As protesters and police officers clashed in the streets of Los Angeles, a parallel conflict raged on social media, as immigration advocates and President Donald Trump’s allies raced to shape public opinion on the impacts of mass deportations on American life.
The sprawling protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were captured from all angles by cellphones and body cameras and streamed in real time, giving a visceral immediacy to a conflict that led to more than 50 arrests and orders from the Trump administration to deploy the National Guard.
Amateur videographers and online creators shared some of the mayhem’s most-talked-about videos and images, often devoid of context and aimed at different audiences. Clips showing officers firing less-lethal rounds at an Australian journalist or mounted police directing their horses to stride over a sitting man fueled outrage on one side, while those of self-driving Waymo cars on fire and protesters holding Mexican flags stoked the other.
The protests have become the biggest spectacle yet of the months-long online war over deportations, as Trump allies work to convince Americans that the issue of undocumented immigration demands aggressive action. But immigrant families and advocates have also been winning attention, and seeking public support, through emotional clips of crying families grappling with removal orders, anti-ICE gatherings and young children in federal custody.
The messaging war comes at a time of polarized public sentiment over Trump’s immigration policies. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in April found that roughly half the country believed Trump’s deportations had gone too far, while the other half thought his actions were about right or hadn’t gone far enough.
“To advance your side of the story, you need a piece of content that the algorithm likes. You need something that really grabs people’s attention by the throat and doesn’t let it go,” said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences.
“If you’re on the pro-ICE side of this, you need to find visual images of these protests that look really scary, look really dangerous because that’s what’s going to draw human attention,” she added. But if “you don’t think that ICE should be taking moms away from their families and kids, you’re going to have a video that starts with a crying child’s face.”
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal plans, said Trump’s digital strategists were following the president’s lead by spotlighting images of destruction while insisting that he would always intervene in moments of unrest. The White House, which has said the ICE deportations are necessary to solve a national crisis, on Sunday posted an Instagram photo of Trump and a warning that looters and rioters would be given “no mercy.”
“We’re obviously following the president’s direction. He is driving the message through his posts and his comments to the press,” the official said. “We are definitely playing offense here. We are once again boxing the Democrats into the corner of defending criminal illegal aliens.”
The unrest and its online propagation also heightened activity around projects like People Over Papers, a crowdsourced map for tracking the locations of ICE officers. Reports flooded in as the clashes continued, said Celeste, a project organizer in L.A. who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used for fear of government retribution. “I haven’t slept all weekend,” she said.
She added, however, that she worried violent imagery from the ground could hurt the protesters’ cause. She said she planned to start making Spanish-language videos for her 51,000 TikTok followers, explaining to skeptics that the violence isn’t reflective of the protests, which she sees as necessary to counter ICE’s agenda.
The L.A. unrest followed weeks of online skirmishes over deportations, some of which have been touched off by the White House’s strategy to lean into policy fights with bold and aggressive messaging.
The White House last month posted a video that it said showed an “EPIC takedown of 5 illegal aliens” outside a home improvement store and included an ICE hotline to solicit more tips. The clip, recorded by ICE agents’ cameras, was liked 68,000 times but also drew criticism from commenters, who called it “disturbing” and said this “isn’t a reality show.”
After a similar ICE raid on Saturday outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a predominantly Latino suburb of L.A., witnesses sent out alerts on social media, and protesters raced to the scene. Within hours, the Trump administration called for the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops to neutralize the unrest.
On his Truth Social account a week earlier, Trump celebrated the Supreme Court clearing the way for the removal of some immigrants’ legal protections by posting a photo of a jet-filled sky with the phrase, “Let the Deportations Begin!” The White House has also posted stylized mug shots of unnamed immigrants it said were charged with heinous crimes. “I love this version of the white house,” one commenter said, with a cry-laugh emoji. “It feels like a movie every day with President Trump.”
During the protests, the administration has worked with new-media figures and online influencers to promote its political points. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil who now runs the conservative media network Merit Street, posted an exclusive interview with border czar Tom Homan and embedded with ICE officers last week during L.A. raids, as the company’s spokesperson first told CNN.
Some top administration officials have worked to frame the protests in militaristic terms, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller on Saturday sharing a video of the protest and calling it “an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.”
Others, like Vice President JD Vance, have treated it as a chance for dark jokes. When posters on X said Vance could do the “funniest thing ever” by deporting Derek Guy, a prominent menswear commentator who discussed how his family had been undocumented after fleeing Vietnam, the vice president on Monday posted a brief clip of Jack Nicholson nodding with a sinister grin.
Some far-right influencers urged their followers to identify people caught on camera during the civil unrest. In one X post with more than 29,000 likes, the account End Wokeness shared a video of masked figures throwing rocks at police from an overpass and said, “These are insurrectionists trying to kill cops. Make them famous.”
In more left-leaning online spaces, some posters watching from the sidelines offered advice on how protesters could best position their cause to the rest of the world. On the r/ICE_raids subreddit, some posters urged L.A. protesters to stop carrying non-American flags. It’s “adding ammo to ICE’s justification,” one poster said, attaching a screenshot of a Homeland Security post showing masked protesters with Mexican flags.
Many accounts, knowingly or unknowingly, shared images that warped the reality of what was happening on the ground. An X account with 388,000 followers called US Homeland Security News, which is not affiliated with DHS but paid for one of X’s “verified” blue check marks, posted a photo of bricks that it said had been ordered to be “used by Democrat militants against ICE agents and staff!! It’s Civil War!!” The photo actually originated on the website of a Malaysian construction-supply company. The post has nevertheless been viewed more than 800,000 times.
On Sunday night, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s X account tried to combat some of the misinformation directly, saying a viral video post being passed around as evidence of the day’s chaos was actually five years old.
Even before the L.A. protests, the increased attention on ICE activity had driven a rush of online organizing and real-world information gathering, with some people opposed to mass deportations tracking the movements of ICE officers with plans to foil or disrupt raids.
In one viral TikTok post last week, a Minneapolis protester marching in a crowd outside the site of a rumored ICE raid said he had learned of it from Reddit, where a photo had been posted of Homeland Security Investigations officers outside a Mexican restaurant. The local sheriff’s office later told news crews that the operation was not an immigration-enforcement case and that no arrests had been made.
Some online creators treated the L.A. clashes as a prized opportunity for viral content. On Reddit, accounts with names like LiveNews_24H posted “crazy footage” compilations of the unrest and said it looked like a “war zone.” On YouTube, Damon Heller, who comments on police helicopter footage and scanner calls under the name Smoke N’ Scan, streamed the clashes on Sunday for nearly 12 hours.
Jeremy Lee Quinn, a photographer who shares protest footage to his social media followers, posted to Instagram on Saturday a video of protesters cheering from a bridge as officers tried to extinguish a burning police vehicle.
Quinn, who also documented Black Lives Matter marches and the U.S. Capitol riots, said viewers on the left and right treat viral videos like weapons in their arsenal.
Far-left viewers might take away from the videos ideas for militant tactics to use in future protests, he said, while far-right viewers will promote the videos to suggest the other side craves more violent crime. Either way, his material gets seen – including through reposts by groups such as the LibsOfReddit subreddit, which shares screenshots mocking liberal views on undocumented immigrants and transgender people.
“You end up with a far-right ecosystem that thrives on these viral moments,” Quinn said.
As short-form video and social media platforms increasingly become many Americans’ news sources of choice, experts worry they could also amp up the fear and outrage engendered by polarizing events. The fragmentation of social media and the attention-chasing machinery of its recommendation algorithms helps ensure that “there are a lot of people talking past each other,” said Northeastern’s Edelson, not seeing one another’s content or “even aware of the facts that are relevant to the other side.”
Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said videos can play a uniquely forceful role in shaping people’s reactions to current events because they “encapsulate the emotion of the moment.”
“There’s a heavy dose of misinformation,” he added. “And, you know, people just end up getting angrier and angrier.”
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