Who Is Behind the Los Angeles ICE Riots?

On Friday, local activists in Los Angeles (including the president of the California chapter of the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU) mobilized in a series of coordinated protests against raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These initial “protests” led to clashes and arrests, sparking further protests, riots, and arson throughout the city.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced he was deploying 2,000 troops from the California National Guard to quell the riots, against the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has called the deployment “purposefully inflammatory” and threatened to sue the administration. Trump and some of his top aides, including Stephen Miller, have decried the rioters as “insurrectionists,” though they have stopped short of formally invoking the Insurrection Act, which would grant the president broad latitude to deploy the military to restore order.

As in 2020 or with the widespread anti-Israel protests last year, both social and traditional media are awash with half-truths and misinformation about the disorder. To help make sense of things, The Scroll spoke with Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy and an expert on radical left-wing protest. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

The Scroll: ​​What is your sense of how the riot got started?

Kyle Shideler: Well, my understanding is that protesters essentially attempted to barricade ICE inside where they were staging for their raids, which is an activity that has been going on around the country for some time now. But this operation is obviously at a greater scale. The key indicator that this was intended to become a major incident to capture national attention was the presence of the SEIU, the SEIU president getting arrested, and the degree to which this rapidly escalated. So clearly this was not a handful of antifa guys just tracking ICE and causing mischief; this was intended to provoke a larger event, an event that would nationalize, and we’re now seeing today that they’re trying to spur things up in Chicago, New York, Houston. My concern is that if you look back before the election, they were talking about how to confront a future Trump administration over immigration, so they have been preparing for this for some time. This is the conflict that they wanted, and it’s the topic that they wanted.

Who is the “they” there?

Well, for a while, the hard radical left—the campus communists, the Palestinians, the pro-Hamas people—has been focused 100% on the Palestinian issue. And that was largely aimed at the Democrat establishment. Now we’re seeing the onus of street action shifting from the Palestinian angle to the ICE/immigration/Trump angle, which is where the establishment left would much rather have the conversation. So this seems to me like an attempt for the traditional American establishment left to reclaim control of the street radicals.

That isn’t to say there aren’t foreign activists involved. But you have the SEIU, you had Maxine Waters showing up right away to try to get in everybody’s face, you have very vocal opposition from [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. So it’s much more like what we saw with BLM than what we’ve seen with the Palestinian stuff, where a lot of the animus was directed at the Democratic Party, especially in the lead up to the election.

So the institutional left is bringing the radicals back into the party fold?

I’d put it in terms of orienting everyone toward a shared opposition. People will sometimes think these radical groups are centrally directed by one set of bad actors, like George Soros sitting in the middle of a spider’s web. I think of them much more as an asset that can be deployed by a variety of groups for a variety of reasons. With the Palestine stuff, for instance, we’ve clearly seen targets chosen by groups that have links to foreign adversaries, but then you also have tentacles that direct them toward what we might think of as the American left’s priorities and focuses. For instance, you didn’t really see the major radical unions, like SEIU and the teachers’ unions, go to bat in the Palestinian protest stuff. Now they’re activating.

Talk about the SEIU’s role here. It seems to provide a sort of connective tissue between the street-level radicals, on the one hand, and Democratic donors and politicians, on the other hand. The union played a critical role in founding the Democracy Alliance, the Democratic donor association, and it raises hundreds of millions of dollars for Democratic candidates in every election cycle.

“Connective tissue” is exactly right. You often find that these unions serve as a home for street agitators, the professional protesters and the “direct action” trainers. It’s a place where they still understand the value of a certain amount of street politics—the ability to hold a pop-up rally, a protest, maybe a riot. So the unions provide for the institutionalization of certain capabilities, a place where they can live in a more or less respectable way. And a lot of the genuine radicals find a home in everyday union organizing. And then when something like this happens, they take off one hat and they put on the other hat. The SEIU in particular has a history of radical activity and also of being willing to rough up their opponents. People used to refer to them as the “purple people beaters” during the Tea Party town halls, because you had SEIU and ACORN reps who would show up and make things difficult for people.

So you have a lot of those types in the SEIU, and then I imagine there’s some kind of conversation that’s taking place with the more official elements of the Democratic Party, and there’s give and take. If you go back to that 2021 Time article about “fortifying” the 2020 election, it mentions the union leadership being one of the major players calling for aggressive resistance to Trump. The more establishment Dems, and Democrat money, were saying no, let’s do this [by] changing the rules and controlling state election boards and filing lawsuits.

I have thought for a while that there is a conversation of a sort taking place on the left between these various groups over how they want to run the left in America generally. There are certainly elements of the left agitating for street action. They want politics to be the politics of revolution. The Palestinian protests were trying to send that message to the party establishment before the election. Part of it is there’s a civil war inside the American left over how they are going to operate in a Trump world. Are the Democrats the party of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party of Socialism and Liberation? Or are they the party of Wall Street and establishment money? The SEIU is this weird little nexus for that, because it has a foot in both camps.

On X, there’s been a lot of talk—some of it sensible, some of it less so—on the question of who is funding and organizing the riots. People posting pallets of bricks or cinder blocks and saying, “Who paid for them, or who put them there?” Was it George Soros or USAID or Chinese Communists or the deep state?

I have always been skeptical of the pallet-of-bricks narrative, going back to when it first emerged in 2020. You know, who put this pallet of bricks here? Probably the construction company that’s right next door. If you’re antifa or one of these other revolutionary groups, and you’re leading these marches or protests, you can control where the protest goes, and you scout the routes ahead of time. So if they want to move the route of the protest past a construction site where there are a bunch of bricks, they can easily do that. It doesn’t actually require some hidden hands to be ordering bricks and placing them somewhere.

I will say, I have talked to a law enforcement officer who said that back in 2020, his department had a situation with a pallet of bricks that showed up. They investigated it, and they were somewhat befuddled as to where it came from or how it got there. So I can’t entirely dismiss the narrative, but for the most part I think it’s a bit tryhard. It’s just not that hard to find something heavy to throw at a window in an urban setting.

For instance, if you go back and read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, he has a little line in there where he talks about the bricks in the streets being numbered so that when the Spanish got done building barricades, they could put the bricks back where they belonged. That’s a cute little image, but you get the idea. You know, I saw a video this morning of protesters just digging up rocks. They were these decorative rocks that were clearly placed in whatever government-funded minipark they were staging in. And it’s like, where did they get these rocks? They dug them up. Where did they get these tents? They ordered them on Amazon. People on the right observing these things have a tendency to view organizing street politics like it’s black magic. It’s not black magic, it’s just hard work. And there is an apparatus on the left that has been doing this for more than 100 years. They understand how to do these things. They share tactics, techniques, and procedures from around the globe with each other. It’s not rocket surgery.

So Klaus Schwab isn’t calling up antifa and saying, you know, “Now it’s time for L.A. to burn”?

We’re moving into a world of distributed networks, right? And if you think about your own life, how you get things done, you can see how they get things done. It’s really the same model. I’ve got a bunch of people I know in my phone. When I need somebody who can do a certain thing—say, a plumber—I call the guy that I know, and he comes and does the thing. These networks are interpersonal; they’re based on my history. When I need help with something, I go to the guy that I know. That’s how they operate too. They go to school, they join various groups, and they build an interpersonal network among individuals who are members of these groups.

If you’re looking at it on a visualization of a link analysis graph, it looks like a huge mess of organizations and people, but it’s really a network of people within various organizations. There’s an organizational structure that goes beyond money. A lot of the activity happens in this interpersonal space, and that confuses a lot of people. Think back to all those debates about USAID. Well, Trump cut USAID off, and there are still riots in L.A. That should convince us that there’s no “off” button.

The left is a self-perpetuating ecosystem. It’s not sufficient to just pick a hate figure at the top, as much as they might deserve whatever attention they get for bad behavior. You have to disrupt their ecosystem at all levels if you actually want to address this. You can’t put enough rioters in jail to stop them, and you can’t shut down one source of money and stop them. You have to operate at every level, and I think especially at the level of the organizers, of the trainers, of the mid-level professionals who make these things happen. These are the guys who don’t get arrested in a protest. There’s a limited number of those people, but there will never be a shortage of people willing to throw a rock or hold a sign.

What’s your read on the administration’s response so far?

Trump is responding to this in the way that he sort of talked about responding to the BLM riots in 2020. And what happened in 2020 probably confirms his prior assumptions that you have to nip these things in the bud. So he’s looking to draw a hard line early and try to break this thing in Los Angeles before it spreads. I think that’s probably the right move.

But I’m concerned because that’s the obvious Trump response. It’s what you’d expect if you know anything about Trump and his personality. Which makes me worried that it’s exactly what they wanted him to do. So I’m sort of waiting to see if another shoe drops. What have they planned for? I can see them saying, “We know Trump’s going to federalize things. We know he’s going to bring in the National Guard. He’s going to go heavy early.” We have to see what that response is going to be from the left, which should tell us a lot about how far ahead they’ve planned this and what their intentions are. They ran war game scenarios about this sort of crisis before the election, and I would not be shocked if you see in there elements of what comes next.

The model in 2020 was to drive a wedge between the president and the military, the people actually responsible for the National Guard. And we saw that play out in the BLM riots in 2020 in Washington, D.C., where you had a split between Trump and his then secretary of defense over the use of the Insurrection Act. And you saw it again on Jan. 6, where you had DOD officials countermanding the president and not operating on his requests for a heavy National Guard presence to keep things calm. So I expect that that’s one of the places they’ll try to drive the wedge. I don’t think they can drive a wedge between Trump and the DOD or the FBI now, however, so where will they try to drive that wedge? The response to these things is always political, and success, victory, or loss is not measured in how many police cars get burned. It’s measured in achieving a political objective.

That said, the left has greatly misjudged the American people before and probably will again. It happened in the 1970s with Nixon. And it’s possible that the American people are going to see what’s happening in Los Angeles, and they’re going to say, you know, “We want this over, and we don’t really care what it takes to do it.”