Guard troops, ICE stage photo op in Los Angeles park. A masked and heavily-armed assortment of agents from nine agencies and the National Guard flooded a public park in California Monday morning for an hourlong “show of force akin to a Hollywood movie,” the Los Angeles Times reported after images surfaced online and via embedded Fox TV cameras.
Agency representation included Customs and Border Protection; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Federal Protective Service; Homeland Security Investigations; ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations; the U.S. Marshals Service; the Internal Revenue Service; the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; and the LA Police Department. “They came with horses and armored vehicles, carrying rifles and in tactical gear…But there were few of their supposed targets to be found Monday—immigrants without documentation,” three Times reporters write.
Involved: 17 Humvees, four tactical vehicles, two ambulances, horses, and around 80 armed National Guard soldiers.
The multi-agency presence lasted “for about an hour before abruptly leaving” after Mayor Karen Bass showed up and began asking questions, the Associated Press reports. Bass shared a short video of the immigration raid sweeping across the park Monday, calling it “Absolutely outrageous,” and said, “It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”
Why this particular public park? “MacArthur Park is the Ellis Island of the West Coast,” City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez told reporters. “It was chosen as this administration’s latest target precisely because of who lives there and what it represents: resilience, diversity and the American dream.”
Panning out: “Monday’s sweep comes days after President Trump signed a budget bill that will provide a mass infusion of funds to drastically ramp up immigration enforcement and detention levels across the country,” the LA Times notes. “Los Angeles has become the poster child of Trump’s mass deportation plan, as more than 1,600 people have been arrested between June 6 and 22.”
A note on optics: “Two defense officials told reporters that what happened at MacArthur Park on Monday was not a military operation but acknowledged that the size and scope of the Guard’s participation could make it look like one to the public,” AP reports.
Coverage continues after the jump…
Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1876, nearly 100 armed white men attacked more than two dozen Black soldiers at a National Guard armory in Hamburg, South Carolina, killing two of the soldiers before torturing and killing four others—including state legislator Simon Coker as he was praying—while holding them as prisoners. Ninety-four white men were later indicted for the attacks; but none were prosecuted for what has since been referred to as the Hamburg massacre.
“Ominous crackdown” or “botched laughing stock”? National Guard sources told journalist Ken Klippenstein the MacArthur Park operation was seen internally as a laughing stock, complete with a formal “concept of operation” plan and a codename, Operation Excalibur. Citing Army documents, Klippenstein reports “the erstwhile justification for the operation was to try to shut down the distribution of fake IDs” at MacArthur Park, which a briefing for troops described as “the largest open-air market of fake identification to enable illegal immigration and human trafficking in the Southwest United States.”
According to the Army documents, the joint force’s “intent at MacArthur Park [was] to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area.”
The 1st Squadron of the California National Guard’s 18th Cavalry provided the troop presence, though they were instructed not to “restrict pedestrian movement” and not to “conduct law enforcement activities” during Monday’s counter-fake ID ops at an American public park. According to the troops’ briefing, the threat level was “high” at the park because “criminal elements, likely including FTO [foreign terrorist organization] MS-13 consider the park their home ‘turf’ and could escalate to lethal violence.”
First objective: “Secure key terrain,” with follow-on tasks including “Provide area security, enable civil freedom of movement, support law enforcement,” and comply with rules of force.
Said one Army veteran of the Global War on Terror to The D Brief: “Pretty amazing that federal forces feel the need to establish ‘freedom of maneuver.’”
Due at least in part to alleged poor communication between ICE and CBP, “We were on the objective for 24 minutes,” a National Guard member told Klippensstein. “Many of the phase lines were not reported because they didn’t happen. So we parked and then left. Soldiers didn’t get out of trucks. [They] stayed in the back of the 5-tons [military trucks] sweating in the heat.”
Message from the feds: “Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon,” U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino told Fox. “Illegal aliens had the opportunity to self deport, now we’ll help things along a bit,” he added on social media Monday.
Why so few arrests? It’s possible the locals were tipped off after folks at a nearby Home Depot spotted the agents en route to MacArthur Park, the Times reports. One person said rumors of the operation also began to spread on Sunday. “This was just one big, perverse publicity stunt,” he told the newspaper.
Mayor’s POV: “I don’t think the goal is to detain. I think the goal is to spread fear,” Bass said Monday. “It’s to say to immigrants that are in our city of immigrants that they need to stay home, they shouldn’t go to work, they shouldn’t go to school, because we’re coming after you.”
Related reading:
After pause, Trump resumes some defensive aid to Ukraine
One week after U.S. officials paused arms transfers to Ukraine, President Trump on Monday said he’s authorized the resumption of at least some of that military equipment support. The pause had included “shipments of Patriot missiles, precision-guided GMLRS, Hellfire missiles and Howitzer rounds,” AP reports.
“They’re getting hit very hard now,” the president told reporters Monday after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’re going to send some more weapons—defensive weapons primarily,” Trump said.
For what it’s worth, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart last week “he wasn’t responsible for the halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv,” and “that he had directed a review of Pentagon munitions stockpiles after the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear sites last month but hadn’t ordered the department to freeze the arms deliveries,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Reminder: On June 23, U.S. troops defended a Qatari base from an Iranian missile attack in what Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine described as the “largest single Patriot engagement in U.S. military history.”
Last week, Politico reported the pause order originated with the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby; the Guardian, however, reports “The decision was rather made by [deputy defense secretary Stephen] Feinberg, the former chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management to whom Colby reports…Defense secretary Pete Hegseth then signed off on Feinberg’s determination.”
Pentagon: “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops. Our framework for POTUS to evaluate military shipments across the globe remains in effect and is integral to our America First defense priorities,” Spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Monday afternoon.
Additional reading:
Israel-Gaza war
More Israeli attacks. At least 49 Palestinians, including eight aid seekers, have been killed and 262 wounded in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the Gaza Health Ministry told media outlets around midday local time on Tuesday.
The fighting took place as Netanyahu and Trump touted a plan to find Palestinians a new home somewhere else. “If people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave. It shouldn’t be a prison. It should be an open place and give people a free choice,” Netanyahu said, as quoted by Al Jazeera. “We’re working with the United States very closely about finding countries that will seek to realise what they always say, that they wanted to give the Palestinians a better future. I think we’re getting close to finding several countries.”
More immediately, Israel’s defense minister announced plans to force all Palestinians into a single giant refugee camp near Rafah. BBC: “Israel Katz told journalists on Monday he wanted to establish a ‘humanitarian city’ on the ruins of the city of Rafah to initially house about 600,000 Palestinians – and eventually the whole 2.1 million population. He said the goal was to bring people inside after security screening to ensure they were not Hamas operatives, and that they would not be allowed to leave.” More, here.
The plan drew immediate condemnation. It is an operational plan for a crime against humanity. It is nothing less than that,” Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, told The Guardian. “It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip.” Two Israeli professors described their concerns at greater length at Just Security; read that, here.
Meanwhile, Israeli and Hamas officials were discussing a possible ceasefire for a third straight day in Doha, Qatar. Read more at the New York Times.
Read the full article here