Audio excerpt – [Sirens]

ERIC:

What we saw was a pretty wide-scale revolt against the mass deportation operation that the Trump administration has been executing since he took office.

Audio excerpt – Witness:

“Immigration agents, ICE, all that came, you know, they came dressed up in all their military gear and they stopped traffic. When they stopped traffic we started noticing.”

ERIC:

Basically, what these were were protests in response to a series of raids or ICE enforcement operations in the Los Angeles area, which has a very dense migrant community.

Audio excerpt – [Sirens]

RUBY:

Eric Cortellessa is TIME’s senior political correspondent.

He’s been watching what happened over the weekend in Los Angeles. When ICE turned up in L.A.’s fashion district to deport undocumented workers and protests turned into riots.

Audio excerpt – ICE Agent:

“You are impeding our duties as federal law enforcement officers and preventing us from carrying out our official and lawful duties. If you do not disperse immediately, you may be arrested and charged with a crime.”

ERIC:

And, you know, in some cases, they escalated to the point where there were clashes with police, there was video of some of the protesters throwing rocks at police cars and other things like that.

Audio excerpt – [Rocks being thrown at cars]

RUBY:

Police in Los Angeles made at least 27 arrests. Officers repeatedly fired rubber bullets at protesters.

Audio excerpt – Lauren Tomasi:

“After hours of standing off this situation has now rapidly…”

RUBY:

One hit an Australian journalist as she was reporting from the streets.

Audio excerpt – Protestor:

“You just fucking shot the reporter!”

ERIC:

And as these images were being amplified on social media, television, you know Donald Trump took some pretty aggressive actions to tamp down on the unrest, including, to call in the National Guard and more recently to deploy active duty Marines into Los Angeles.

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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

Today, Eric Cortellessa on the tipping point of Trump’s mass deportations - and whether the commandeering of the national guard is a forerunner to more authoritarian acts.

It’s Wednesday June 11.

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Eric, first of all welcome back to 7am.

ERIC:

It's good to be with you, thank you.

RUBY:

Eric, the protests in LA – they’re a response to the ICE raids that really began to ramp up in LA over the past week or so. So - tell me about those raids.

ERIC:

Well, we've seen a major expansion of, you know, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to identify, target, arrest, and deport migrants who came to the country illegally. And so what we've seen are, targeted enforcement operations where there might be someone who is a migrant who has been convicted of a crime, and they surveil them, they go and find them, they arrest them, and they deport them. There are other cases in which you have cities that participate with ICE that might arrest someone on driving drunk, or maybe pull them over for a traffic violation, or get called because of a domestic disturbance and discover that the person is not here legally, and thus they then will hand them over to ICE and the deportation proceedings will begin.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“The number of arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Trump topped 100,000 this week. This is according to internal government data obtained by CBS News. The agency was averaging around 660 arrests daily during the president's first 100 days. The Trump administration has been intensifying efforts to detain unauthorised migrants in courthouses, worksites, and communities throughout the U.S.”

ERIC:

In some cases, though, there are what you might call a raid.

They'll go into schools, restaurants, they might go into a park where you have migrant landscape workers on the job, and they will arrest them in groups and then put them through these deportation proceedings. And what you're seeing in the legislation that the administration is pursuing right now on Capitol Hill, they're trying to ramp up the capacity for these law enforcement agencies to arrest more people, to process them at greater volume, and to be able to hold them in detention facilities while they're awaiting their removal from the country. And, you know, the Trump administration has done a host of other things to really build on its deportation operation. It's recruited other law enforcement agencies to assist in the effort. They have enlisted other agencies that are not law enforcement, agencies like the IRS or the postal service to help target and identify migrants for deportation. So you're really seeing Donald Trump go full throttle on what was one of his biggest campaign promises, which was to deport more than 11 million undocumented migrants from the country.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower right now has that record.”

ERIC:

And Donald Trump has said he's going to try and get every single one of them out of the country.

RUBY:

Okay, so I believe it was 6pm Saturday evening that Trump signed this memo to send in the National Guard. Can you tell me about that and what he said his reasoning was?

ERIC:

Well, his reasoning was that California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass had not done enough to quell the unrest and that they needed backup and they needed to restore order.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“Well, we're going to have troops everywhere. We're not going to let this happen to our country. We're not going to let our country be torn apart like it was under Biden.”

ERIC:

And he also said that they were not going to allow heretics, protesters, demonstrators to interfere with their deportations. And so this was a matter of law enforcement. It was a matter of. Insuring order on the streets of a major American city. Gavin Newsom has said that it was not called for. He didn't request it.

Audio excerpt – Gavin Newsom:

“I got a call from a staffer. No heads up whatsoever. And again, we're here to support local law enforcement. There's a mutual aid process. Local law enforcement had no needs. They were not requesting any additional resources.”

ERIC:

He requested, in fact, that Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth pull or withdraw the troops from Los Angeles and saying that what Trump was actually doing was escalating the conflict even further in order to win an argument in the battlefield of public opinion and to advance his argument that you need to deport people in order to have equilibrium in America.

RUBY:

And you mentioned that Marines are also being sent in to join the National Guard in Los Angeles. Does this mean, do you think that things are going to escalate even more over the next few days?

ERIC:

It's certainly possible. And one thing you're seeing is more Americans in other cities who are starting to mobilise with mass protests. So, you know, Trump's very aggressive actions to send in the National Guard, to send in Marines, you have to say things like, when they spit, we hit.

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“I have a little statement they say they spit, we hit, and I told them nobody is going to spit on our police officers. Nobody's going to spit on our military.”

ERIC:

This is galvanising a certain segment of the American society, right, to participate in the uprising. So it's not clear at this point how the conflict will be resolved.

RUBY:

And the California governor, Gavin Newsom, he says that the state will sue the Trump administration.

Audio excerpt – Gavin Newsom:

“This is exactly what he wanted, this is what he intended by illegally acting to federalise the National Guard. We're going to be initiating a lawsuit first thing tomorrow morning.”

RUBY:

Can you tell me more about that and whether or not he has a case there?

ERIC:

Well, I mean, you know, he certainly has a case. I think, you know, the rub of the situation for Newsom is that the courts often move slowly, and you have a Trump administration that will appeal any loss in order to bring it up to the Supreme Court, where they believe they have an emboldened conservative Supreme Court majority that has been pretty deferential on the executive's power, especially when it comes to matters of national security. So the legal fight is one that the Trump administration certainly anticipated and that they're very happy to engage in that fight.

Audio excerpt – Reporter 1:

“If you stand in the way of your enforcement operations you know you could be subject to potential arrest. Are you saying that about Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom are they at risk of being arrested by anybody.”

Audio excerpt – Tom Homan:

“I’ll say this about anybody. You cross that line. It's a felony to knowingly harbour and conceal an illegal alien. It's a felony to impede law enforcement from doing their job.”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 2:

“What crime has Governor Newsom committed?”

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“The crime, has he committed?”

Audio excerpt – Reporter 2:

“Yeah, to warrant his arrest, as you suggested earlier.”

Audio excerpt – Donald Trump:

“His primary crime is running for governor because he's done such a bad job.”

ERIC:

They have levelled this threat before that they will arrest anyone, whether it's a judge, whether it is a public official or a politician or an average Joe or average Jane if they impede deportation enforcement. And so, you know, they are certainly suggesting that that is something they are considering. I'm not entirely sure what they would say was the law that he broke. I think obviously that would create a pretty serious firestorm in the United States to see an elected leader of an opposition party, governor of another state, be arrested by the president because he has criticised the president or because he's resisted certain policies of the White House.

RUBY:

Okay, so in the meantime then what powers does Governor Newsom have to stop what's happening? Can he for instance tell the National Guard to stand down?

ERIC:

He certainly can tell the National Guard to stand down. He has said that this is a violation of state sovereignty, but as you've seen, he doesn't have the power to ensure that they listen to him. So right now, what you're really seeing is, is a real power struggle between, you know, a state executive and the federal executive. And thus far, the federal executive is winning.

RUBY:

Coming up after the break – how Trump’s deportations will reshape the US.

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RUBY:

Eric, Trump is right now making good on his election promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants. He said he would do this - but do you think the method is coming as a surprise to many people?

ERIC:

It's coming as a surprise to some people. It's not coming as a surprise to others. I mean, Donald Trump was very clear on the campaign trail that this was something he was going to do. He was not shy about saying what methods he would use. I mean I think one thing people were pretty surprised by was that he was willing to send Venezuelan nationals to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador, or the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, I think that really took a lot of people off guard. But the alacrity with which he has pursued deportations and in which he had tried to enlist the entirety of the federal government to assist in this effort, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody, not anyone who was paying attention to him on the campaign trail.

RUBY:

And in terms of some of the scenes we're witnessing, I'm thinking in particular of journalists being shot at by US authorities. I think for a lot of people watching, it's raising questions about how far this administration is willing to go and whether this is just the beginning of the ways in which we might see democracy changed or tested over the next three years.

ERIC:

Well, I think, you know, one thing the administration has signalled from the outset is that it's willing to push the extremes in order to achieve its objectives of expelling millions of migrants from the country. And one thing they want to do is shock you and make you realise just how serious they are, and I think they also want to change the realities on the ground.

They're moving at such speed, right, that the courts are playing catch-up, that civil society is playing catch up, that migrants themselves don't know how to resist. Many are choosing to voluntarily depart from the country rather than fight their cases in court. They don't think they have a chance. And even if they did, they know they wouldn't be welcome here. I mean, I recently reported on the deportation operation from inside of one of the ICE detention centres in central Louisiana, and a recurrent theme I found when talking to the detainees was that they were resigned to their fate. They didn't feel like there was any utility in challenging their deportation order. In fact, the warden of the prison said, fewer and fewer of the detainees are fighting their cases because they just don't think it's worth it. And so you're seeing the ripple effects play out across society where, you know, the United States has become this beacon for migration and for people seeking refuge from violence and oppression. The Trump administration is basically trying to reverse what has been a decades-long trend that has, over time, remade the country demographically and socially.

RUBY:

Yeah, how fundamentally does this change the country if millions of migrants are deported?

ERIC:

Yeah, I think, you know, for one, there are economic impacts, obviously. You know, we would lose a major source of labour, particularly, you know, low wage labour. When you lose that labour, obviously the risk that economists are pointing out is that it could lead to higher prices, because you won't have these low skilled, low wage workers who are performing jobs that most Americans don't want to perform. And that those are also a very important base of employees that make it possible for people in higher level positions to have those jobs at companies throughout the country.

The other thing is that it's sort of taking away from the sort of traditional American notion that everybody here has a hyphen in a way, right? You're Italian-Americans, you're African-American, you are Jewish-Americans or Chinese-American. Right? But what you're seeing is a sort of nationalist bent on immigration, a populist bent where, you know, America as a nation is geared from a policy perspective as directed by the levers of the Trump administration toward people who are indigenous in some form or fashion, maybe more modernly indigenous to this soil.

RUBY:

Eric, thank you so much for your time.

ERIC:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has described the footage of Nine correspondent Lauren Tomasi being shot by a rubber bullet live on air as “horrific”.

Albanese said he has expressed his concern to the US government. The media union has also condemned the shooting.

And

A second bungled embryo implant at Monash IVF has sparked a new investigation.

Monash IVF yesterday revealed that a patient’s own embryo was transferred, instead of that patient’s partner’s embryo.

It comes two months after the company revealed that a different patient had an embryo incorrectly transferred to her, meaning she gave birth to a child of an unrelated woman.

I’m Ruby Jones this is 7am see you tomorrow.

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