Who are the people protesting in Los Angeles?

By Chelsea Bailey, Julia Vargas Jones and Kyung Lah, CNN

(CNN) — Estrellazul Corral joined protests outside the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center every day this weekend to demand justice for the dozens of migrants detained by armed ICE agents in armored vehicles who targeted jobsites in the city’s predominately Latino communities.

After hours of peaceful demonstrations, Corral, a social worker focused on the city’s unhoused and undocumented population, said the National Guard began to push back.

“They threw tear gas at us, and we were doing what they were telling us to do,” she said. “Then people just got really upset and angry. And I think that’s where you see things starting to escalate.”

As the sun set Sunday evening, CNN correspondents documented how the demonstrations descended into violence. Some protesters torched self-driving cars. Some rained rocks down on police sheltering under a highway overpass after marchers shut down traffic. Others spray painted anti-law enforcement slogans on a downtown federal building. At least 21 people were arrested Sunday, the Los Angeles Police Department said.

The raids are in keeping with the Trump administration’s hardline approach to illegal immigration. But President Trump’s decision to federalize and deploy the National Guard against American citizens – the first time a US president has used such power since 1992, when riots erupted after the White officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King were acquitted – sparked a swift backlash that later grew violent.

Indeed, the protests appeared divided into separate groups: progressive citizens who felt called to defend the rights of the undocumented, and protesters who appeared determined to drag the city into violent chaos.

Defending ‘La Raza’

Unión del Barrio, an organization whose members are dedicated to defending the rights of “la raza” – or Mexican and indigenous people – within the United States, praised the efforts to fight back against ICE and other agencies.

The Los Angeles community has “the moral authority and universal right to defend our people from kidnappings and family separation,” said a spokesman for the organization in a statement on social media.

“What has happened these days weren’t acts of vandalism or crime, they were acts of resistance against a government that is kidnapping our fathers, our mothers, our wives, our husbands, our children,” the spokesman said. “The people did it out of a deep love and sense of justice for our families and our people.”

But one county official described Sunday as “probably one of the most volatile nights” in the city.

Jim McDonnell, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, spoke out against the violent attacks against his officers. At the same time, he drew a distinction between those who protested peacefully during the day and those who stoked the violence at night.

“When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that’s not the people that we see during the day who are legitimately out there exercising their First Amendment rights to be able to express their feelings about the immigration enforcement issue,” he said.

A senior law enforcement source told CNN that intelligence analysts have been conducting assessments on the crowds that gathered Sunday night. They found the many of the protesters were motivated by the recent immigration raids and disdain for the federal government’s deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles.

But some protesters, the intelligence source said, fit law enforcement profiles of so-called “professional rioters,” who continually seek out confrontation with law enforcement.

In her first appearance since the federal government launched its response to Los Angeles protests, US Attorney General Pam Bondi lambasted the clashes between protesters and law enforcement and promised a crackdown from the Justice Department.

The DOJ has “nine open cases” connected to the protests in LA, Bondi said in an interview with Fox News on Monday evening. She did not specify whether the department had brought charges in those cases or if they were still in the initial phases of investigation.

CNN has reached out to the department for clarification.

One of those investigations is into a masked individual who was filmed breaking cinderblocks and throwing shards at law enforcement officers, she said.

Federal prosecutors will also bring charges against those who assaulted federal officers and local police, Bondi said.

The toll of violence on vulnerable communities

After being informed ICE agents were questioning workers at a Pasadena hotel, Pablo Alvarado, the co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, began calling for protests to protect vulnerable immigrant communities throughout the city.

“The Pasadena community showed up in large numbers and the message was loud and clear, we don’t want to see your armored vehicles, men in masks coming to our communities to pick people up to rip families apart.”

But, Alvarado added, he felt the violence that spread throughout the city in response to the raids was tainting their cause.

“Every time that there’s violence the most vulnerable communities pay the price. Every time that there are riots, we see the business of low-income communities get burned down,” he said.

“The anger is understandable because you’ve seen armored vehicles and ICE agents armed to the teeth come into the neighborhoods,” he said.

But while he can understand why protesters are angry, Alvarado said there’s no excuse for violence. “We can send the message that we want to send without attacking anybody,” he said.

Families caught in the chaos

Blocks away from the charred husks of self-driving cars and graffiti-tagged buildings, the families of the people who were detained in the weekend’s immigration raids held a news conference Monday morning to call for their loved ones to be released from ICE custody.

Clutching signs with photos of their relatives, they each approached the microphone and asked for their loved one’s rights and due process to be respected.

A young woman named Julian said her entire family was traumatized by watching her father be shackled and led away by ICE agents, but his arrest has been particularly hard on her 4-year-old brother, who is disabled.

Although he struggles to communicate, Julian said, her brother hasn’t stopped asking for his dad since he was “kidnapped by ICE.” “We’ve told him ‘He’s working,’” she said.

But the truth, she added, has been far more difficult to explain. “We live in a city that considers itself to be a sanctuary city, but we’ve all seen that it is not.”

Another young woman named Montserrat told reporters her father, George Arrazola, was among the dozens detained in the raid on Los Angeles’ Fashion District.

“I was present,” she said. “I saw with my own eyes the pain of the families crying, screaming, not knowing what to do, just like me,” she said.

She called for Los Angeles’ status as a “sanctuary city” to be respected.

“No matter where a person comes from, or how they arrived in this country, their lives (are) valuable,” she said. “The treatment they received is not right – we demand justice now.”

That’s why Corral said she kept coming back – despite being repeatedly tear gassed and kettled by law enforcement – because she wanted the people detained to know someone was there, standing up for them.

But after days of inhaling pepper spray, Corral said as she faced down the line of armed US National Guardsmen Sunday, she began to wonder what was happening in her country.

“People were screaming, ‘Those are weapons of war. Those are weapons to murder people, to kill people in a war zone – that is not for a situation like this,” she said. “We stood our ground and were like, ‘We’re not going to let them intimidate us.’”

This story has been updated with additional information.

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