In an interview, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said federal immigration raids and the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines have turned her city into a testing ground for aggressive Trump administration policies. She described the terror felt in Latino neighborhoods, denounced what she views as the unnecessary militarization of Los Angeles, and urged other cities to see the confrontation as part of a broader threat to democracy.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, elected in 2022 as the city's first Black woman mayor, has faced a series of crises, including wildfires in January 2025 that triggered an ultimately unsuccessful recall effort and complicated her push to tackle homelessness.
Her tenure has drawn national attention amid a renewed Trump administration crackdown on immigration. Bass told The Nation that "the first part of the year, we had the worst natural disaster in California's history," referring to the 2025 wildfires, and that recovery efforts were still underway when a wave of federal immigration enforcement began on June 6.
According to Bass's interview with The Nation, on June 6, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out coordinated raids at multiple locations in Los Angeles. She said agents arrived in regular cars with darkened windows, sometimes without license plates, and that masked officers armed with rifles "would literally snatch Latinos off the street," behavior she said Angelenos have come to call "the hunting of Latinos." Bass and immigrant‑rights advocates described the operations as sowing "absolute terror" in Latino communities, prompting rapid protests supported by long‑standing immigrant‑rights organizations.
Bass and other officials have said that, in response to those protests, President Donald Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles on June 7, later increasing the deployment to roughly 4,000. In The Nation interview, Bass said Trump "seized power" from California Governor Gavin Newsom, who ordinarily serves as commander in chief of the state National Guard, and that no local authorities had requested the assistance. Reporting by outlets including The Guardian and the Associated Press likewise notes that thousands of Guard members and about 700 Marines were sent to the Los Angeles area to support federal operations around the raids.
Bass maintains that the scale of the deployment bore little relation to conditions on the ground. She told The Nation that Los Angeles, a city of about 500 square miles, saw vandalism confined to roughly four blocks. Among the sites targeted, she said, were Olvera Street, a historic area that celebrates Mexican culture; the Japanese American National Museum, located at a site tied to World War II‑era internment; and a mural of labor leader Cesar Chavez, where graffiti reading "F ICE" was scrawled. She emphasized that "a riot never happened here" and that the Los Angeles Police Department, supported by county sheriff's deputies, managed the unrest.
In the same interview, Bass noted that Los Angeles has a population of about 3.8 million and that "close to 50 percent" of residents are Latino, most with roots in Mexico and Central America. She said sectors such as fashion, construction, hospitality and tourism depend heavily on immigrant labor. Citing local estimates, she put the Latino share of the city's construction workforce at about 40 percent and warned that immigration raids could slow rebuilding in fire‑damaged areas like Pacific Palisades.
Bass argues that the administration is using Los Angeles as an experiment for how far it can go in deploying military forces domestically. "Beware!" she told The Nation. "This is being tested in liberal Los Angeles because, if they can get away with this here, then you can imagine what they could do in places where the mayor might be a Democrat but the state is Republican."
She has also raised legal concerns, pointing to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars the use of federal military forces in domestic law enforcement. Bass told The Nation that the presence of Marines and large numbers of National Guard troops on city streets is part of an effort to "get the American public to tolerate military intervention on our streets." Trump, she noted, has additionally threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to assume direct control over local law enforcement — a statute last used in 1992 in Los Angeles following unrest after the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a level of violence she contrasted with the more limited vandalism seen this year.
Bass framed the current moment, including the immigration crackdown, as "the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War." In The Nation interview, she linked that assessment to what she called an administration‑wide attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs; the removal of African Americans from leadership roles; and federal cuts that she said affected some 300,000 Black women through layoffs and program reductions.
She further described what she called a "dosing" strategy by the administration — testing public tolerance for aggressive measures in different cities. In Los Angeles, she said, the "dose" involves immigration enforcement backed by military deployments. In Washington, D.C., she argued, the focus has been homelessness and crime, with National Guard troops sent to "clean up" encampments and a push to lower the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults. In Chicago, she alleged, federal forces carried out a 1 a.m. raid on a Black and Latino apartment building, deploying from a Blackhawk helicopter, breaking down doors and zip‑tying residents — including U.S. citizens and legal immigrants — while denying them access to lawyers and family members. Bass characterized these tactics as a sharp break from past immigration enforcement practices, where detainees more readily had contact with counsel and relatives.
Bass also tied the immigration crackdown to her core mayoral priority of addressing homelessness. She declared a citywide state of emergency on homelessness on her first day in office, citing what she called a humanitarian crisis among tens of thousands of unhoused residents. The Nation, drawing on July 2025 data from the University of Southern California verified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, reported that since Bass took office in December 2022, street homelessness in Los Angeles has fallen by about 17.5 percent over two years, with a 13.5 percent drop in the use of tents, cars and other makeshift shelters. The magazine credited her administration with resolving roughly 100 encampments, launching a citywide homelessness‑prevention program and helping facilitate more than 30,000 affordable‑housing units.
Bass warned that federal policy could undermine those gains. She told The Nation that Trump signed an executive order on homelessness calling for expanded arrests of unhoused people and criticizing cities for being too lenient. She said she fears that in areas such as Skid Row — where she estimated more than 5,000 people live on the streets — National Guard troops or other federal forces could be used to conduct large‑scale sweeps or transfers to remote facilities.
Throughout the interview, Bass urged Americans to resist what she described as the normalization of military forces patrolling city streets and the policy blueprint laid out in conservative projects such as "Project 2025." She drew historical parallels to McCarthy‑era loyalty oaths and said that today, to receive certain federal grants or contracts, local entities are effectively required to pledge not to pursue diversity or sanctuary‑city policies. Progressive local leaders, she argued, face the prospect of reduced federal funding or other punitive steps if they openly challenge the president, but she said her own ideology remains an "anchor" guiding practical decision‑making in Los Angeles.
Bass's account and characterizations, as published by The Nation and echoed in interviews she has given to outlets including local television stations and national networks, form the basis for her warning to the rest of the country: that Los Angeles is both a "petri dish" for aggressive federal intervention and a test of how cities can push back.
