Name: Inside Trump's immigration raids as National Guard deploys to Washington DC
Uploaded: 2025-08-29T23:16:06.000Z
Duration: 6 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's 7 a.m. in Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

Reflexive pronouns

We'd set out to see for ourselves what law and order now looks like in today's America.

We hadn't expected it would take just five minutes and two blocks to find it.

Observe right here, don't cross the street.

The agents are from ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, here on the orders of the president.

It's one strand of his law and order blueprint for America.

Get her out of here, he says to a neighbor woken by the commotion.

The surge of federal law enforcement agents into America's capital has been unprecedented and their powers are too.

So it's just gone 20 past seven in the morning.

What appears to have happened is that the authorities have pulled over this truck here.

They have detained, we think, three people from them.

They've removed them, put them into these unmarked police vehicles here and they will be taken away.

It's causing a huge amount of upset with the locals here.

Detained because they were not able to prove on demand as they went to work whether they are here legally.

They are taking hardworking people away, not criminals.

This is not making our city safe, pulling out workers who are an essential member of our community and being like, oh, that makes D.C. a better place.

Well, that really was stark to see it all unfolding in front of us and the blunt actions of the agents really is a reflection of the orders from the very top.

But for me, the really interesting thing was the visceral reaction from the community.

Up the road, another moment of community tension.

Well, 15 minutes or so since we filmed that last raid, we've moved a few blocks away and you can see the commotion here.

Locals very upset because this vehicle, inside it, are some of the ICE officials, the police officers who are doing the detaining and clearly for the locals, they do not want them there.

The whistles are a new community tactic to alert people that ICE agents are in the area.

It's a couple of weeks now since President Trump outlined from the White House his plan for Washington.

Massive enforcement operations targeting known gangs, drug dealers and criminal networks to get them the hell off the street, maybe get them out of the country.

Because a lot of them came into our country illegally.

And this is the intentionally visual part of it all.

The National Guard at the sites and on the streets.

The president has seized control of law, order and security from the city authorities, who he has framed as failing liberals.

He's pledged it as a model for other cities.

But if this is largely about a display of strength, well, in the neighbourhoods of overwhelmingly democratic, left-leaning D.C., it feels closer to a worrying tipping point.

Like, I have to be a little bit more aware and not in a good way.

24 hours later and we're back in Mount Pleasant.

So we just ran into a local guy here who's had a tip-off that there is a raid happening a couple of blocks over here.

Yeah, you can see the flashing lights down here.

The officers are at the entrance to an apartment block.

They appear to be from various agencies and the city police too, who are now also under the authority of President Trump.

We're a quiet community, great neighbours.

On this occasion, no one is arrested and they are in the end literally shouted out of the street.

I've lived here for 47 years and I've never seen anything like this.

They are occupying the city and our neighbourhoods.

This is a Donald Trump dominance performance.

It is more than a performance though because here in Washington, the President can and has taken control of law enforcement from the local authorities to deliver his election pledge.

Does this community anger make you feel upset, worried?

But the community anger here is visceral.

If this is the plan for Democrat-run cities across the country, well then the weeks ahead look divisive indeed.