On Monday, heavily armed federal agents stormed MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, California in an apparent show of force, making no arrests and conducting no raids. And just prior to their arrival, dozens of children in the middle of summer camp were playing.
Los Angeles-based ABC affiliate KABC reported Monday that there were more than 20 kids playing on a soccer field before federal personnel descended on the park, who were apparently in the middle of a summer camp activity. Los Angeles Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said that staff ushered kids into the lower level of a nearby building the camp was using after they were made aware federal agents were in the vicinity. One eight year-old boy who was at the summer camp told Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass that he was scared the agents would arrest his parents.
“I don’t think the goal is to detain; the goal is to spread fear,” Bass said, adding that the agents’ behavior was “absolutely outrageous.”
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Video that Los Angeles-based journalist Mel Buer posted to Bluesky on Monday shows a group of community members chasing an armored truck carrying multiple armed federal agents wearing tactical gear, face masks and sunglasses. The nonprofit group Unión del Barrio responded to the scene, with group member Ron Gochez telling KABC that the fact that there were no arrests may have been due to vigilant locals.
“They brought terror to the community, but they didn’t have the guts to stick around because they knew if they stuck around here, to really do a big raid, the community would come out to defend the people,” Gochez said. “And that’s exactly why we’re here. They have all the courage when it’s a senior citizen vendor selling flowers by a cemetery. They had the courage to go kidnap her. But when the masses come out, where is the courage?”
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Monday that he obtained documents from an unnamed source in the California National Guard, in which the storming of MacArthur Park was apparently dubbed “Operation Excalibur.” The mission was thoroughly planned and was ostensibly for a “show of presence” aimed at preventing the distribution of fake IDs. However, Klippenstein’s source said the operation was botched due to poor communication between federal and city officials.
“We were on the objective for 24 minutes,” a National Guard member told Klippenstein. “Many of the phase lines were not reported because they didn’t happen. So we parked and then left. Soldiers didn’t get out of trucks. [They] stayed in the back of the 5-tons [military trucks] sweating in the heat.”
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Click here to read KABC’s full article, and click here to read Klippenstein’s report in its entirety.