What we saw was a pretty wide scale revolt against the mass deportation operation that the Trump administration has been executing since he took office.
Immigration agents ies all that came, you know, became dressed up in all their military.
Gear, and they stopped traffic.
When they stopped traffic, we started noticing basically what these were were protests in response to a series of Varanians or ICE enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area, which has a very dense migrant community.
Eric Cordlessa is Times Senior political correspondent. He's been watching what happened over the weekend in Los Angeles when Ice turned up in LA's Fashion district to deport undocumented workers, and protests turned into riots.
Carrying out not just your wrestling at charge.
Of the car, and you know, in some cases they escalated to the point where there were clashes with police. There was video of some of the protesters throwing rocks of police cars and other things like that.
Police in Los Angeles made at least twenty seven arrests. Officers repeatedly fired rubber bullets at protesters. Now is the standing off? The situation has now one hit. An Australian journalist as she was reporting from the streets.
And as these images were being amplified on social media and television. You know, Donald Trump took some pretty aggressive actions to tamp down on the unrest, including to call in the National Guard and more recently, to deploy active duty marines into Los Angeles.
From Schwartz Media, I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven.
AM today, Eric card a lesser on the tipping point of Trump's mass deportations and whether the commandeering of the National Guard is a forerunner.
To more authoritarian acts. It's Wednesday, June eleventh, So Eric Festival, welcome back to seven Am.
It's good to be with you.
Thank you.
Eric.
The protests in LA they're a response to the ice raids that really began to ramp up over the past week or so. So to begin with, tell me about those raids.
Well, we've seen a major expansion of immigration customs enforcement the Department of Homeland Securities efforts to identify, target, arrest, and deport migrants who have came to the country legally. And so what we've seen are targeted enforcement operations where there might be someone who is a migrant who has been convicted of a crime and they surveil them, they go and find them, they arrest them, and they deport them.
There are other cases in which you have cities that participate with ICE that you might arrest someone on driving drunk, or maybe pull them over for a traffic violation, or get called because of a domestics disturbance and discover that the person is not here legally, and thus they then will hand them over to ICE and the deportation proceedings will begin.
The number of arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump topped one hundred thousand this week. This is according to internal government data obtained by CBS News. The agency was averaging around six hundred and sixty arrests daily during the president's first one hundred days. The Trump administration has been intensifying efforts to detain unauthorized migrants in courthouses, work sites, and communities throughout the US and CBS News Immigration and polities.
In some cases, though, there are what you might call arraid well, they'll go into schools, restaurants, they might go into a park where you have migrant landscape workers on the job, and they will arrest them in groups and then put them through these deportation proceedings. And you know what you're seeing in the legislation that the administration is
pursuing right now on Capitol Hill. They're trying to ramp up the capacity for these law enforcement agencies to arrest more people, to process them at greater volume, and to be able to hold them into tention facilities while they're awaiting their removal from the country. And you know, the Trump administration has done a host of other things to really build on its deportation operation. It's recruited other law
enforcement agencies to assist in the effort. They have enlisted other agencies that are not law enforcement agencies, like the IRS Post Service, to help target and identify migrants for deportations. So you're really seeing Donald Trump go full throttle on what was one of his biggest campaign promises, which was to deport more than eleven million undocumented migrs in the country. We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.
Dwight Eisenhower right now as that.
Director, and Donald Trump has said He's going to try and get every single one of them out of the country.
Okay, So I believe it was six pm Saturday, evening that Trump signed this memo to send in the National Guard. Can you tell me about that and what he said He's reasoning was.
Well, his reasoning was that California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass had not done enough to quell the unrest and that they needed backup and they needed to restore order.
Well, we're gonna have coops everywhere. We're not gonna let this happen. We're not going to let our country be door depart like it.
Was an to fight. And he also said that they were not going to allow heretics, protesters, demonstrators to interfere with their deportations. And so this was a matter of law enforcement. It was a matter of ensuring order on the streets of the major American city. Gavin Newsom has said that it was not called for. He didn't request it.
I got a call from a staffer, no heads up whatsoever. And again, we're here to support local law enforcement. There's a mutual aid process. Local law enforcement had no needs that were out requesting any additional resources.
He requested, in fact, that Secretary Defense Keith Hegseth pull withdraw the troops from Los Angeles and saying that what Trump was actually doing was escalating the conflict even further in order to win an argument in the battlefield of public opinion and to advance his argument that you need to deport people in order to have equilibrium in America.
And you mentioned that Marines are also being sent in to join the National Guard in Los Angeles. Does this mean do you think that things are going to escalate even more over the next few days.
It's certainly possible. And one thing you're seeing is more Americans than other cities who are starting to mobilize for mass protests. So, you know Trump's very aggressive actions to send in the National Guard, to send in Marines, you know, to say things like when they spit, we hit.
They.
Spin, we hit, And I told them, nobody's gonna spit on our police offices, nobody's gonna spit on our military, which they do. This is galvanizing a certain segment of the American society right to participate in the uprising. So it's not clear at this point how the conflict will be resolved.
And the Californian governor Govin Newsom, he says that the state will sue the Trump administration.
This is exactly what he wanted. This is what he intended by illegally acting to federalize the National Guard. We're going to be initiating a lawsuit first thing tomorrow morning.
Can you tell me more about that and whether or not he has a case then.
Well, I mean, you know, he certainly has a case.
I think you know.
The rub of the situation for Newsom is that courts often move slowly, and you know, you have a Trump administration that will appeal any loss in order to bring it up to the Supreme Court, where they believe they have an emboldened conservative Supreme Court majority that has been pretty deferential on the executive's power, especially when it comes to matters of national security. So the legal fight is one that the Trump administration certainly anticipated and that they're
very happy to engage in that fight. If you stand in the way of law enforcement operations, you know you could be subject potential to arrest. Are you saying that about Mayor Bass and Governor news Are they at risk of being arrested? I'll say about anybody you cross that line. It's a friendly to knowingly harboring case. It's a felinity to impede law enforcements doing their job. What crime has Governor Knewsome committed?
A crime?
Has he committed to warrant his arrest?
I think is.
Primarily primary crime is running for governor because he's done such a bad job.
They have leveled this threat before that they will arrest anyone, whether it's a judge, whether it's a public official or a politician, or you know, average Joe or average Jane, if they impeded deportation enforcement. And so, you know, they are certainly suggesting that they are just something they aren't considering. I'm not entirely sure what they would say was the
law that he broke? I think obviously that would create a pretty serious firestorm in the United States to see an elected leader of an opposition party, governor of another state be arrested by the president because he has criticized the president, or because he has resisted certain policies of the White House.
Okay, so in the meantime, then what powers does Governor Newsoon have to stop what's happening? Can he, for instance, tell the National Guard to stand down?
He certainly can tell the National Guard to stand down. He has said that this is a violation of state sovereignty. But as you've seen, he doesn't have the power to ensure that they listen to him. So right now, what you're really seeing is a real power struggle between you know, a state executive and the federal executive, and thus far the federal executive is winning.
Coming up after the break, how Trump's deportations will reshape the US. Eric Trump is right now making good on his election promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants. He said he would do this. But do you think that the method is coming as a surprise to many people.
It's coming as a surprise to some people, It's not coming as a surprise to others. I mean, Donald Trump was very clear on the campaign trail that this was something he was going to do. He was not shy about saying what methods he would use. I mean, I think one thing people were pretty surprised by was that he was willing to send Venezuelan nationals to a notorious Megaprison and l Salvador, the Terrorism Comminement Center or SEACAT. I think that really took a lot of people off guard.
But the alacrity with which he has pursued deportations in which he has tried to enlist the entirety of the federal government to assist the efforts. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody, not anyone who's paying attention to him on the campaign Trill.
And in terms of some of the scenes we're witnessing, I'm thinking in particular of journalists being shot at by US authorities. I think for a lot of people watching, it's raising questions about how far this administration is willing to go and whether this is just the beginning of the ways in which we might see democracy changed or tested over the next three years.
Well, I think you know, one thing the administration has signaled from the outset is that it's willing to push the extremes in order to achieve its objectives of expelling millions of migrants from the country. And one thing they want to do is shock you and make you realize just how serious they are. And I think they also
want to change the realities on the ground. They're moving at such speed right that the courts are playing catch up, that civil society is playing catch up, that migrants themselves don't know how to resist. Many are choosing to voluntarily depart from the country rather than fight their cases in court. They don't think they have a chance, and even if
they did, they know they wouldn't be welcome here. I mean, I recently reported on the deportation operation from inside of one of the ICE attention centers in central Louisiana, and a recurrent theme I found when talking to the detainees was that they were resigned to their fate. They didn't feel like there was any utility in challenging their deportation order, and in fact, the warden of the prisons said fewer and fewer of the detainees are fighting their cases because
they just don't think it's worth it. And so you're seeing the ripple effects play out across society where the United States has become this vegan for migration and for people seeking refuge for violence and oppression. The Trump administration is basically trying to reverse what has been decades long trend that has, you know, over time, remade the country demographically and socially.
Yeah. How fundamentally does this change the country if millions of migrants are deported.
Yeah, And I think, you know, for one, their economic impacts obviously, you know, we would lose a major source of labor, particularly you know, low wage labor.
When you lose that.
Labor, obviously, the risk that economists are pointing out is that it could lead to higher prices because you won't have these low skilled, lowage workers who are performing jobs that most Americans don't want to perform, and that those are also a very important base of employees that make it possible for people in higher local positions to have
those jobs at companies throughout the country. The other thing is that it's sort of taking away from the sort of traditional American notion that everybody here has a hyphen in a way, right, you're Italian Americans, You're African American,
Wish americanas or Chinese American Bright. But what you're seeing is a sort of nationalist event on immigrated tramps, a populist event where you know, America as a nation is geared from a policy perspective, as directed by the libraries of the Trump administration, toward people who are indigenous in some form of fashion, maybe more modernly indigenous to this soil.
Eric, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Also in the news today, Prime Minister Anthony Alberesi has described the footage of Nine correspondent Lauren to Massey being shot by a rubber bullet live on air as horrific. Albanesi said he has expressed his concern to the US government. The Media Union has also condemned the shooting, and a second fungled embryo implant at mornash IVF has sparked a new investigation. Mornash IVF yesterday revealed that a patient's own
embryo was transferred instead of that patient's partner's embryo. It comes two months after the company revealed that a different patient had an embryo incorrectly transferred to her, meaning that she gave birth to the child of an unrelated woman. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. See you tomorrow.