted on Boyle Heights murals. I had experienced LA. Walked those streets. Written from them. Now I was watching it burn from the outside, a familiar fever dream playing out in real time.

On Sunday, June 8, 2025, the United States government deployed the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, not at the request of the California governor, but by presidential fiat. Trump’s second term had turned constitutional norms into little more than suggestions, and with a Republican-controlled Congress and a Supreme Court that rubber-stamped his “emergency powers” doctrine, the president invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, a relic once used to suppress Civil War uprisings and desegregate Southern schools. The provision allowed deployment in “times of rebellion.”

The rebellion, allegedly, was protest.

Three days of demonstrations had rippled across LA in response to Operation Return to Sender, a wave of aggressive immigration raids, over 200 immigrants arrested in the span of 72 hours, from the Fashion District’s garment factories to the parking lot of a Paramount Home Depot. Mothers were separated from children at bus stops; day laborers vanished from street corners. People were dragged from neighborhoods that had once claimed sanctuary. On Sunday, the tipping point came.

Downtown turned kinetic. Thousands of protesters surrounded the Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees banged on windows to signal their location. National Guard troops stood shoulder to shoulder, rifles slung, riot shields up, forming a ring of silence and intimidation around federal buildings. The crowd chanted “¡Sí se puede!” and “go home.” Police on horseback flanked the perimeter. LAPD declared an unlawful assembly. Then came the tear gas, its acrid plume drifting into residential towers where families sealed windows with wet towels. The rubber bullets. The flash-bang grenades that echoed every few seconds into the evening sky, each concussion shaking the lenses of photojournalists.

From Grand Park, protesters dragged metal chairs into the streets to form makeshift barricades. Some began hurling objects at law enforcement,  bottles, rocks, a Lime scooter hurled like a javelin,  and in one case, chunks of concrete from a broken sidewalk. Over the closed 101 Freeway, protestors lobbed Molotov cocktails crafted from Starbucks bottles at parked patrol cars. Officers ducked under overpasses to avoid getting hit.

Near Pershing Square, four Waymo self-driving cars were torched, their AI voices calmly repeating, “Please exit the vehicle” as the flames consumed them. Black smoke plumed upward. The future was literally on fire.

The scale of destruction wasn’t yet comparable to Watts, Rodney King, or the George Floyd protests five years earlier, but the symbolic weight was just as heavy. This wasn’t just about ICE or one city. It was about power,  federal, unchecked, and weaponized against its own people.

I’d seen militarization before. In Latin America, it starts with curfews. Then the checkpoints. Then the lists. In LA, it started with a president’s voice on Air Force One, saying, “These anarchists think they own our cities. We own the tanks.”

Governor Gavin Newsom, stunned, furious, and legally handcuffed, called it “a coup against the Tenth Amendment” and demanded the National Guard be withdrawn. Mayor Karen Bass was even more blunt: “They’re not here to protect us. They’re here to punish us.”

The White House responded with characteristic venom. “Governor Newsom opened the door to lawlessness when he abolished ICE in California,” said press secretary Abigail Jackson, falsely conflating state sanctuary policies with abolition.

By Monday morning, the city looked like an occupied zone. The 110 Freeway became a convoy route; MacArthur Park’s lily pond was drained and repurposed as a staging ground. Federal troops, not just Guard units, but Marines from Twentynine Palms’ 7th Regiment, stationed themselves outside union halls and mosques. Outside the Home Depot in Paramount, where protests had erupted Saturday, agents in riot gear fired pepper balls into a crowd shielding children with cardboard signs. A prominent SEIU organizer was arrested. Dozens more followed.

Kamala Harris, now the former vice president and a resident of Brentwood, emerged from political silence to call the operation a “dress rehearsal for dictatorship.” She voiced support for those “standing up to protect our most fundamental rights and freedoms.”

It’s hard to know where the line is anymore, between safety and surveillance, between peacekeeping and provocation. But watching from abroad, the distinction felt all too familiar.

America is learning what much of the world already knows: authoritarianism never arrives fully dressed. It comes dressed as order. It speaks in headlines like “restoring civic peace” and “protecting communities.” It hides behind uniformed men and legal footnotes.

The president invoked a clause originally written for rebellion. But the rebellion was invented. What happened in LA wasn’t chaos, it was resistance. A collective exhale after months of silence, a fire alarm pulled by the people before something worse could ignite.

A friend in Koreatown texted me a photo: soldiers posted outside a bodega, beneath a mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The troopers’ faces were blurred; the Virgin’s gaze was not. “La Virgen doesn’t run,” he wrote. Neither do the people who still believe in the soul of this city.

Because for all the smoke and flash grenades, Los Angeles still burns bright,  in anger, in solidarity, in art. It’s the city of reinvention, yes, but also of memory. The marchers haven’t forgotten the raids. The children haven’t forgotten their fathers being pulled from trucks. The students haven’t forgotten who tear-gassed them on the 101.

And neither should we.

This column isn’t an obituary. It’s a dispatch. A message from one shore of a border to the other, reminding those still inside the storm: You are being watched. You are being remembered. Not just by those across the street, but by those of us who once lived there, and who now stand in exile, bearing witness.