Finneas O'Connell got involved with the Los Angeles protests against the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) recent raids and said that he was "almost immediately" met with force.
Last week, the city of Los Angeles responded to ICE's aggressive raids and arrests of immigrants with large-scale protests. The situation continued to escalate when Trump deployed the National Guard, but that hasn't stopped people from standing up against the mass deportations. In a post shared on Instagram, Finneas suggested that authorities on the ground in L.A. were instigating the violence.
"Tear gassed almost immediately at the very peaceful protest downtown—they're inciting this," he wrote on his Instagram Stories. "Fuck ICE."
Reporting from the scene of the Los Angeles protests has painted a grim picture of National Guard and ICE officers, who have deployed a lot of less-lethal force against protesters. Recently, Australian 9News reporter Lauren Tomasi was covering the protests when she was seemingly targeted by an officer firing a rubber bullet directly in her direction.
While a lot of coverage of the protests have attempted to depict what's happening in Los Angeles as violence from the side of protesters, there's been an increasing amount of evidence to show that Trump and ICE are the instigators. Several viral clips show officers being overzealous in their response to pressure from civilians, many of whom have no choice but to wear masks to protect themselves from either tear gas or from being identified and subjected to a political witch hunt.
Still, protesters have remained steadfast in their beliefs, as one viral clip below shows.
