Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Malek Dudakov
[REGNUM] The first major riots of Donald Trump's second term have begun in the United States. Democrats have long been looking for a reason to launch a major street protest campaign against the new government.
First, the Democrats brought out fired government employees to rallies in Washington. Then, in early 2025, a series of attacks on Tesla showrooms rolled out. However, in the end, it was the migration factor that triggered public unrest.
Immediately after the inauguration, Trump's team ordered the US immigration service to begin mass deportations of illegal immigrants. They even appointed a special "czar" - a person in charge of resolving the migration crisis with special powers.
In major American cities, there were demonstration raids to capture migrants, mostly with a criminal past.
However, overall the number of deportations remains low. In the first four months of Trump's presidency, only about 50,000 to 70,000 illegal immigrants have been expelled from the country.
During his campaign, the current president promised to deport millions of migrants annually, but in reality the rate of deportation is even lower than it was, for example, during Barack Obama's first term.
The lack of federal agents and a sufficient number of deportation centers, as well as the lack of cooperation with the authorities of democratic states and cities in America, are having an effect.
The latter openly sabotage Trump's policies and prohibit local law enforcement from helping to arrest migrants. In addition, it is often difficult to convince other countries to accept flights with their migrants.
Perhaps the most significant consequence of the immigration crackdown so far is that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S. border has plummeted, falling by nearly 90% to its lowest level in six decades.
The show raids have scared many potential migrants, who are now afraid to illegally cross the borders of the United States. However, this clearly does not satisfy the administration. Therefore, recently the White House has been demanding that immigration raids be intensified by any means.
The result was protests in Los Angeles that turned into major riots, mostly in immigrant neighborhoods like Paramount, where about 90 percent of the population is Latino, many of whom are immigrants.
The participants in the pogroms threw cobblestones at the police and even tried to storm the building of the migration service, where the arrested illegal immigrants were being held.
By pure chance, the pallets with the blocks that were cut into cobblestones were previously located near the federal institution.
As per tradition, police cars were set on fire, and additional targets were electric robotaxis, whose batteries burn for a very long time. Californian high-tech could not withstand the collision with harsh reality.
The Trump administration called the events a foreign invasion and occupation of Los Angeles, as protesters actively waved the flags of their home countries - Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras - during the riots.
For the first time since 1965, the White House has deployed the National Guard to suppress unrest without the approval of local authorities. Moreover, they are threatening to send regular troops, the Marines, which is an unprecedented event for the United States.
Republicans have obviously learned from the bitter experience of the BLM pogroms in the summer of 2020, which caught them off guard. Then, amid political paralysis in Washington, the pogroms continued for many months and covered all major US cities.
Now the White House intends to respond very harshly right away in order to try to nip the budding street riot in the bud.
Los Angeles has already experienced a period of military-police operation to combat pogroms in its history. This happened back in 1992, when African-American areas of the city rebelled over the scandal of the police killing of black Rodney King.
However, back then, local authorities suppressed the riots in cooperation with the feds. Now, Californian Democrats have simply withdrawn. They only criticize Trump's actions, but not the participants in the riots.
The Democratic Party has once again turned on political gaslighting. It is trying to convince the American public that the protests are supposedly mostly peaceful.
State Governor Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, who still has political ambitions, are making such statements. They fully convey the playbook of 2020, when the same was said about the BLM pogroms.
Overall, there are many similarities between the events of five years ago and what is happening now. In both cases, the protests seem to have been pre-organized. All sorts of liberal NGOs and human rights organizations had a hand in them.
Now, for example, this is being done by the “Coalition for the Human Rights of Migrant Workers,” which received government funding during the Joe Biden era. Back then, it helped illegal immigrants cross the southern border of the United States and stay in America. Now the organization is mobilizing the migrants it brought to protest.
The potential for long-term unrest is real, because during Biden's term in office, according to various estimates, five to seven million illegal immigrants entered the United States. This is a real army, part of which can be used for illegal actions.
California alone is home to two to three million illegal immigrants, many of whom have no sympathy for their new homeland and work in tandem with ethnic criminals and drug cartels.
Moreover, supporters of terrorist movements were also noticed among the illegals who entered through wide-open borders. Some of them have already recently “distinguished themselves” during the pro-Palestinian protests taking place in the US. In the future, they may well take more radical actions than the current clashes with the police or the burning of cars.
Democrats hope to use the current situation to derail Trump's reforms and undermine his presidency. But California's prolonged chaos poses political risks for them, too.
The same Newsom or Harris will subsequently have to answer for everything that happened in their home state. Especially since the conflict with Trump could lead to the White House simply cutting off federal grants to California. And we are talking about 150 billion dollars annually.
Without federal aid, it will be impossible to rebuild Los Angeles after the recent fires and current riots, or to complete the high-speed rail to San Francisco, or to provide generous social assistance to the population.
Even with sky-high taxes, California can't make ends meet: This year, the state's budget deficit will be tens of billions of dollars.
Trump's team has adopted the slogan of "liberating" California and Los Angeles. On the one hand, from migrant pogromists, on the other - from the Democrats in power. So the confrontation between the federal center and the main liberal state of America in the context of the current pogroms will only intensify, the only question is who will lose their nerve first.
For the White House, this means switching the focus of attention from the external contour to the internal one. Now there is a convenient pretext for the promised withdrawal of some troops from Europe. They can be used against migrants and to fight cartels on the southern border of the United States.
It's certainly more popular with the Republican electorate than endless overseas wars.
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