“If he continues to embarrass the FBI and the president, he’s not going to last long in that job no matter how long he attacks me or anyone else,” says Sen. Adam Schiff on FBI director Kash Patel.
‘Embarrassing the FBI’: Schiff predicts Kash Patel won’t last long as director
“If he continues to embarrass the FBI and the president, he’s not going to last long in that job no matter how long he attacks me or anyone else,” says Sen. Adam Schiff on FBI director Kash Patel.
Los Angeles police officers fired over 1,000 projectiles at protesters on a single day in June as demonstrators pushed back against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and decision to deploy the National Guard to the nation’s second largest city.
The police department released a state-mandated report Monday on use of force against protesters that included numbers on bean bags, rubber and foam rounds, and tear gas deployed during days of protests in Los Angeles.
On June 6, police fired 34 rounds at about 100 people. On June 8, police fired 1,040 projectiles at about 6,000 people, including 20 rounds of CS gas, a type of tear gas. Six injuries were reported as a result of those projectiles.
There were 584 police officers responding that day, the department said. Protesters had blocked off a major freeway and set self-driving cars on fire.
The report was concerning to Josh Parker, deputy director of policy at the New York University School of Law Policing Project.
“The sense that I got from that data is that if that’s how you police a protest, then you’re policing it wrong,” Parker said.
The protests have put the use of these types of munitions by law enforcement under scrutiny. After journalists were shot, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order that blocked LA police from using rubber projectiles and other munitions against reporters.
A protester who was hit and lost a finger filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of LA and county sheriff’s department.
California in 2021 restricted the use of less lethal munitions until alternatives to force have been tried to control a crowd. Police cannot aim “indiscriminately” into a crowd or at the head, neck or any other vital organs. They also cannot fire solely for a curfew violation, verbal threats toward officers, or not complying with directions given by law enforcement, such as when they order an unlawful assembly to disperse.
“To see such a high number of projectiles discharged in a relatively short time period gives me grave concern that the law and those best practices were violated,” Parker said.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. LAPD was planning a “comprehensive evaluation of each use-of-force incident,” said Chief Jim McDonnell in a statement reported June 23 by the Los Angeles Times.
The days of protests in “dangerous, fluid and ultimately violent conditions” left 52 officers with injuries that required medical treatment, McDonnell said. Officers were justified in their actions to prevent further harm, he said.
“Agitators in the crowd vandalized buildings, threw rocks, broken pieces of concrete, Molotov cocktails, and other objects toward law enforcement officers,” the report said.
Many protesters left by evening, but some formed a barricade of chairs on one street and threw objects at police on the other side. Others standing above the closed southbound 101 Freeway threw chunks of concrete, rocks, electric scooters and fireworks at California Highway Patrol officers and their vehicles parked on the highway.
Police issued multiple unlawful assembly orders shutting down demonstrations in several blocks of downtown Los Angeles but the crowd remained and munitions were used to bring the situation under control, the report said.
A box that read, “Other de-escalation techniques or other alternatives to force attempted,” was blank.
Parker said departments should plan for when a crowd begins throwing objects or being unruly, drawing on crowd management techniques.
“It’s important that law enforcement agencies not needlessly provoke the crowd” with aggressive language or weapons on display, he said.
Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies far outpaced the LAPD’s use of projectiles. With more than 80 deputies responding, the department deployed over 2,500 projectiles on June 8, the agency reported last week. It also said there were “hundreds to thousands” of people.
The California Highway Patrol, whose 153 officers responded to protesters blocking a major downtown freeway, estimated a crowd of about 2,000 people and used 271 rounds.
The tallies reported by LA police and deputies are high, especially considering the small number of deputies sent by the sheriff’s department, said retired LAPD Lt. Jeff Wenninger, who provides expert testimony for court cases.
“I don’t believe law enforcement officers or commanders truly understand the extent of this law, the restriction it provides,” he said. “And they just default back to old practices.”
LA police fired over a thousand projectiles at protesters in a single day
Los Angeles police officers fired over a thousand projectiles at Trump administration protesters on a single day in June.
During his remarks at the White House in June, President Trump threatened to make himself chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump asked, “Am I allowed to appoint myself?”
‘Am I Allowed To Appoint Myself?’: Trump Demonstrates His Incompetence, Threatens To Make Himself Chairman Of The Federal Reserve During Bizarre Rant
During his remarks at the White House in June, President Trump threatened to make himself chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump asked, “Am I allowed to appoint myself?”
Senator Fatima Payman has described Charlie Kirk as an ‘awful person’ in a video in which she appears to make light of his assassination.
Kirk, a 31-year-old father of two and controversial conservative commentator, was shot in the neck last week during a rally at Utah Valley University. He died a short time later.
The independent senator for WA responded to Kirk’s death in a live TikTok video, recorded at some point over the last week.
‘What do I think about Charlie Kirk and obviously his assassination?’, she told her nearly 195,000 followers.
‘I think he was a pretty awful person and he doesn’t deserve all the recognition he’s getting.’
She added: ‘It would have been best to not have him assassinated and for him to remain a footnote in the Trumpian era of the United States.
‘But yeah, so, not cool. Yeah, Charlie Kirk got shot and he’s RIP – whatever you want RIP to stand for! Some people will say it’s not peace. Fill in the blanks people, fill in the blanks.’
Her video has received swift condemnation, with One Nation Leader – and longtime Payman enemy – Pauline Hanson claiming it exposes her ‘radical leftist ideology’.
‘Fatima Payman mocking the death of Charlie Kirk isn’t just vile, it’s revealing,’ Senator Hanson said.
‘When the mask slips, this is what the left shows us: no compassion, no decency, only contempt. And yet they lecture the rest of us about unity and respect.
‘Remember this moment the next time anyone from the left starts lecturing from atop their moral high horse.’
A spokesperson for Senator Payman did not reveal what other possible meaning of ‘RIP’ she was referring to.
‘Senator Payman condemns all forms of political violence, and the level of violence we are seeing in the United States is frightening,’ the spokesperson added.
‘The Senator extends her sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s young family. For them, this is a terrible tragedy, and they deserve compassion in their grief.’
The spokesperson insisted that Senator Payman ‘notes that since Mr Kirk’s death, there has been a wave of commentary revisiting his statements and public positions.
‘The Senator will not engage in attempts to recast or glorify Mr Kirk’s record. Her focus remains on condemning violence, supporting victims of hate speech, and standing for respectful, democratic debate,’ the spokesperson added.
Fatima Payman declares that Charlie Kirk was an ‘awful person’
Kirk, a 31-year-old father of two and controversial conservative commentator, was shot in the neck last week during a rally at Utah Valley University. He died a short time later.
“The Trump administration is announcing their intention—loud and clear—that they want to use every tool of the state at their disposal to suppress domestic political dissent,” says Chris Hayes.
‘So absurd’: Chris Hayes blasts MAGA crackdown on free speech
“The Trump administration is announcing their intention—loud and clear—that they want to use every tool of the state at their disposal to suppress domestic political dissent,” says Chris Hayes.
Immigration enforcement actions are separating military families despite ongoing legal processes for citizenship. The War Horse investigation reveals how thousands of service members face difficult choices between military service and family unity.
“There’s No Way This Is Going to Happen to Us” : Army Sergeant, Before ICE Deports His Wife
Immigration enforcement actions are separating military families despite ongoing legal processes for citizenship. The War Horse investigation reveals how thousands of service members face difficult choices between military service and family unity.
During his remarks at the White House in May, President Trump trembled as a reporter called out his failed trade negotiations. Trump was asked, “Are you letting China off of the hook?”
‘Are You Letting China Off Of The Hook?’: Trump Trembles As Reporter Calls Out His Failed Trade Negotiations During Press Briefing
During his remarks at the White House in May, President Trump trembled as a reporter called out his failed trade negotiations. Trump was asked, “Are you letting China off of the hook?”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker also speculated about the president’s neurological health during a separate conversation.
President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) traded barbs on social media on Tuesday, with plenty of name-calling.
Trump trashed Newsom as “Newscum” ― a name he often uses for the governor ― while Newsom’s press office accused the president of suffering from dementia.
At least one other Democratic governor, Illinois’ JB Pritzker, also suggested the president may have “some” dementia during an unrelated discussion on Tuesday.
Trump lashed out at Newsom in a lengthy post on Truth Social, claiming the governor is “is in final stages of approval” for low-income housing in the “super luxury” Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles after the devastating fires earlier this year.
He also claimed Newsom “allowed their houses to burn” by “not accepting” water from the Pacific Northwest.
Donald Trump signed a memorandum to deploy troops in Memphis, Tennessee several days ago from the Oval Office. During his gaggle with the press, Trump threw a temper tantrum over protestors who crashed his recent restaurant visit in D.C. Trump stated that he asked U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into whether or not these protestors can be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and put in jail. “They should be put in jail. What they’re doing to this country is really subversive,” Trump remarked.
‘I’ve Asked Pam To Look Into That’: Trump Openly Discusses Plans To Dismantle Democracy, Says All His Critics Should Be ‘Put In Jail’
Donald Trump signed a memorandum to deploy troops in Memphis, Tennessee several days ago from the Oval Office. During his gaggle with the press, Trump threw a temper tantrum over protestors who crashed his recent restaurant visit in D.C. Trump stated that he asked U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into whether or not these protestors can be charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and put in jail. “They should be put in jail. What they’re doing to this country is really subversive,” Trump remarked.
The text messages ricocheted across Mount Pleasant, a historically diverse enclave two miles north of the White House, moments after someone said they saw federal agents stopping a Latino immigrant driving his daughter to school.
“At a raid now at mt p and Lamont!!!” popped up on Phaedra Siebert’s phone a few blocks from the intersection, she recalled later. Sprinting over, the former museum curator joined a crowd that was screaming at officers they assumed were with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Shame on you!” they chanted. “Shame on you!”
“We’ve got ICE out here!” someone yelled. “ICE here!”
President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in D.C. roiled large swaths of the nation’s capital, as Washingtonians encountered police checkpoints, armed National Guard troops and masked immigration agents. Although the president’s 30-day emergency ended Wednesday, the heightened pace of immigration arrests has continued in the city.
In Mount Pleasant, a left-leaning neighborhood whose large Latino population has long been part of the community’s fabric, residents have responded out of a sense of kinship to the sight of ICE agents swooping in, presumably to apprehend people living and working there suspected of being in the country illegally.
On weekday mornings, those upset by the arrests volunteer to chaperone groups of children walking to schools. Others patrol the streets, some while walking their dogs and riding bikes. Everyone is on the lookout for agents in unmarked SUV’s with tinted windows and out of state license plates that are hard to miss against a backdrop of elegant brick rowhouses and apartment buildings and a colorful low-rise commercial corridor.
If something catches their attention, they blow homemade whistles — their high-pitched trill echoing through the streets — and text warnings to hundreds of neighbors, many of them on a messaging system the man behind it likened to a “bat signal.”
“Can we stop ICE from coming? No,” said Rick Reinhard, who has lived in Mount Pleasant for more than 50 years and helped launch the network, among several residents use to communicate. “But can we make it uncomfortable? … Yeah.”
Mount Pleasant residents have their reasons for focusing their concern on ICE. In the month since the start of Trump’s crackdown, according to White House officials, law enforcement has apprehended slightly more than 1,000 immigrants across D.C., accounting for about 38 percent of the arrests they have reported for the period.
Following Trump’s emergency declaration on Aug. 11, Attorney General Pam Bondi said D.C.’s lenient policies toward immigrants, which prohibited police from cooperating in ICE arrests, made the city more dangerous. Immigration agents intensified enforcement in areas such as Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, neighborhoods popular among the city’s 95,000 immigrants, more than a quarter of them estimated to be undocumented.
Siebert, 54, was on her own self-styled walking patrol Aug. 28 just before 8 a.m. when she saw the text about agents detaining the man at the corner of Mount Pleasant and Lamont streets.
As she arrived, she said, she saw that the officers already had the man in handcuffs and that his daughter was weeping. Loren Galesi, who also lives in the neighborhood, had positioned herself in front of what she thought was an agent’s car, an act of protest she later described as “so out of character for me.”
“In a political city, we’re not political,” Galesi, 42, a graduate student in history at Georgetown University, said of herself and her husband, who moved to Mount Pleasant with their two children in 2021. “I vote every four years, that’s the extent to my involvement.”
Something changed in her after the start of Trump’s crackdown, said Galesi, as she witnessed “these masked agents show up and take our neighbors away.”
At the intersection that morning, Galesi saw the agents place the man in a car and drive off. Her friend, Liz Sokolov, 50, an educator who had been on her own patrol when she came upon the crowd, was in tears. “It just feels like you’re living in a country you don’t recognize,” Sokolov said later.
She tried to comfort herself with the thought that the detained man “knew we didn’t want him taken away and knew we were using our voices to help.” Yet, a litany of unsettling questions remained, not the least of which was when the agents would return.
Everyone is scared
The ICE raids — and the possibility of more in the future — has caused fear in the neighborhood, a sloping pocket just off 16th Street NW with a diverse population of lawyers, policy analysts, Capitol Hill staffers, and blue collar workers, many of them immigrants from El Salvador.
The neighborhood has faced a variety of crises over the years, including a 1991 riot that began when a police officer shot a Salvadoran immigrant. A five alarm fire in an apartment building in 2008 displaced 200 low income Latino families. The pandemic delivered another wave of pain five years ago.
Six days after Trump’s Aug. 11 emergency declaration, the administration made it known that Mount Pleasant was on its radar. On social media, ICE posted a video of agents descending on a neighborhood plaza and ripping down a banner that used a Spanish epithet to denigrate the agency.
“We’re taking America back, baby,” an agent says in the video, his face concealed by sunglasses, a hat, and a black gaiter.
Residents replaced the banner with another — “No Deportations in Mt. Pleasant,” it read — though their defiance did not salve the general unease.
“People are really, really scared; they don’t want to go to their jobs, they don’t want to go shopping,” said Yasmin Romero-Castillo, head of a local tenants association who buys groceries for residents too afraid to leave their apartments.
As she spoke, she sipped tea at Dos Gringos, a cafe whose owner, Alex Kramer, has been a Mount Pleasant fixture since 1994. Kramer said her business suffered during the crime emergency because employees from nearby shops weren’t going to work and dropping in for coffee. “The neighborhood is dead; they have killed the vibe,” Kramer said. “You listen for the whistles and the helicopters. Everyone is scared. I’m scared.”
The shrill of a whistle and a woman shouting, “Get your hands off of her!” is what caught Claudia Schlosberg’s attention on Labor Day as she watered her garden.
Schlosberg, 71, a civil rights and health care attorney who has lived in Mount Pleasant since 1978, dropped her hose and ran to the corner where U.S. Park Police officers and other agents were questioning the driver of a van and her passenger.
The officers, Schlosberg said, smashed the window, pulled the passenger out and whisked him away. A woman who questioned the arrest had been pulled off her bicycle and over to the sidewalk by a man in a vest marked “Police.” As she tried to video, Schlosberg said the same man threatened her with pepper spray and ordered her to move back.
“What are you doing?” Schlossberg recalled responding. “Why are you doing this? Get out of here!”
Two days later, Schlosberg was part of a group of 50 residents who went to a local library, expecting to voice their concerns over the immigration arrests at a meeting with someone from the office of D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D).
Many in the neighborhood were already displeased that Bowser had signed an executive order directing her police force to coordinate with federal authorities indefinitely, though the mandate did not include ICE.
They never got to share those sentiments. Anthony Robertson, a Bowser staffer, showed up only to depart quickly without taking questions. “It really feels like there’s no one we can turn to protect our community,” Schlosberg said.
A mayoral spokesperson, in a statement, did not directly address the reason for Robertson’s departure but said the administration would “continue to work with the community” through “the appropriate senior officials who can provide the most relevant and timely information.”
The ‘eyes and ears’ of the community
Even before Trump took office in January, Reinhard contemplated ways to organize Mount Pleasant, figuring that the neighborhood’s immigrant population could be vulnerable if the president carried out a campaign threat to takeover the city.
By the spring, Reinhard, a photographer with a history of activism in the neighborhood, had started a texting network and recruited a few people. Then came Trump’s emergency declaration and membership on the channel ticked up: 50 people, then 80, then 100, then 200 and more.
Recruits are vetted to ensure they don’t work for the Trump administration, as well as law enforcement and news organizations, and are encouraged not to talk to outsiders about the channel. “There’s so much concern that they could seize our phones and infiltrate a group chat,” Galesi said. “There’s a strong sense that if you don’t live here, we can’t trust you.”
One neighborhood restaurant owner described the messaging system as the “eyes and ears” of Mount Pleasant. “As soon as someone posts they’ve seen something, someone will be like, ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’” said the owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful of drawing unwelcome attention to the restaurant. “It’s almost like a constant patrol. Instead of walkie-talkies, they’re using their phones.”
Others started their own chat groups, including Sokolov, who worried that a local day care center could be vulnerable because it caters to immigrants families. A friend with a 3D printer volunteered to make nearly 200 whistles they distributed across Mount Pleasant.
Siebert started her patrols weekday mornings, beginning at 6:45 a.m. She has become adept, she said, at spotting unmarked police SUVs, “usually black or charcoal,” with their darkened windows and concealed emergency lights.
“I’m glad to be doing something of use when it’s easy to feel entirely impotent,” she said. “I’m also glad to find a way to use my privilege as a nice White lady. People don’t clock me as a someone patrolling the patrollers but this is what we do. One of my tools is blonde hair.”
By the end of the first week of September, the visits from federal agents seemed to subside. Residents remained on alert, though. Their messaging systems still hummed. Patrols persisted.
As parents picked up children at the Bancroft Elementary School one afternoon, a man pointed down the street as he walked his Chihuahua and shouted, “Hey everybody! Be careful! ICE is out there!”
Heads turned, footsteps quickened.
“They’re down the street!” the man repeated. “They’re down there!”
At the end of the block, there was no sign of ICE or any other law enforcement, for that matter. “A UPS man said he’d seen them outside an alley,” the man explained. “And in another alley.”
He shrugged and moved on.
A few feet away, a boy turned to a stranger.
“What’s ICE?” he asked, his brow furrowed before he resumed his walk home.
A D.C. neighborhood long home to immigrants pushes back against ICE arrests
