A limited curfew will be imposed in several parts of downtown Los Angeles starting Tuesday evening, amid escalating violence, looting, and arson triggered by immigration raids ordered by the Trump administration. Announcing the curfew, Mayor Karen Bass said it will be enforced from 8 PM to 6 AM and could remain in effect for several days, though residents and workers in the area will be exempt.
The unrest follows a series of aggressive immigration enforcement actions in the city, including raids targeting day labourers and undocumented workers, which were carried out by ICE officers last week. The situation intensified after the Trump administration deployed more than 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to California without the governor’s explicit approval.
Mayor Bass criticized the federal intervention and said the LAPD needed support, but not from the Trump administration. She called the president’s actions an overreach, stating, “People have asked me what the Marines are going to do when they get here. That’s a good question — I have no idea.”
Tensions between the state and federal governments have sharply escalated. President Trump, in a press statement, justified the deployment under the Insurrection Act, claiming he was acting to “liberate Los Angeles” from what he described as “a full-blown assault on peace… by rioters bearing foreign flags.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom condemned the move, calling it a violation of state sovereignty, and indicated the state was preparing to sue the Trump administration. On X (formerly Twitter), he said, “We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved. This is a serious breach of state sovereignty.”
The legal crux of the conflict lies in the dual jurisdiction over the National Guard, which typically requires state consent unless the president invokes specific legal provisions — as Trump has now done — allowing unilateral federal deployment under the justification of enforcing national law.
Mayor Bass concluded her press briefing by urging the federal government to halt immigration raids, which she described as the root cause of the unrest. “The real solution is for the Trump administration to stop the raids,” she said.
The situation remains tense, and with multiple legal and political battles unfolding, both local and national attention is now sharply focused on Los Angeles as a flashpoint in the broader immigration and federalism debate.
