Name: Curfew begins in LA as California governor attacks Trump for 'inflaming' protests | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-06-11T08:50:36.000Z
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We start Newsday in the United States, where a curfew has just come into effect in downtown LA, as protests over immigration raids continue for a fifth day.

In the last hour, California Governor Gavin Newsom has said he doesn't want the streets of his state militarized by the country's armed forces.

It comes as the federal government has sent National Guard and Marines to quell the protests.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that those troops will be providing protection for immigration agents during raids.

Now here is part of what Governor Newsom had to say moments ago.

Like many states, California is no stranger to this sort of unrest.

We manage it regularly and with our own law enforcement.

What then ensued was the use of tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets.

Federal agents detaining people and undermining their due process rights.

Donald Trump, without consulting California law enforcement leaders, commandeered 2,000 of our state's National Guard members to deploy on our streets, illegally and for no reason.

This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers, and even our National Guard at risk.

He doubled down on his dangerous National Guard deployment by fanning the flames even harder.

Let's go live now to Los Angeles, where our correspondent, Carl Nasman, is following this story for us.

Carl, the curfew went into effect a few minutes ago.

Tell us what the situation is like where you are.

Yeah, that's an 8 p.m. curfew, so we're about a couple minutes into it now.

We are in that zone where there are severe restrictions in place.

If you're out on the streets, you would be subject to arrest for most people in this area.

There is a very big line of police officers here.

And what we've been told is that they're now ready to, at any moment now, begin to march forward and clear the streets here of anybody who's still left on the streets of this area of downtown Los Angeles.

Something that the mayor was stressing was that this is a small area.

This is about a one-square-mile zone of downtown Los Angeles, of course, which is already a small area of the city.

So emphasizing, you know, this isn't martial law.

This isn't something where no one will be out on the streets in the entire city.

But as you can see, taking this very seriously here, a large police presence, and most of those demonstrators that we've seen, even in pockets, even in small gatherings throughout the day, have now dissipated.

And there's very few people left in the streets.

I'm just going to look down that way and very empty streets there as well.

So we're going to be waiting here, Steve, and we want to just see how this curfew does go into effect, what kind of reaction it gets from anyone that is left out in the streets.

But this is something that was announced by the mayor of Los Angeles earlier on today.

And this is clearly an attempt to try to gain control of the situation, especially as you can tell, we're only a few minutes away from sunset.

And that's when we've seen some of those troublemakers really come out and start to wreak a bit of havoc across the city.

You know, Kyle, you've been out on the streets for us for the last few days.

Just remind us of how events have unfolded and indeed escalated over the last few days that have now culminated and led to this application of a curfew.

What was interesting, because earlier we saw a mirror image of something that we saw on Sunday night, and that was a group of protesters making their way down onto the freeway, which passes right through downtown Los Angeles, the 101 freeway.

They briefly again blocked traffic on on both directions until police were able to get down there, usher them away.

But, you know, we saw these very chaotic scenes on Sunday where protesters managed to occupy parts of the freeway for about an hour.

It took a lot of effort from police to get them out of there.

Then 67 people arrested just in that incident today.

And these are the kinds of scenes, obviously, that they want to avoid here and try to get visual control over the city.

They don't want any more scenes playing out.

And I think there's a bit of a messaging battle here, too.

We saw two different addresses by two leaders of California, the mayor of Los Angeles and then the governor of California, denouncing the actions by President Trump.

And then we've heard President Trump saying that if he wants to see law and order in the city and he believes that his actions of deputizing and sending in National Guard troops, as well as beginning to send in hundreds of active duty Marines, he thinks that those actions helped to to start to calm things down.

But it definitely seems like right now this is the biggest action we've seen from the local officials here to really gain the upper hand.

And again, we're waiting and watching as this line of California highway patrol officers stands by and we'll see if they begin to move in.

And there's likely similar scenes playing out in different areas, different boundaries of where this curfew is set.

Again, a one mile radius in downtown Los Angeles.

Actually, Steve, just before I let you go, I could tell you, can you can you see that right there?

We're getting a cell phone alert and this is telling everybody in the area it's a public safety alert saying that the city of Los Angeles has declared a curfew.

It's now officially in place from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

So everybody in this area right now getting that text message for people to know that it's now a curfew zone.

Kyle, thanks very much for getting us up to speed with those latest details now that the curfew has been put into place.

Kyle Nassman there on the streets of Los Angeles.

A U.S. president, Donald Trump, says the protests in downtown L.A. against immigration raids are an assault on peace and public order.

During a visit to North Carolina, the president doubled down on deploying more National Guard troops and Marines to the city.

As long as we have the military there, the protests won't mean anything.

Last night, if we weren't there, they would have burned down the city.

A lot of damage other than they broke up a lot of concrete looking for weapons.

If that hits somebody in the head, the person's dead.

That's very proud to tell you that they might as well turn around.

Some of them will end up in jail for a long period of time.

And joining us for more on this from L.A. to discuss the legal implications of deploying the U.S. military to the streets of the city is Jodi David-Armer, a professor of law at University of Southern California.

Jodi, thanks very much for your time today.

Now, we heard earlier from Governor Gavin Newsom criticizing President Trump.

He called his actions a brazen abuse of power.

Is he right or is there a legal reasoning for the Trump administration to deploy a military to the streets of L.A.?

Well, frankly, there is quite a bit of precedent that gives the president the power to invoke, for example, the Insurrection Act.

The local authorities, governor and others, did not want to integrate schools, did not want black children coming into the schools.

Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard, told them to stand down and stop interfering with black kids making it to the schools.

And then he sent troops in to walk those black girls and boys into those schools and sit them in the seats.

And that happened also in the South and places like Alabama and Mississippi in the early 60s.

So there is precedent for what he's doing.

And, you know, his position would be, I have a national mandate and here are some local authorities who are refusing to robustly enforce my national mandate.

And so just like back there in 1957, when Eisenhower had to federalize the National Guard to make sure that the local authorities conform to his wishes and will the national mandate, I'm just doing the same kind of thing.

So he's going to he's going to try to spin the narrative for sure that way.

But the circumstances are incredibly different in this aspect, aren't they?

You know, there you had somebody trying to promote and protect values of equality, right, and saying that there was a national consensus that black citizens should be treated equally with white citizens and we will send in federal troops to enforce that.

There's a lot there's not that clear consensus on the values that Trump is trying to promote or vindicate by bringing in the agents rather than allowing the process of protest, the normal process of protest and free speech to run its course, as it has been in many other instances without the federal officers coming in.

Well, a curfew has now been put into place in your view.

Is that the right course of action for local authorities to take?

Well, a lot of local authorities are going to err on the side of safety and too often civil liberties are sacrificed for the sake of safety.