Who’s Really Funding LA’s Anti-ICE Protests?

 

Los Angeles descended into turmoil this weekend as left-leaning activist organizations, funded by taxpayer dollars, are believed to have intensified protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). What started as a relatively small demonstration opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown on criminal illegal immigrants rapidly escalated into violent clashes with law enforcement. Groups such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), closely connected to Democratic leaders and allegedly supported by billionaires with foreign ties, have been fueling the unrest while claiming to defend illegal immigrants' so-called “rights.” 

The anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles quickly spiraled into widespread chaos, with some participants throwing rocks at police, torching vehicles, and shouting inflammatory slogans. What began as a gathering of a few hundred soon swelled into thousands of rioters. Despite the escalating violence, Democratic leaders at the state level chose not to call for calm or de-escalation. Instead, their rhetoric appeared to encourage and fuel the aggressive actions of the crowd.

If you think you’ve read this story before, it’s because it’s very similar to the 2020 unrest that happened during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, which turned out that many of those protests were dark-money funded. 

The anti-ICE protests quickly escalated beyond control, fueled in part by prominent left-wing community figures. Among them was SEIU California President David Huerta, who was detained for obstructing federal agents during an ICE operation. After his arrest, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom condemned the federal enforcement actions.

The anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles are backed by well-financed, ideologically motivated groups that support the violent actions on the ground. These demonstrations are part of a larger, organized effort to undermine law enforcement by framing it as a social justice and immigrant rights issue, effectively turning the city’s streets into arenas for advancing a radical political agenda.

CHIRLA Executive Director Angelica Salas publicly called for mass action against ICE during a press event that preceded a sharp rise in unrest and confrontations. In the same period, CHIRLA saw a significant boost in public funding, pulling in $34 million in government grants by the end of June 2023, mainly from California state sources. That figure nearly tripled the $12 million the group had received last year.

According to Data Republican, CHIRLA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation are among the NGOs involved in the current unrest. Both organizations have a history of organizing protests targeting President Donald Trump.

Between October 2021 and September 2024, CHIRLA was awarded nearly $450,000 in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants for citizenship education and training programs. When President Trump began his second term, approximately $100,000 remained from the grant. DHS's immigration division froze the remaining funds, prompting CHIRLA to file a lawsuit. In response, DHS canceled the contract, and the lawsuit was later withdrawn.

The California Department of Social Services, the California Arts Council, and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services provided CHIRLA funding. Additionally, the organization received a contract from the Department of Homeland Security, personally secured by Bass. With this funding, CHIRLA opened an “Immigrant Welcome and Empowerment Center” in downtown Los Angeles, which Bass toured in May 2024

The LA Chaos Is an Illusion and Trump Will Not Fall for It

 

Let’s understand what’s going on in Los Angeles because most people don’t. This is not a battle of cops versus rioters; it is a battle between narratives. Most people see regime media video of Third World savages waving the tacky banners of their garbage homelands, lighting fires, hassling cops, and doing other things consistent with being barbarians, and think that Los Angeles is in chaos and therefore get scared. The idea behind this color revolution – it is organized and planned, not spontaneous or genuine – is to intimidate normal people into submitting and embracing the politicians associated with its goals in the hopes that it will stop. This is the work of the Democrat Party; the rioters are its useful idiots, acting to support the party’s goals while its maintaining deniability. But this scheme only succeeds if the target is feckless and weak, which such targets usually are. Trump isn’t. He’s going to win this because he understands this fight better than his enemies. The chaos is an illusion; his strength is reality.

Remember, this is not a kinetic operation. A kinetic operation achieves its goal by the violence itself. Kinetic operations destroy enemy personnel, reduce enemy combat power, or conquer territory through physical destruction. But this is an information operation. It accomplishes its mission by influencing the population. The violence itself is not an end, but a means; the goal is to compel people to submit by convincing them to accept the narrative.

And the narrative here is that Los Angeles is in complete chaos as a result of Donald Trump attempting to enforce federal law, so to stop the violence, Donald Trump must be compelled to cease enforcing federal law. This, of course, would be a devastating neutering of Trump while strengthening the Democrats. They want to make Trump look weak and convince America to submit to their intimidation. But this plot only works if we accept the illusion they are presenting.

Remember, it’s an information operation. None of what you see on the regime media is real. Oh, they are burning a few cars and screaming and yelling and running around waving flags of garbage countries, but what does any of that actually do? Nothing. They can’t make anyone do anything. They are not eliminating any federal law-enforcement capabilities. They are not significantly hindering federal law enforcement operations. They are not holding significant territory over time. They’re simply acting out in front of the cameras to try to convince you that Trump is powerless. 

To some extent, this works. As a Southern Californian, I’ve been bombarded by people around the country asking me if I’m okay. Of course, I’m okay. I live among rich people who like their Chardonnay oaky and their illegal alien domestic help cheap and compliant. They won’t let that nonsense happen in my neighborhood. Hell, my liberal neighbors would call the local SWAT team in if poor people knocked over one of their “Hate Has No Home Here” signs. The violence is happening downtown, where practically nobody lives except bums and a few urban pioneers, as well as in some scruffy suburban cities on the east side of the metropolis. The impact on the daily life of 99% of people in Los Angeles is exactly zero. There are approximately 20 million people here. Maybe 5,000 have anything to do with this nonsense.

Again, it’s all an illusion designed to frighten and confuse you. That’s what an information operation does. It creates a narrative in people’s brains to achieve an effect it can’t achieve by force. These mobs don’t have the capacity to do much of anything except block some freeways and set a few cars on fire. If the cops and the Guard decided to get kinetic, they’d be wiped out faster than they could chant, “No justice, no arrrggggghhhh.” They aren’t a revolutionary army. They are a bunch of jerks pretending to be a threat.

And Trump has called their bluff. They were counting on what usually happens when the professional agitators in blue cities start getting frisky – they get catered to by the Democrats who run these urban areas. The Democrats react like a mommy while Trump reacts like a daddy. He’s not taking any of their guff, but what is important is that he understands that this is an information operation. He escalated by activating the California Army National Guard – I was a deputy commander of the brigade Trump called out and on the streets with the Army during the Los Angeles riots – but not so he could go kinetic. He’s not calling in the Guard or the Marines to bust heads or quell disorder, like we did in 1992. The guardsmen are basically providing point security around federal facilities to free up federal cops to go out and do cop things like arrest scumbags. 

What Trump is doing is messaging to the country that he’s not taking their crap. He’s not going to be intimidated. He’s not going to let this get out of control. The ones who are letting it get out of control are the Democrats who run California, like slack-jawed moron Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Hairstyle. Let’s understand the relationship between the riots and the Democrat establishment. The rioters are catspaws, cut-outs whose act of violence and intimidation support Democrat policies even as the Democrat establishment pretends to be upset about the chaos. However, the Democrats must at least appear to be trying to maintain order. Trump knows that is one of their weaknesses. He is sticking them with the consequences of their own disorder. Have you noticed how the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles sheriffs, and the California Highway Patrol are the ones dealing with riots? They are the ones who look powerless in the face of the rioters. This, in turn, makes Gavin Newsom and his pals look powerless – an image compounded when they whine and complain impotently about Trump calling up the Guard and Trump ignores them.

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A color revolution information operation depends on an inept response from the targeted authority. Either the target of authority overreacts by going in and shooting a bunch of people, therefore appalling the weak-hearted citizenry, or it under-reacts and demonstrates its own powerlessness. But the color revolution fails when the target understands the game better than the leftists who initiated it. That’s what’s happened here. Donald Trump has projected strength, but not too much strength. He understands that normal American citizens are going to show absolutely no sympathy for the vandals, looters, illegal aliens, and other criminals, setting fires and looting 7-Elevens live on television. He has made Democrat officials look weak by ignoring their whining and forcing them to handle the part of the response that creates the worst optics.

At the same time, this situation provides an opportunity for Trump’s federal law enforcement to map out the network of organizations and individuals who coordinated and logistically supported rioting in Los Angeles. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. Leftist groups do this all around the country. Remember, time is on Trump’s side. Federal law enforcement can target the conspirators with criminal indictments and finally break this cycle. It can dismantle the infrastructure that allows these faux-spontaneous insurrections to pop up across the country. Offering rewards for specific criminals is another way to highlight to Americans that these people are criminals. And the situation also provides an opportunity to defund the government support to NGOs that launder government money to fund this kind of violence. The LA rioting has exposed our enemy to scrutiny, and we should take full advantage of that to crush it.

Trump is handling this just right. The battle isn’t on the streets of Los Angeles. The battle is in the hearts and minds of normal Americans. When normal Americans see burning and looting by degenerates, they are naturally frightened and appalled. What the leftists want to do, what the purpose of their information operation is, is to convince normal people that they have no choice but to submit because no one can protect them. Trump breaks that paradigm by providing an alternative – he will protect them, and therefore normal citizens don’t have to submit to the intimidation. All you need is someone willing to stand up to these dirtbags and it completely disrupts their info op.

The left has two main options going forward. One is to become even more violent and see if they can provoke an overreaction – remember, they don’t have the combat power to achieve anything by force. Even if they increase their level of violence, this is still an information operation. However, they risk overplaying their hand and justifying a forceful reaction by Trump. If some criminal – a substantial number of the rioters are not political activists but common street thugs – decides to shoot a fed and the feds shoot back, normal people are going to cheer.

The second and more likely course of action is for the word to go out to dial back the disorder. It’s not working. It’s not having the desired effect. It’s also hurting the Democrats, who tacitly support the violence but want to maintain distance from it. It’s their city that’s in chaos, not Trump’s. The Democrats are united in whining about Trump not submitting like cowards to the thugs, but all this is doing is making them look weak. It’s not Trump‘s forces that are getting pushed around by the rioters; it’s the Democrats’ local cops who are. The Democrats have had nothing but problems lately, and the last thing they needed was to have several days of news footage making them look ineffectual while also blowing the Elon vs. Donald cage match off the front pages.

The only real question is whether or not Donald Trump and his team planned this. It’s working to his advantage  – the Big Beautiful Bill debate just stopped being about saving a few pennies and became about saving our country from foreign invaders. You have to wonder whether the Trump 2.0 administration specifically choose a super leftist city to spin up ICE raids knowing that there would be a riotous backlash that they could then co-opt to message strength. Did they make a conscious decision to provide America a clear and unequivocal choice?

All I can say is that I hope so.

Biden’s Border Nihilism Will Live Long After He Is Gone

 

The spiteful open-borders legacy of Joe Biden will plague America for generations to come, long after the former president is a fading bad memory.

Somewhere between 10-12 million foreign nationals are believed to have entered the U.S. illegally under his watch, to add to the existing 12-20 million illegal aliens.

Almost all were unaudited.

They stormed the border for four years without background checks of the sort that American citizens must undergo to purchase a firearm or take out a loan.

At a time when citizens were expelled from the military for not submitting to the experimental mRNA COVID inoculations, millions of foreign nationals, with the Biden administration’s encouragement, crossed the southern border, exempt from any vaccination requirement or medical examination.

When Americans were required to present multiple forms of identification to apply for a mandatory “real ID” to fly in 2025, millions of illegal entrants were flown across the country, often stealthily and under the cover of night, without any valid ID at all.

On some days, the Trump administration has managed to deport 800 of Biden’s illegal aliens.

But 10 times that many entered illegally each day under Biden.

Trump’s border patrol would have to deport over 8,000 people every day of his four-year tenure just to undo what Biden wrought by his dismantling of federal immigration law.

Some 500,000 illegal entrants are believed to have criminal records—a number greater than the population of Oakland, California.

Indeed, new reports relate almost every day that another illegal alien has murdered, raped, or assaulted an American citizen.

The culpable Left often champions violent illegal alien criminals facing deportation. Their apparent assumption is that hurting Trump politically justifies hurting Americans even more by protecting violent illegal alien criminals instead of sending them home.

Thousands of these unknown criminals are deadly land mines waiting to explode.

Yet the Biden effort to destroy or subvert immigration law transcends just demolishing the southern border.

There are nearly 300,000 Chinese nationals in American universities, the vast majority admitted without serious background checks.

They are welcomed by elite campuses because they pay the full cost and at a premium, with few questions asked about why exactly they came or what they are doing.

No wonder, then, that in the last decade, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is reported to have trained and graduated hundreds of Chinese nationals who were either Communist Party members or the children of prominent Chinese communist apparatchiks.

In other words, at a time when the U.S. is locked in an escalating Cold War with the People’s Republic of China, our universities find great profit in enrolling and educating the communist elite who threaten Taiwan, imprison and oppress the Uyghurs, jail Hong Kong dissidents, and send both bio- and agro-terrorists into the U.S.

Not a day went by during the last two years without Middle Eastern, pro-Hamas visa students on some campus swarming students in libraries, assaulting and bullying Jews, trashing iconic buildings, illegally camping out in student quads, and screaming to bring the intifada home to the U.S.

Neither the Biden administration nor spineless college presidents took any action, despite such flagrant violations of both the terms and spirit of student visas.

Most recently, Yunqing Jian, a 33-year-old Chinese national with ties to the University of Michigan, was arrested as an “agro-terrorist.”

The mission of Jian, along with his girlfriend, was to seed toxic fungus into Midwestern farmland as a way of destroying the American food supply and thereby starve his hosts.

Sometimes the baleful Biden immigration inheritance was simply a matter of allowing “tourists” and “visitors” to stay far after their visas had expired—without consequences.

So, for example, Egyptian national and terrorist, Mohammed Sabry Soliman, along with his entire family, deliberately overstayed their visas. They were all residing here illegally when Soliman firebombed Jews, crying out “Free Palestine” as he tried to burn them up.

Americans overwhelmingly polled against this Biden border nihilism. Indeed, the House impeached his henchman, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Yet Biden, or his handlers in the shadows, would not stop destroying the borders and immigration law.

So why would a president deliberately cause such mayhem that will cost hundreds of lives and billions of dollars in the years to come?

Was the reason Biden’s characteristic incompetence or dementia?

Or did Biden simply want to alter the demography to find a constituency for his otherwise unpopular agendas?

Did he wish to grow the welfare state?

Was Biden hoping to expand the DEI agenda by bringing in the poor and supposedly oppressed as new fodder in the Left’s Marxist binary of victimized versus victimizer?

No one knows why Biden did it, only that he did — and we will suffer his nihilist legacy for years to come.

The Left Is Alienating Its Minority Base

 

’d like to talk about a more sensitive topic today, and that’s this new appearance or this growing—I would call it—reverse racism or racism among some left-wing elite black leaders, politicians, celebrities. I’ll give you a few examples.

Not long ago Susan Rice, the former top official in the Obama administration, was removed from the Defense Policy Board. That’s a group of grandees that advise the Defense Department. They’re political appointments. And traditionally, when a new president comes in, they get rid of most of the prior Defense Policy Board because they feel they’re partisans.

And in the case of Susan Rice, she was appointed in a late appointment by then-President Joe Biden, who pretty much wiped out all of the Trump appointments. So, her dismissal by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was not unusual.

And yet, she fired back at him and said he was dumb as a rock and ultra-MAGA. But what was interesting, she said, “white male, cisgender.” In other words, she attacked his race. And she said her administration would’ve fired him for the Signal chat scandal. But of course, she was the one that came out on Sunday talk shows and lied five times about the disaster in Benghazi, among other things later in her career. But why inject race into it?

At almost the same period, we had a number of Afrikaners—I should say a very small number, about 60 people—asked for refugee status, felt they had been endangered by black-on-white violence, which is demonstrable and beyond controversy in South Africa. And President Donald Trump allowed them to come in as refugees. And of course, during the prior administration, thousands of people came in as refugees. But because, apparently, they were white, this caused a storm of criticism.

The Episcopalian Church said they would no longer help with refugees because this was racist. Don Lemon went on a profanity-ridden rant about how this is horrible that these white people were coming in, this is disgusting, you shouldn’t be able to do that.

Not too long ago, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, talked about how the party might have to nominate “white boys.” Using that “boy,” that’s sort of a deprecatory term that has racial implications. Remember Joe Biden called two of his aides who are African American “boy.” That’s a very prejudicial term to use. And yet, she was using it in the reverse fashion for so-called whites.

And at the same time she was doing this, another tape surfaced from Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., where she said white men were the most likely terrorists and killers in America. That’s demonstrably untrue.

So, what am I getting at? I’m getting at the elite—the elite in politics and celebrities—are using this idea of white, white, white, white in a prejudicial manner. It’s very ironic because it’s exactly what we were evolving away from in pursuit of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “content of our character, not color of our skin.” And apparently, they believe because they’re African Americans or they’re left-wing that it’s OK to stigmatize somebody by their race. But of course, it’s not.

And here’s my point about this entire discussion. Lately, the Rasmussen polls—who have been very accurate, they were in the 2024 election and they are now—they surveyed the first 100 days of the Trump administration. And they found that—contrary to most of what, candidly, are left-wing polls—that Donald Trump had a positive appraisal by most people.

But here’s my point. Sixty-two percent of those who were surveyed that were Hispanic expressed approval. African Americans were about 39%. And Hispanics were higher than whites.

So, what am I getting at? You have two centrifugal forces at a time when African Americans and Hispanics are considering economics, cost of living, real issues, and they consider them more important than their superficial appearance.

You have a panicky elite on the Left, who, let’s be candid, they have been the primary beneficiaries of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion did not help the inner city. It didn’t stop the crime rate. It didn’t increase the per capita income. It did help a professional class.

But my point is this, while the professional class is obsessed with race and chasing white racist unicorns, the majority of the Hispanic community and a near majority of the black community have moved beyond the elite.

This is gonna have political repercussions in the future because the Democratic Party, the more they pound this tired, weary racial mantra, the more their constituents—they think they’re appealing to—are moving on.

Trump’s Second Term Gains Momentum as Economy Soars, Borders Tighten

We’re at four months now in the new Trump second administration. And a strange thing has happened.

If you look at the polls, after diving for President Donald Trump with the announcement that he was going to subject certain countries to high tariffs—which panicked the stock market. Now, the stock market’s almost recovered, or has recovered, all of its lost. It went down a little bit when Trump said he was going to continue the tariffs, to force the European Union to have reciprocal treatment toward the United States.

But nevertheless, Trump in the RealClearPolitics averages—which to be fair, have a preponderance of left-wing polls—is still only about a point, point and a half down. But in other polls, Rasmussen, he’s either even or he is a couple of points ahead. And yet, all of the media and all of the major organs on the Left, but even in the center and Right—The Wall Street Journal, to take another example we’ve discussed—they have been uniformly negative.

So, how in the world is Donald Trump—and Donald Trump has not been reticent. He has tweeted all sorts of things about, you know, Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift and Canada—things that were very controversial. How can he be almost equal and much higher than he was at his first term at this time? And the answer is twofold.

No. 1 is what he’s doing. Every time people say we’re headed for a recession or his trade war is gonna tank the economy, data comes out. This week, it was the corporate profits were unusually high, strong. It came out that we’re not in a housing recession, that housing sales are steady. Inflation is down. Energy prices are way down. Economic growth is up. Joblessness is down. So, that is one reason.

The second is Donald Trump has been touring the world. And you can call it mercantilism but essentially, the Trump doctrine is we’re not going to get into optional military engagements on the ground anywhere and we’re going to have our relations be transactional. So, even our enemies—to the degree it’s even possible—we’re gonna try to find some mechanism by which we can stop wars. Maybe rare earth mineral corridor in Ukraine or maybe we’re dangling an end of sanctions for Iran—I don’t think that’s going to work.

But the point is people appreciate the idea that Trump, first, is trying to exhaust peaceful avenues before he uses force. And he’s trying to address the theater wars that former President Joe Biden left him in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The economy is strong. The border is 99% closed. We’ve gone from over 150,000 entries down to less than 8,000, in many places fewer. The wall is going to be continued. The Border Patrol is increased. The deportations, despite the court orders, continue.

So, the things that he’s doing are very popular, especially to the working classes: black, white, Hispanic. They like cheap gas prices. They like news that there’s going to be $8 to $10 trillion of investment and new jobs and assembly manufacturing in the United States. They like the idea that we’re cutting unnecessary funds for government and we’re not touching Social Security. They like the idea that Trump is trying to reduce taxes on the middle class in terms of Social Security or tips. But there’s another facet. And that is not Trump, but the people who despise Trump and are attacking Trump.

When the electorate looks at that and they say, “Well, Trump—I like everything he’s doing but I don’t like what he said about Canada. It just kind of bothers me.” Or, “I don’t like him lowering himself to attacking Bruce Springsteen, in kind.” Yes. But what is the alternative?

Well, the alternative is the Left is glorifying a murderer, Luigi Mangione. And the campuses will not, cannot, do not want to stop the antisemitism. So, we see foreign guests with masks on who continue to use violence and vandalize our campuses. Now we have two wonderful Israeli citizens who have been murdered. And doesn’t seem that anybody in the core base of the Democratic Party is objecting at all.

This comes on the heels of attacks on Tesla. This comes on the heels of this strange Democratic reaction to Trump, where they use almost pornographic language: “s—,” the F-word. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz can’t give a speech without either comparing Trump to Hitler or calling him some pejorative.

The result of all this is when they look to the Democratic alternative, there is no alternative. There’s no explanation why they opened the border. There’s no explanation, opposition to what Trump is doing. Why aren’t they saying, “We like an open border. Stop it, Donald Trump”? They’re not even doing that.

They’re not presenting any positive, constructive alternative. There is no shadow government. There is nobody in the Democratic Party that is popular. Not Tim Walz. Not former Vice President Kamala Harris. Not Sen. Chuck Schumer. Not even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Especially not Rep. Jasmine Crockett. I mean popular to the American people in general.

And so, when you add the fact that the economic news is pretty good and there’s a lot of initiatives on the horizon—peace initiatives, foreign investment initiatives, trade initiatives. And when you look at the people around Trump—Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—they’re very good. And when they go before Congress, they’re calm, they’re rational, they’re data-driven. The Democratic senators who press them and inquire of them and mock them are usually poorly prepared, hysterical, angry, and make fools of themselves.

Add it all up: Things are going pretty good in the country. Donald Trump is a whirlwind. He’s staging a counterrevolution. And most of the issues that he’s trying to undo of the progressive project, the public supports him.

And his Democratic opposition—four months into his tenure—has still completely lost its mind and not only does not offer an alternative agenda, but personally, emotionally, psychologically puts people off. They do not like the way that they’re talking. They do not like the way they’re acting. And they don’t like them in general.