When federal immigration agents swept through Los Angeles’ Fashion District, Boyle Heights, and Pico-Union neighborhoods last week, arresting dozens of migrants in coordinated raids, Bryant Odega was transported back into his childhood memories. 

In elementary school, Odega’s first airport visit was to watch his father, an immigrant from Nigeria, get deported back to his birth country. “It’s triggering,” the 27-year-old LA public school teacher said about the past week, “to see the videos of people being basically kidnapped. It brings me back.” 

The mass immigration raids across LA County triggered a lot more people in the region, home to the second-most undocumented migrants in the country. Still, the protests that erupted over the weekend told a story as much about who showed up as who stayed home.

Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets outside the federal building downtown. Local police doused protesters with tear gas and fired flash-bang grenades. Protesters hurled fireworks back at the police lines. And by Sunday night, President Donald Trump took an aggressive approach, deploying over 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to the city.

The question hanging over the protests for Black Angelenos quickly moved beyond just immigration policy to who belongs in neighborhoods and in the city where belonging itself has been contested for decades. 

Across social media and in homes across the country’s largest county, Black residents sparked heated debate about solidarity, displacement, and the complex racial dynamics that have reshaped one of America’s most powerful cities over decades. 

The protests have marked the first military deployment against American citizens since 1992 when riots erupted in LA after the white police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted, and the first time in 60 years that a president had federalized a state’s National Guard without the governor’s consent. But, the crowds of protesters, some people said, were lacking the Black activists who had led similar resistance movements just years before. 

The viral criticism was swift, and some Black folks responded with the argument that immigration enforcement wasn’t a “Black issue.” 

On social media, one user wrote, “Black people be warned. Go home. This is not your battle to fight.” The comment, which focused on the threat of violence against protestors, was shared thousands of times across social media to the tune of millions of views and, crystallized a painful truth about Los Angeles: The same neighborhoods now under siege by immigration enforcement were once the beating heart of Black LA, before decades of demographic change transformed South Central from Black strongholds into Latino communities. And as a result, violence could seep into Black communities.

Other Black residents expressed feeling the targeted attack on migrant communities was not their battle to fight because of their own experiences with displacement.

“There is a notion of disengaging that took root amongst Black folks and that this attack was seen as a Latino issue,” said Odega, who grew up in South LA and now teaches Black and ethnic studies. “But it speaks to this culture of violence where we accept harm and choose not to speak up against what we know is wrong because we feel like we’ve been wronged, too.” 

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The Los Angeles area is the only American region to see most of its once majority-Black neighborhoods transform into majority-Latino neighborhoods, leading to racial animosity amongst the groups. Since 1980, LA County’s Black population has grown by just 1%, while the county’s Latino population has grown by 130%. Since then, 92% of the region’s Black neighborhoods that experienced gentrification are no longer majority-Black, the highest rate in the nation.

“Growing up in South LA, the first anti-Black insults that I ever heard were from Latinos,” Odega said, “so I understand how these conditions have divided people.”

What the debate missed, however, was how deeply immigration raids cut into the issue of displacement that still aches through Black Los Angeles and how the federal agents now hunting migrant families are wielding the same tools of surveillance and removal that have long targeted Black communities. 

As Marne Campbell, the author of Making Black Los Angeles, told Capital B in 2023 after audio tapes leaked of Latino City Council members in LA disparaging Black communities and voters, the animosity amongst Black and Latino people in LA is rooted in decades of competition for the same struggling schools, the same scarce affordable housing, and the same low-wage jobs that have defined life in LA’s working-class communities of color.

Surveys, including one done by the University of Southern California, have shown that in Los Angeles, “newly arrived Latinos” typically enter the city with perspectives on Black people that are “heavily influenced by anti-Black stereotypes,” leading to a “maintained distance from their African-American neighbors.” Latino residents tend to hold negative beliefs about Black Angelenos because of the city’s disparate rates of incarceration, crime, and excessive policing concentrated in Black communities. But in the same vein, Black residents respond negatively to new Latino residents because of these prejudices.

Kat Calvin, an LA resident and author of American Identity in Crisis: Notes from an Accidental Activist, said she believes Trump’s plans are underscored by a desire to disrupt communities of color. 

“We have to remember what we’re fighting for. It is very easy for our communities to be pitted against each other, but this is pretty clearly Trump’s war on California,” said Calvin. “We can all agree [Trump’s] not doing all of this, bringing in this chaos and the military presence, just to deport a few hundred undocumented immigrants.” 

This is a fight for Black migrants, too

The debate around how Black residents should show up or not show up in these protests reflects another complex reality about immigration enforcement that few acknowledge: Black migrants face deportation at dramatically higher rates than other immigrant populations, making ICE raids as much a Black issue as a Latino one. 

Adrienne Spires, an LA County resident and mental health professional, said that because of this reality, she believes there is a misconception around the ways Black people are showing up. 

“I think people are so used to seeing, historically, how Black people have shown up — and we’re always leading the struggle — but just because we’re not the loudest in the room today doesn’t mean we’re not supporting or caring about the issue,” she said. “There are a lot of complex reasons behind stepping back.”

There are over 4 million Black immigrants living in the U.S., which is 20% of the nation’s Black population, and California has the sixth-most Black immigrants in the country, with 60,000 Black immigrants living in LA alone.

Adding another wrinkle, studies show that when U.S.-born Black people are pushed out of neighborhoods, like they have been in LA for decades, the Black immigrant population actually increases in these neighborhoods. This potentially contributes to negative feelings between U.S.-born Black people and Black migrants. 

Still, data shows that Black people are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement regardless of their citizenship status. Nationally, there are an estimated 582,300 Black undocumented immigrants, accounting for 5.6% of the total undocumented population. But Black migrants account for more than 1 in 5 noncitizens facing removal based on criminal convictions, meaning that in immigration courtrooms across America, Black people are disappearing at a rate that is four times more often than their numbers would suggest. 

The odds are so steep that a traffic stop or minor arrest becomes a near-certain path to exile for Black migrants in ways that don’t apply to other immigrant communities. Inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, the targeting becomes even more brutal: Black migrants are almost twice as likely to be abused by guards and staff, according to reports. 

The city’s Black residents, who constitute roughly 40% of the county’s homeless population while representing only 7% of the county’s total population, understand intimately how federal enforcement targets communities of color. So the decision to participate in the protests is less about solidarity and more about survival in a city where they’ve already been displaced once, explained Odega, whose father was deported when he was in elementary school.

“I know what it feels like to have my family be separated by [immigration agents], but it sucks even if you haven’t. Living in LA, the folks that are being targeted are the people who we’ve grown up with and go to school with.” 

He added: “If this government feels like it can do this to Latinos, we know that they can do that to Black folks, too.”

“A dangerous escalation”

The protests that began Friday evening have now led to hundreds of arrests. The charges paint a picture of urban warfare, including assault with a deadly weapon on police officers, attempted murder with a Molotov cocktail, arson, and looting, as protesters blocked the 101 Freeway and tagged federal buildings with anti-ICE graffiti. What started as crowds trying to physically block federal vehicles from transporting detainees has evolved into a broader resistance movement demanding an end to Trump’s deportation strategy, which aims to arrest at least 3,000 migrants daily nationwide. The protesters’ central demands are focused on ending what organizers call federal overreach.

“This unnecessary and dangerous escalation occurs in conjunction with the Trump Administration’s sweeping effort to criminalize migrants, especially migrants of color, and weaponize federal resources against protesters exercising their rights to express support for those targeted by this Administration’s anti-civil and human rights policies,” said NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Janai S. Nelson in a statement. “Through the deployment of military resources, President Trump seeks to usurp control of California from its Governor to promote an anti-immigrant agenda.”

Trump has threatened that this military action, which has targeted protesters and journalists alike, could be “the first of many” such deployments if anti-ICE protests spread to other cities. He has justified the military presence by claiming protesters are “paid insurrectionists” engaged in what he calls an “insurrection,” warning that demonstrators will be “met with equal or greater force” and stating that troops will remain in Los Angeles “until there is peace.” He has even suggested he might invoke the Insurrection Act to give military forces broader law enforcement powers. 

Read More: Atlanta Immigration Protest Draws Hundreds Amid Tear Gas and Fireworks

A coalition of 26 Republican-led states have backed his approach. “In California, we’re seeing the results of leadership that excuses lawlessness and undermines law enforcement. When local and state officials won’t act, the federal government must,” a statement by the state leaders read. 

However, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass mounted a coordinated political and legal offensive against the deployment of federal troops, with Newsom filing an emergency motion in federal court Tuesday to block Trump’s use of the National Guard and Marines, arguing the president had violated the Constitution and state sovereignty by federalizing troops without gubernatorial consent. 

Newsom accused Trump of manufacturing a crisis to distract from his legislative struggles and trade war challenges, calling the president “deranged” and claiming he had “created the conditions you see on your TV tonight” by conducting provocative immigration raids designed to incite community backlash. 

However, by Tuesday evening, Bass relented and declared a local emergency, imposing a curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. covering 1 square mile of downtown. Their legal challenge also suffered a significant setback when U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer declined Newsom’s request for an emergency restraining order to immediately block the military deployment, instead scheduling a hearing for Thursday and giving the Trump administration until Wednesday afternoon to file its response, effectively allowing federal troops to remain on Los Angeles streets for at least several more days.

“We have seen federal agents destabilize our city and Black LA, just look at the riots of ’65 and ’92,” Odega said. “They know that we are powerful, and as Black people, we cannot deny the power that we have by choosing not to engage.”