LA under curfew for second night after hundreds arrested

BBC:

A curfew is in place for a second night in Los Angeles after nearly a week of unrest in the city over US immigration raids.

Multiple people were arrested for violating the downtown curfew shortly after it came into effect at 20:00 local time (03:00 GMT), the BBC’s US partner CBS reported.

Nearly 400 people have been arrested in LA since protests began on Friday, including 330 undocumented migrants and 157 people arrested for assault and obstruction, including one for the attempted murder of a police officer.

Federal prosecutors have so far charged two men for throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers in two separate incidents.

A total of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines have been deployed to help quell the unrest. Some of those National Guard troops are now authorised to detain people until police can arrest them.

Hundreds of protesters marched to Los Angeles City Hall early on Wednesday evening before being dispersed by police.

As the overnight curfew began, LA Mayor Karen Bass wrote on X that it was designed to “stop bad actors who are taking advantage of the president’s chaotic escalation”.

She had earlier blamed the demonstrations on US President Donald Trump’s immigration raids, which she said “provoked” residents by causing “fear” and “panic”.

“A week ago, everything was peaceful,” she told a news conference on Wednesday.

“Things began to be difficult on Friday when raids took place.”

Bass suggested Los Angeles was “part of a national experiment to determine how far the federal government can go in taking over power from a local government, from a local jurisdiction”.

She has previously called on the administration to end the raids.

Overnight on Tuesday into Wednesday, Los Angeles police said they made “mass arrests” after a fifth day of protests over the immigration action.

In a series of statements, the city’s police department said that those detained included 203 people arrested for failure to disperse, 17 for curfew violations, three for possession of a firearm, and one for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.

Two officers were injured in the skirmishes, the statement added.

On Tuesday, Bass declared an overnight curfew within a relatively small area of the city’s downtown district, saying businesses were being vandalised and looted.

After the LA curfew came into force at 20:00 local time on Tuesday, police moved through downtown areas, firing rubber bullets to try to disperse crowds.

Explaining the curfew on Tuesday, Bass said she wanted “to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting”, saying the city had reached a “tipping point”.

The curfew order affects an area of about one square mile in the second-largest city in the US.

Police chief Jim McDonnell said: “Some of the imagery of the protests and the violence gives the appearance as though this is a city-wide crisis, and it is not.”

Pam Bondi, the US Attorney General, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that the curfew “helped a bit”.