This is a developing story that will be updated throughout the day.
Federal law-enforcement officials fired canisters of tear gas at a group protesting immigration raids in Los Angeles on Sunday, a day after President Trump ordered the National Guard to help quell demonstrations over the objections of California officials.
Video from the scene showed Department of Homeland Security officers and at least three from Immigration and Customs Enforcement also firing other crowd-control munitions outside a detention center in downtown Los Angeles where members of the California National Guard had also been deployed. The smoking canisters forced some of the hundreds of protesters to flee, while others helped fellow demonstrators wash their eyes. It was not immediately clear what prompted the escalation.
“They want to see us fail,” said Julie Solis, a protester who described herself as a first-generation citizen born and raised in California. “They’re trying to look for an excuse to implement martial law, and we can’t give them that satisfaction.”
The confrontation was the latest between government agents and protesters, whose demonstrations have been largely peaceful but nonetheless prompted Mr. Trump to announce the deployment of at least 2,000 members of the National Guard. The president said that any protest or act of violence that impeded officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.”
Mr. Trump, in a post on Truth Social, said Los Angeles had been “invaded and occupied.” He wrote that “violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.”
The president made rare use of federal powers to bypass the authority of Gov. Gavin Newsom in announcing the deployment on Saturday. Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, called the president’s decision “purposefully inflammatory.”
Roughly 300 members of the National Guard had been deployed to the city as of Sunday morning, according to Mr. Newsom’s office. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles called the deployments a “chaotic escalation” on Sunday, adding that the only other time she had seen the National Guard patrolling city streets, besides to help with disaster recovery, was during the 1992 riots, when they were requested by state and local officials. “There’s no reason for them to be on our streets now,” she said.
Mr. Trump said late on Saturday that he was deploying at least 2,000 members of the California National Guard in response to the protests.
One expert said Mr. Trump’s order for the troops was the first time since 1965 that a president had activated a state’s National Guard force for a domestic operation without a state governor’s request for the purposes of quelling unrest or enforcing the law. That year, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.
Furthermore, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested that active-duty Marines could also be deployed in response to the protests, drawing sharp criticism from Mr. Newsom. Such a move can only come from the president, and Mr. Trump would need to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One in New Jersey on Sunday, said he was not yet at the point of invoking the Insurrection Act to quell the demonstrations. But said he was watching the situation closely and “if we see danger to our country and to our citizens, we will be very, very strong in terms of law and order.”
“Nobody is going to spit on our military,” he said. “That happens, they get hit very hard.”
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung subsequently posted a video of the president’s remarks on X with the comment, “They spit, we hit! THEY SPIT, WE HIT!!”
Furthermore, Mr. Trump told reporters, “We’re going to have troops everywhere. We’re not going to let this happen to our country.”
The chaos that engulfed Los Angeles began on Friday when camouflage-clad federal agents rolled through the garment district in search of workers who they suspected of being undocumented immigrants. They were met with protesters, who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed with pepper spray and nonlethal bullets.
The enforcement operation turned into one of the most volatile scenes of President Trump’s immigration crackdown so far, but it was not an isolated incident.
Last week, at a student housing complex under construction in Tallahassee, Fla., masked immigration agents loaded dozens of migrants into buses headed to detention centers. In New Orleans, 15 people working on a flood control project were detained. And raids in San Diego and Massachusetts — in Martha’s Vineyard and the Berkshires — led to standoffs in recent days as bystanders angrily confronted federal agents who were taking workers into custody.
The high-profile raids appeared to mark a new phase of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, in which officials say they will increasingly focus on workplaces — taking aim at the reason millions of people have illegally crossed the border for decades. That is an expansion from plans early in the administration to prioritize detaining hardened criminals and later to focus on hundreds of international students.
“You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation,” Thomas D. Homan, the White House border czar told reporters recently. “We’re going to flood the zone.”
