Police make 'mass arrests' in LA during nighttime curfew

Los Angeles police began arresting people in the city's downtown area late on Tuesday, as groups gathered in violation of an overnight curfew after a fifth day of protests against Donald Trump's immigration crackdown.

Looting and vandalism in the second-biggest U.S. city have marred the largely peaceful protests over ramped-up arrests by immigration authorities.

The demonstrations, which began on Friday, and isolated acts of violence prompted Trump to take the extraordinary step of sending in troops, over the objection of the state governor.

The protests again turned ugly after dark on Tuesday, but an hour into the overnight curfew only a handful of protesters were left downtown, with police making several arrests as they warned stragglers to leave.

Police arrested 25 people on suspicion of violating the curfew as of Tuesday evening, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing a spokesperson of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The number of arrests was likely to rise as law enforcement worked to remove the remaining protesters from the area, the newspaper said.

Earlier, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said she had issued the curfew "to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting."

One square mile (2.5 square kilometers) of the city's more-than-500 square mile area will be off-limits from 8:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. (0300 to 1300 GMT) for everyone apart from residents, journalists and emergency services, she added.

At their largest, the protests have included a few thousand people taking to the streets, but smaller mobs have used the cover of darkness to set fires, daub graffiti and smash windows.

Protests against immigration arrests by federal law enforcement have also sprung up in cities around the country, including New York, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Austin.

Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, along with 700 active-duty Marines, in what he has claimed is a necessary escalation to take back control – despite the insistence of local law enforcement that they could handle matters.

A military spokeswoman said the Marines were expected to be on the streets by Wednesday.

Their mission will be to guard federal facilities and to accompany "federal officers in immigration enforcement operations in order to provide protection."

The Pentagon said the deployment would cost U.S. taxpayers $134 million.

Late on Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said his state would deploy its National Guard "to locations across the state to ensure peace & order" after solidarity protests.

"Peaceful protest is legal. Harming a person or property is illegal & will lead to arrest," Abbott wrote on X.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who has clashed with the president before, said Trump's shock militarization of the city was the behavior of "a tyrant, not a president."

In a filing to the U.S. District Court in Northern California, Newsom asked for an injunction preventing the use of troops for policing.

U.S. law largely prevents the use of the military as a policing force – absent the declaration of an insurrection, which Trump has mused.

The president "is trying to use emergency declarations to justify bringing in first the National Guard and then mobilizing Marines," said law professor Frank Bowman.

Sun Taiyi, an associate professor of political science at Christopher Newport University in the United States, said there are problems with legal basis on which Trump invoked the National Guard, because the protest sites in Los Angeles were not federal government facilities, such as the Pentagon or Capitol Hill that met the requirements, but merely some shops and businesses.

(With input from AFP)