LOS ANGELES — Since June 6, police sirens, drones, helicopters, and fireworks have stuffed the air round my neighborhood in Elysian Park (also called 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 vitality within the metropolis is tense and electrical, even in areas that at the moment are emptier than typical. Elysian Park and Echo Park Lake on a Saturday are usually teeming with folks, 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 probably on the mercy of ICE and the violence of their ways. These contain storming into companies corresponding to taquerias, automotive 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 neighborhood that was destroyed to make approach 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 out there parking house to dock their tons of of marked and unmarked automobiles.
The homes that had been razed to pave asphalt for ballgame parking and now tactical harboring had 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 condo to downtown at Alameda and Business 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 folks driving beneath on the 101 freeway. “We were fine until [ICE] showed up,” mentioned 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 in the course of the first two weeks of June, they had been vacated resulting from a curfew instated by our mayor, Karen Bass. Outdoors the Japanese American Nationwide Museum, Nicole Maloney’s everlasting public art work “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). (picture courtesy Octavio Loera)
Through the large, 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 enjoying 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 advised 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 together with her digital camera.
“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 advised 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 (picture 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 each day and using quite a lot of ways, like forming neighborhood patrols and fast response groups to stop 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 advised me. She joined noise disruption protests at accommodations that had 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 mentioned. “We’re protecting our neighbors and protecting ourselves.”
Regardless of having deadlines in his personal studio, artist Sam Shoemaker advised 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 mentioned.
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. Through the sport that night on the Dodger Stadium, artist and singer Nezza sang the nationwide anthem in Spanish, regardless of being advised to not. At night time, I heard fireworks as a substitute of sirens, a fast reprieve earlier than the subsequent 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 automobiles from a raid at a House 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 mentioned a California Border Patrol agent advised 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 the usage of the ballpark as a staging web site.
Raids proceed throughout city, and communities proceed to stand up in protection of their neighbors. The town of Bell, for instance, gave ICE brokers hell at a automotive wash over the weekend. Angelenos and Californians have at all times fought again — it’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Watts Rebel, when tons of 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 advised me. “I think we are all feeling a deep appreciation for LA right now.”
