A year after the first wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids terrorized Los Angeles, the political earthquake that followed is still redrawing the boundary between federal and state power in American immigration enforcement. Reporting published this weekend by The Guardian, marking the anniversary of the June 2025 raids, documents a city that has not recovered — more than a thousand arrests in the original operation, several deaths of people being chased by agents, and a community that still flinches at the sight of a white van. The anniversary lands at a particularly combustible moment, with the Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, threatening a fresh ICE surge against New York and a federal appeals court still weighing whether the President’s decision to federalize the California National Guard is even reviewable by the courts. What began as a single weekend of raids in Los Angeles has become the central constitutional test of the administration’s second term.
The original operation, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” brought an estimated several thousand ICE and Border Patrol agents into Los Angeles in early June 2025, along with roughly four thousand National Guard troops and seven hundred Marines deployed by President Trump over the objection of Governor Gavin Newsom. According to the American Civil Liberties Union and reporting by The Guardian and the Los Angeles Public Press, the raids swept up workers at car washes, garment warehouses, and a church in the city’s MacArthur Park neighborhood; at least 71 people ultimately faced criminal charges arising from the protests that followed, and several immigrants died during pursuits or in custody. Newsom’s lawsuit against Trump, filed June 10, 2025, in the Northern District of California, produced a temporary restraining order on June 12 that briefly blocked the federalization, but the Ninth Circuit stayed that order and the litigation is still active.
The constitutional question Newsom put on the docket
The deeper constitutional wound is the question the Ninth Circuit has been asked to decide: whether a President may federalize a state National Guard against the wishes of its governor under 10 U.S.C. § 12406, and whether that decision is “unreviewable by courts” as the Justice Department has argued. Newsom’s office has framed the case as a direct assault on states’ rights, while the administration has cast it as an unavoidable response to “rebellion or inability” to enforce federal law. The legal stakes have grown since the original filing. In January, the killings of two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, during aggressive ICE operations in Minneapolis became a rallying point for the Democratic base and forced Homan to publicly promise, “You will not see a Minnesota” in the next round of enforcement.
That pledge is now being tested in real time. On June 9, Homan told reporters at the White House that a surge of ICE agents into New York City was imminent, blaming Governor Kathy Hochul for signing legislation that ended the state’s agreements to delegate local officers to immigration work. “You can expect more ICE agents to go to New York because Gov. Hochul signed legislation that ended our agreements,” Homan said, without providing a date. Hochul’s response was immediate and used the same constitutional language Newsom deployed a year ago. “We will not stand by if ICE floods our communities with agents, separates families, and turns our neighborhoods into the backdrop for a campaign of fear,” she said in a written statement, drawing a public line the administration is now openly trying to cross.
What the anniversary actually tells us
The political math on both sides is unforgiving, and the anniversary is the natural moment to take its measure. The administration needs visible arrest numbers to deliver on a campaign promise of mass deportation; Democratic governors need visible federal overreach to energize a base demoralized by a year of losses. New York’s move, mirroring legislation in Minnesota and California, is the practical counter-strategy of sanctuary-state governors: deny ICE the local cooperation it depends on, force the administration to fly agents in from elsewhere, and turn every arrest into a federal-only operation that is harder to sustain and easier to publicize. That is also why the Trump administration has framed its threat as a direct answer to the legislation, and why Homan insisted the surge would happen “because” of Hochul’s signature, not in spite of it.
For all the constitutional argument in Washington and Sacramento, the most telling evidence this week came from East Los Angeles, where the Guardian found residents who said the arrests “never really stopped” even after the news cameras moved on. Brian Gavidia, a U.S. citizen pinned against a gate by federal agents who refused to believe him, told the paper that he still feels his skin prickle when he spots a white van with tinted windows. That is the lived answer to the legal question the Ninth Circuit is now deliberating: whatever the eventual ruling on the federalization of the National Guard, the federal enforcement presence it justified is already woven into the daily life of a city of nearly four million people. The Los Angeles anniversary is not just a backward-looking story. It is a preview of what the next sanctuary-city confrontation — almost certainly New York, almost certainly this summer — will look like, and the political price both sides are about to pay for the fight they have chosen.