LOS ANGELES — Since June 6, police sirens, drones, helicopters, and fireworks have stuffed the air round my neighborhood in Elysian Park (often known as Dodgertown), a mile or so northeast of Downtown LA, the place most mainstream media initially centered their protection of the continuing anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protests.
The power within the metropolis is tense and electrical, even in areas that at the moment are emptier than standard. Elysian Park and Echo Park Lake on a Saturday are usually teeming with individuals, however since ICE raids started terrorizing the east aspect, making distributors afraid to work, our neighborhoods have felt eerily silent, incomplete, and fewer vibrant. One-third of Los Angeles’s inhabitants is foreign-born, that means some 3 million individuals are doubtlessly on the mercy of ICE and the violence of their techniques. These contain storming into companies resembling taquerias, automobile washes, swap meets, and high-traffic thoroughfares and dragging employees into unmarked vans with their faces hid.
I reside on the final surviving block of Chavez Ravine — a former Latino/e/x group that was destroyed to make means first for public housing, then for Dodger Stadium within the late Nineteen Fifties — subsequent door to the Naval Coaching heart, the place the Los Angeles Police Division (LAPD) has been utilizing the ample obtainable parking house to dock their a whole lot of marked and unmarked autos.
The homes that have been razed to pave asphalt for ballgame parking and now tactical harboring have been dwelling to Mexican-American households for generations. And each afternoon and night this month, the presence of LAPD and ICE taunts the neighborhood. The sirens and buzzing plane began up round 3pm and continued late into the night time, generally all night time. Helicopters, drones, fireworks; even the coyotes yip whereas sirens wail.
Scenes from Downtown LA in June 2025 (pictures Angella D’Avignon/Hyperallergic)
Within the early night of Thursday, June 12, I took a 20-minute stroll from my condominium to downtown at Alameda and Industrial Streets, the place authorities had kettled a small crowd of protesters right into a four-block radius. They blocked all 4 freeway entrances. Regardless of their menacing and overwhelming presence, demonstrators performed drums, blasted West Coast rap, and yelled the battle cry of the anti-ICE motion: “¡Chinga la migra!”
I discovered Jimmy Lopez, a lifelong Angeleno, who was holding up LA fingers for individuals driving beneath on the 101 freeway. “We were fine until [ICE] showed up,” stated Lopez. “We’re out here to protest because we love our city and we want to take care of it.”
Adjoining neighborhoods Little Tokyo and Chinatown are usually full of individuals on weekend nights, with road seating and dense crowds, however through the first two weeks of June, they have been vacated because of a curfew instated by our mayor, Karen Bass. Outdoors the Japanese American Nationwide Museum, Nicole Maloney’s everlasting public paintings “OOMO Cube” (2014) is roofed in MISSING posters, taped to the reflective floor of the dice and to the partitions across the museum.
Raul Baltazar premiered his ad-hoc work “Melt Ice” (2025). (photograph courtesy Octavio Loera)
In the course of the huge, cross-coalitional protest downtown on Saturday, June 14, artist and LA native Raul Baltazar premiered his ad-hoc work “Melt Ice” (2025), an set up that includes three stacked ice blocks with audio system taking part in the theme from the movie The Cremator (1969), melting slowly on the asphalt, over the span of the protest. “Some [protesters] had a poetic moment, others took photos or inserted themselves by posing with the ice,” Baltazar informed me. “Some hugged me, and two young White men sat silently in front of the ice for over an hour and later thanked me.”
Artist Nina Sarnelle spent weekends and afternoons visiting small native companies within the neighborhoods of Westlake and Koreatown, distributing Know Your Rights playing cards with directions on what to do if ICE raids a enterprise. She had began documenting the protests along with her digicam.
“I realized that the real story is happening in a distributed way all over the city. Quietly, at dawn. It’s happening to some of our most vulnerable people. Often at the outskirts, in an industrial zone, in the parking lot or the back kitchen, on a farm,” Sarnelle informed me. “It’s invisible unless a community comes together in time to point their phone cameras and scream at it.”
Jimmy Lopez, a lifelong Angeleno (photograph Angella D’Avignon/Hyperallergic)
Although most media protection facilities the downtown space as the first hub for protests, many different neighborhoods throughout the county, from Whittier to Downey to Bell, have been holding demonstrations every day and using quite a lot of techniques, like forming group patrols and fast response groups to forestall ICE and LAPD from invading.
“It seemed best to serve my own neighbors — my panadería and car wash and taco trucks had ICE raids, and it became important to focus on the area I called home,” good friend and organizer Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo informed me. She joined noise disruption protests at resorts that have been internet hosting ICE brokers within the San Gabriel Valley.
“People come out with instruments — I’ve seen trumpets and saxophones, but I’ve also seen people with pots and pans and cookie sheets,” she stated. “We’re protecting our neighbors and protecting ourselves.”
Regardless of having deadlines in his personal studio, artist Sam Shoemaker informed me that is the one factor he can take into consideration. “Watching ICE raid elementary schools, separate families, and drag our neighbors away is not something you should be able to just compartmentalize and put away,” Shoemaker stated.
On Sunday, June 15, protests continued throughout city. The LAPD officers stationed on the parking zone beneath the stadium on my block moved to Exposition Park. In the course of the sport that night on the Dodger Stadium, artist and singer Nezza sang the nationwide anthem in Spanish, regardless of being informed to not. At night time, I heard fireworks as an alternative of sirens, a fast reprieve earlier than the following week of resistance started once more within the morning.
I took the quiet with no consideration. On Thursday morning, June 19, I awoke to the sounds of sirens and helicopters buzzing overhead. A number of neighborhood patrols had adopted unmarked ICE autos from a raid at a Residence Depot in Hollywood and again to the Dodger Stadium, the place they gave the impression to be processing detainees within the parking zone. An eyewitness who requested to remain nameless for worry of backlash and threats stated a California Border Patrol agent informed her that they like to course of detainees exterior of public view, “because the public makes it dangerous.” By mid-morning, demonstrators had assembled at Gate E on the stadium to protest using the ballpark as a staging web site.
Raids proceed throughout city, and communities proceed to stand up in protection of their neighbors. Town of Bell, for instance, gave ICE brokers hell at a automobile wash over the weekend. Angelenos and Californians have all the time fought again — it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Watts Riot, when a whole lot of Black Angelenos protested police brutality and marked a significant turning level within the Civil Rights Motion.
“We’ve witnessed such incredible bravery in the city this month,” Shoemaker informed me. “I think we are all feeling a deep appreciation for LA right now.”
