How Los Angeles Is Rising Against Fear

It is a Sunday, but not one of peace. Not a quiet day, not a weary end of the week. June 8, 2025 marked one of those moments when a city doesn’t just tremble - it speaks. Loudly. Angrily. Unequivocally. What unfolded in the streets of Los Angeles was no ordinary demonstration, no routine protest, but a cry. An angry, collective reflex to the estrangement by a state that responds to its citizens with uniforms and rifles.

In Downtown, in Boyle Heights, in Compton, in Santa Monica - thousands gathered everywhere. Old and young, Black and white, migrants, students, union workers, mothers with children, retirees with whistles. It was a panorama of society, compressed onto asphalt, held together by the shared feeling: enough is enough. The trigger was the deployment of the National Guard, legitimized by President Trump’s memorandum - signed less than 24 hours earlier, with words that declared protest as rebellion and resistance as a threat.

But Los Angeles did not allow itself to be intimidated. On the contrary. The city vibrated. Beneath the surface, in the arteries of the urban body, history was stirring. The images that etched themselves into the nation’s retina that day were no footnotes: blocked streets in front of federal buildings, helicopters over Santa Monica, and voices - hundreds, thousands of voices - that no longer pleaded, but demanded. “No ICE, no fear!”, “Our streets, not their war zones!” - chants that were not understood as slogans, but as the final witnesses of a democratic claim that must be defended anew each day.

The authorities responded with force. Police declared several gatherings as “unlawful assembly.” There were arrests, injuries, and scenes reminiscent of civil war conditions. And yet, the protest - for all its anger - was permeated by something almost forgotten: dignity. Not hatred, but determination. Not violence for its own sake, but a clear goal: visibility. Truth. Justice.

It was as if the city itself had decided no longer to be a bystander to its own disenfranchisement. As if it had realized that silence is consent - and that in a time when courts are silent, ministers look away, and presidents send soldiers, only the body in the street remains to bear witness.

And yet, as much as this day was marked by resolve and resistance - the fear of escalation remains. In some neighborhoods, especially in the south and east of the city, vehicles went up in flames in the evening, shop windows shattered, and the first targeted attacks on federal vehicles were reported. What began as a peaceful protest now threatens to tilt - not everywhere, not as a whole, but as a crack in the façade of a city trying to assert itself.

• These scenes inevitably revive memories of the unrest that erupted after George Floyd’s death.

And still, one must hope - that the scale does not overflow, that the cries do not vanish in smoke, that the movement is not swallowed by the very violence it seeks to overcome. For on the horizon looms June 14. A day that will arrive like a promise - or a warning. In more than forty cities, mass demonstrations have been announced. In Los Angeles, in New York, in Chicago, in Houston. The resistance is growing, nationwide - and with it the question: will America listen, or strike again?

June 8 will remain. As a date. As a memory. As a warning. Los Angeles has spoken - in the language of resistance, in the grammar of rage. And maybe, just maybe, this Sunday was a beginning. Not a blazing endpoint, but a quiet departure. In the midst of tension. On the edge of a decision.

Update: Unfortunately, the hoped-for calm never came – and the night hasn't even begun yet.