As Democratic senators gathered on Tuesday for their closed-door weekly luncheon, they heard from their California colleagues, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, who carefully differentiated between isolated cases of vandalism in Los Angeles and the larger number of peaceful protesters who swarmed the streets to oppose President Trump’s deportation efforts.
At roughly the same time, Mr. Trump was across town in the Oval Office unspooling stories of violence, asking the assembled cameras, “Did you see the guy throwing the rocks at the police cars?”
For Democrats, the scattered yet searing scenes of unrest in Southern California have uncomfortably thrust to the center two issues that have powered Republican gains in recent years — immigration and crime — as party leaders worry that the president is setting a dangerous political trap with provocations too outrageous to ignore.
Mr. Trump’s extraordinary decision to send military troops to quell domestic protesters over the objection of local authorities, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, has unleashed an avalanche of condemnation from Democrats who argue that the president’s actions were authoritarian and unconstitutional.
“Democracy is under assault before our eyes,” Mr. Newsom said in a speech on Tuesday evening. As he spoke, demonstrations were spreading to other cities and the Los Angeles mayor had announced a Tuesday curfew for parts of downtown.
In an interview, Mr. Schiff urged his party to push back on Mr. Trump without falling prey to his political framing.
“The president would like nothing better than to create a conflict in L.A. to demonstrate his strongman credentials by then cracking down on the chaos,” said Mr. Schiff, who has clashed repeatedly with Mr. Trump and led his first impeachment. “The president is a chaos agent. He thrives on disorder. He thrives on situations that allow him to pretend, to act like a strongman.”
Mr. Trump has used viral images of car fires, damaged property and masked protesters brandishing foreign flags to bolster his claims of a mandate for a crackdown. And he has used them as justification, sometimes after the fact, for his decision to deploy National Guard troops and Marines despite the objections of Mr. Newsom, a Democrat.
Polls have long shown immigration and crime as areas of Democratic vulnerability. And some Democrats see a risk that the party will seem soft on crime and criminals without clearer denunciations.
Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who has increasingly broken with his party, described the scenes unfolding in Los Angeles as “anarchy and true chaos,” posting a photo that Republicans have heavily circulated of a masked man waving a Mexican flag standing on a vandalized car surrounded by fire.
“My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement,” Mr. Fetterman wrote on Monday.
The confrontation — both politically and in the streets — between Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda and the nation’s biggest blue state felt almost inevitable.
“We all knew that this day would come,” Representative Jimmy Gomez of California said on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, flanked by other Democrats from the state.
Mr. Newsom asked a judge on Tuesday to block the Trump administration’s planned troop deployment. One influential House Democrat, meanwhile, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s actions amounted to an impeachable offense.
But even as Democrats try to fight back, few issues have left the party more divided than immigration enforcement, with some in the party shifting to the right along with the American public in recent years. Most prominent Democrats have denounced the recent violence, and many have cited local officials who say such incidents have been mostly isolated.
“It’s a Trump-manufactured crisis beginning with the increasing theatrics, the increasing cruelty, the increasingly aggressive ICE raids,” Senator Padilla said in an interview. “At the end of the day, we have to both hold Trump accountable and remind everybody he’s doing this to distract from his horrible failing agenda.”
Mr. Newsom has used his confrontation with Mr. Trump — who has mused about arresting him — to elevate himself as one of the leading Democratic foils nationally to Mr. Trump, responding to the president’s comments with bravado and seemingly in real time.
Heading into the weekend, America’s political class had been consumed by the operatic demise of the warm relationship between Elon Musk and Mr. Trump. Mr. Musk attacked the centerpiece of the president’s legislative agenda as a “disgusting abomination,” and Mr. Trump threatened retaliation against the tech billionaire’s companies.
Now the attention is on California, where Mr. Trump is explicitly pushing the boundaries of his powers. His deployment of federalized troops without a state’s consent was the first since they were sent to protect civil rights demonstrators in Alabama more than a half-century ago.
The current situation has reminded some of the protests and riots that followed the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a Minneapolis police officer five years ago. The political effects for both parties — a racial reckoning and a subsequent backlash — continue to linger.
There is yet another potential tinderbox looming this weekend, when Mr. Trump has planned a military parade for the Army’s 250th birthday — which coincides with his own. “Those people that want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force,” he warned.
Mr. Trump and his aides, including his longtime immigration whisperer and deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, appear intent on reappropriating the term “insurrectionist,” which has often been used to describe the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Now, they use it to describe anti-deportation protesters and Democrats.
“This is the definition of insurrection,” Mr. Miller wrote on X about the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, after she called for an end to the federal immigration raids.
Mr. Schiff said such messaging “would be amusing if it weren’t so galling” coming from a White House that pardoned the Jan. 6 participants. He urged his party to cast Mr. Trump’s actions not just as an overreach but also as a breach of his pledges to focus on securing the border and removing violent criminals who entered the country illegally.
“The president promised he would focus on deporting violent criminals, and has betrayed that promise,” Mr. Schiff said.
Frank Sharry, the founder of America’s Voice and a longtime advocate for immigrants and an immigration overhaul, said the lack of a unified Democratic vision on the issue — how to handle both the border and those in the country illegally — was hobbling the party’s ability to respond more forcefully.
“The reason some Democrats fear leaning into immigration is they don’t have a particularly good defense, and what they’re really lacking is a good offense,” Mr. Sharry said. “If Democrats had a very clear, solution-oriented stance on immigration, they would be contrasting Trump’s extremism with their pragmatism, and that’s a debate Democrats can win.”
The problem, he said, is that no such stance yet exists.
“Democrats need to figure out not only what they’re against, but what they’re for,” Mr. Sharry said of opposing Mr. Trump’s tactics. “I know it sounds trite, but you can’t beat something with nothing.”
A 54 percent majority of Americans supported Mr. Trump’s program to deport those in the country illegally, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll taken on the eve of the current immigration fight. Americans were in favor of Mr. Trump’s goals, if not necessarily his approach.
Mr. Trump also made significant inroads with Latino voters in 2024, when he made an immigration crackdown a centerpiece of his campaign.
In recent days, he and his allies have continued to argue that California in general and Los Angeles in particular are descending into a lawless state of chaos. At the same time, local officials have said that outbursts of violence have been only sporadic, even as they spread widely on social media.
In a post of his own on Tuesday, Mr. Trump claimed with his customary hyperbole that if he had not deployed thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, the “once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now.”
Arms of the federal government amplified his argument.
The official Department of Homeland Security account on X posted a video of the same scene that Mr. Fetterman cited with burning cars and a masked man waving a Mexican flag, adding, “California politicians must call off their rioting mob.” The post singled out Mr. Newsom.
One of the most veteran Democrats on Capitol Hill, Representative Maxine Waters, who represents a district in Los Angeles County, claimed everything had been peaceful despite images of clashes.
“There was no violence,” Ms. Waters said on Tuesday, in a video clip that Republicans soon circulated. “I was on the street. I know.”
Representative Yvette D. Clarke of New York, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said she believed that Mr. Trump’s actions — sending in troops over the objection of local officials — rose to the level of impeachable offenses.
“If this president is willing to send military troops into an American city over peaceful dissent, we must ask what happens next,” she said at a Capitol news conference. “What American community will be next.”
Ms. Clarke and the chairs of the Hispanic and Asian Pacific American caucuses were peppered by questions from conservative-leaning or right-wing outlets, including The Washington Times, The Epoch Times, Fox News, the Daily Caller News Foundation and The Daily Signal, in a sign of how the immigration issue was resonating on the right.
Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the chairman of the House Democratic Conference, said on Tuesday that his party’s response to those in swing districts next year who were concerned about images of unrest would be pivoting to Republican cutbacks to health-care programs.
“Our message broadly to that audience is going to be, ‘Your Republican member of Congress voted to kick hundreds of thousands of people off of their health care and take away their basic needs,’” he said.
But some on the right hope that immigration will prove as salient in 2026 as it did in 2024.
“The more the Democrats keep this craziness with the protests up, the more I think Republicans could actually win the midterms even if they cut Medicaid,” Matthew Boyle, the influential Washington bureau chief for the Trump-aligned Breitbart News, remarked on X. “Which is unreal.”
