Trump vows to ‘liberate’ city as mayor imposes curfew

The mayor of Los Angeles has imposed a night-time curfew for part of downtown as a fifth day of clashes over President Donald Trump’s immigration raids erupted in America’s second-biggest city.

Karen Bass said she was declaring an emergency as businesses were being vandalised and looted. Nearly 200 people were arrested in the city on Tuesday.

Trump meanwhile defended his decision to deploy 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to LA, vowing to “liberate” the city and prevent it being “conquered by a foreign enemy”.

The immigration raids that triggered the protests last Friday are continuing with National Guard troops now protecting border control agents on enforcement operations.

Chaotic protests also sprung up on Tuesday night in cities around the country, from Seattle to Chicago:

• In Atlanta, Georgia, riot police used tear gas on protesters who fired fireworks towards officers at a demonstration attended by hundreds
• NYPD told the BBC dozens were arrested for blocking vehicular traffic after several thousand marched into lower Manhattan
• Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent National Guard troops to San Antonio, where immigration rallies are planned

LA’s mayor told reporters earlier: “I have declared a local emergency and issued a curfew for downtown Los Angeles to stop the vandalism, to stop the looting.”

The order affects one-square-mile of LA and went into effect on Tuesday night at 20:00 PST (04:00 GMT) until Wednesday morning at 06:00 PST.

Los Angeles police made 197 arrests on Tuesday, up from 114 on Monday, 40 on Sunday and 27 on Saturday, Bass told Tuesday’s press conference.

The mayor said 23 businesses had been looted on Monday night, though she did not provide an estimate of financial losses to the city from the at-times violent disorder.

“We reached a tipping point,” she said of her decision to impose a curfew in a pocket of the sprawling city.

For much of Los Angeles it was a normal Tuesday as tens of thousands of children went to school, commuter traffic choked the streets and tourists strolled Hollywood Boulevard.

LA police chief Jim McDonnell said the curfew was “not about silencing voices”, but was a necessary measure to save lives and safeguard property.

Bass also said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had provoked the unrest by conducting raids on Latino areas in the city in recent days.

“If [the raids are] going to go on for 30 days, and that’s what the rumour is, and, if we want to see our city peaceful again, I will call upon the administration one more time to end the raids,” she said.

On Tuesday, National Guard troops, who were previously guarding federal buildings, began assisting ICE agents with their “daily enforcement operations”, a spokesperson for the border agency told the BBC.

Marines were guarding federal officials and property on Tuesday, Marines Corps General Eric Smith said. They do not have arrest authority.

The military deployment to the LA area will cost $134m (£99m), the Pentagon said.

Addressing troops at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Trump described the protests as a “full-blown assault on peace and public order”.

The Republican president said he plans to use “every asset at our disposal to quell the violence”.

In televised remarks on Tuesday night, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom hit back at Trump’s rare deployment of the American military for a domestic law-enforcement matter.

“This brazen abuse of power by a sitting president inflamed a combustible situation, putting our people, our officers, and even our National Guard, at risk,” he said.

Earlier in the day a federal court denied an emergency request from California to block the use of troops sent to Los Angeles.

District Judge Charles Breyer scheduled a hearing on the motion for Thursday.

Trump has set a goal for border agents of at least 3,000 daily arrests as he seeks to ramp up mass deportations, a signature pledge of his re-election campaign.

Since assuming office, the president has drastically reduced illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border to historically low levels.