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Two silver Safariland foam baton shells, marked “37 MM Black Powder,” alongside two gray foam projectiles. A black KN95 respirator mask.

These items document one of the first volleys fired when the National Guard dispersed protesters outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles on June 8, 2025—the first time military troops had been deployed in Los Angeles since the 1992 Rodney King uprising, and the first time since 1965 that a president had federalized state National Guard troops without a governor’s consent.

This wasn’t routine crowd control. This was the United States military, federalized under presidential order, using force against American civilians protesting immigration enforcement operations. Three months later, a federal judge would rule the entire deployment illegal, a willful violation of the Posse Comitatus Act—the 147-year-old law that prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement.

When Immigration Enforcement Became a Military Operation

On June 6, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted workplace raids across Los Angeles, arresting over 100 people. Federal agents stormed Ambiance Apparel in the Fashion District, loading workers into unmarked vans. They arrested David Huerta, president of the Service Employees International Union, when he tried to block access. Protesters quickly gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center where detainees were being processed, chanting “Set them free, let them stay!”

By June 7, protests had spread to Paramount and Compton. Cars burned in intersections. Protesters threw rocks and fireworks at federal agents. That evening, President Trump signed a memorandum deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles under Joint Task Force 51, calling the situation “lawlessness that has been allowed to fester.” Governor Gavin Newsom immediately objected, calling the deployment “purposefully inflammatory.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Police Chief Jim McDonnell insisted they could handle the protests without military intervention.

Trump ignored them. By June 10, the military presence had grown to 2,100 National Guard troops and 700 Marines from Twentynine Palms. Soldiers in body armor, often indistinguishable from ICE agents, set up perimeters around federal buildings. They accompanied immigration raids. They controlled traffic. They confronted crowds.

At the Metropolitan Detention Center—a federal prison in downtown LA that holds both criminal defendants and immigration detainees—National Guard troops and Department of Homeland Security officers used smoke grenades, pepper spray, and less-lethal munitions including foam batons to clear protesters blocking the facility entrance. The foam baton preserved here was among the first fired.

Federalization as Escalation

The deployment wasn’t just militarized—it was military. There’s a critical difference. Police departments, however armed, remain civilian institutions answerable to mayors and city councils. The federalized National Guard operates under the president’s direct command, following Defense Department protocols, protected by different legal frameworks.

Trump invoked Title 10 of the U.S. Code to federalize the California National Guard, bypassing Governor Newsom entirely. This stripped the governor of command over his own state’s troops and placed them under federal military authority. The last time a president had done this without a governor’s request was 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent troops to Selma, Alabama—to protect civil rights marchers from violence, not to suppress protests themselves.

The legal justification was thin. To federalize the Guard, Trump claimed the protests constituted a “rebellion” threatening federal operations. But as U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer would later note, “There was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” The LAPD had explicitly stated they could handle the situation.

The protesters’ strategy was simpler but more dangerous: show up anyway. The black KN95 mask represents calculated preparation. By 2025, masks served multiple purposes at protests—limited anonymity from facial recognition, protection against chemical agents, and a signal of readiness for confrontation. Protesters who wore masks to face federalized military troops weren’t naive. They knew what they were risking.

Soldiers at the Prison Gates

The Metropolitan Detention Center sits at 535 North Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1988, it was designed to look less like a prison—plate glass windows, balconies, atriums. But its function is containment: federal prisoners awaiting trial, convicted offenders, and immigration detainees all held behind the same walls.

When the National Guard surrounded it, the building became a fortress. The symbolism was stark: immigration detention had become so critical to federal policy that the president would deploy military force to protect it. Not police. Not federal marshals. Soldiers.

The foam baton represents the state’s calibrated violence. At 37mm, these rounds cause pain and fear without (theoretically) permanent injury. The Safariland shell specifies “TO BE USED BY TRAINED LAW ENFORCEMENT, CORRECTIONAL OR MILITARY PERSONNEL”—a telling list. The munition works equally well whether fired by a police officer or a soldier, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and military action.

The mask represents individual defiance against institutional power. Someone stood outside that detention center knowing soldiers had been authorized to disperse them, knowing foam batons and chemical agents would be used, knowing arrests would follow. They came prepared, but they came.

What Actually Happened: The Human Rights Watch Report

In August 2025, Human Rights Watch released a detailed investigation documenting what occurred during those June protests. The findings were damning: 65 documented cases of injuries from law enforcement (the actual number likely far higher), including broken bones, concussions, and severe eye damage. Officers deployed tear gas, pepper balls, hard foam rounds, and flash-bang grenades—often at close range, without warning.

One volunteer medic described treating protesters with deep wounds and broken limbs: “People were yelling for help… bleeding from their heads or faces.” An immigrant rights advocate was hit multiple times by foam projectiles while trying to move a tear gas canister away from families. A woman walking near her residence was shot point-blank by LAPD with less-lethal ammunition.

The report emphasized that while some protesters engaged in property damage and threw objects, most violence occurred after law enforcement initiated force. “Only a small portion of the protesting crowd engaged in destructive acts,” HRW stated, yet officers did not limit their response to those individuals.

Legacy: The Illegal Deployment

On September 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer issued a 52-page ruling that vindicated every protester who had questioned the deployment’s legality. The Trump administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act—willfully and systematically.

Breyer’s findings were extraordinary. The evidence showed that Task Force 51 troops conducted security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, and riot response—all activities explicitly prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act when performed by military forces. Soldiers accompanied ICE agents on raids. They set up checkpoints. They detained civilians trying to enter restricted areas. At times, their uniforms were indistinguishable from ICE agents, and even federal officials at trial couldn’t tell them apart.

“The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence,” Breyer wrote. “In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”

More damning: the violation was intentional. Military leadership, “all the way from the top” of the Department of Defense, had ordered troops to perform law enforcement functions despite training materials that explicitly prohibited such activities. “Defendants knowingly contradicted their own training materials, which listed twelve functions that the Posse Comitatus Act bars the military from performing.”

Breyer rejected the administration’s claim that constitutional authority to protect federal property overrode the statutory prohibition. Such an interpretation, he wrote, would “create a brand-new exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that nullifies the Act itself.” It would give the president unlimited power to deploy military forces for any federal law enforcement purpose, effectively creating “a national police force with the President as its chief.”

The ruling was historic—the first time a federal court had ever issued an injunction to stop a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

The Questions These Objects Raise

Who was hit by this foam baton? Did they go home that night, or to a hospital? Did they return to subsequent protests, or did the injury and fear accomplish their purpose?

Who distributed this mask to protestors? Were they a longtime activist with experience facing state violence, or someone attending their first protest, terrified but determined? Did they know that three months later, a federal judge would validate their belief that the deployment was illegal?

More fundamentally: How did American immigration enforcement reach the point where a president would deploy military troops against protesters? What does it mean that foam batons—”less-lethal” munitions designed to cause pain without death—have become standard equipment for both police and soldiers operating on American streets?

The artifacts also force us to reckon with the gap between what’s legal and what’s possible. The September court ruling confirmed the deployment was illegal. But it happened anyway. Troops were deployed. Foam batons were fired. People were injured. The legal victory came months after the damage was done.

Downtown Los Angeles, June 2025

The Metropolitan Detention Center is now quiet in downtown Los Angeles. The National Guard eventually withdrew. Most of the criminal charges against protesters were dropped after DHS agents were found to have made false statements. The deployment inspired anti-ICE protests in cities across America—New York, Chicago, Dallas—testing whether the Los Angeles precedent would be repeated or rejected.

But these objects remain, preserved not as symbols of what immigration policy should be, but as evidence of what the state was willing to do to enforce it. The foam baton is a munition designed to disperse crowds through pain. The mask is personal protective equipment bought at a pharmacy. Together they document an asymmetry of power so stark that a federal judge would later call it a constitutional crisis.

The Trump administration insisted the protests were riots requiring military intervention. Protesters insisted they were exercising their constitutional right to dissent. Judge Breyer sided with the protesters: “There was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond.” The military deployment was not a necessary response to chaos. It was, in the judge’s words, “a top-down, systemic effort by Defendants to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law across hundreds of miles and over the course of several months.”

Someone kept this foam baton shell and this mask because they recognized what they documented: the first time in a generation that the United States deployed military troops against civilians in an American city, the first time a president federalized a state’s National Guard without the governor’s consent in 60 years, and an action that a federal court would later rule illegal, unconstitutional, and a willful violation of laws designed to prevent precisely this abuse of power.

The foam baton was meant to be swept up and discarded. The mask was meant to be worn once and thrown away. Instead, they’re evidence in the ongoing American argument about who belongs, who decides, and what happens when people believe their government has crossed a line.

In June 2025, people gathered outside a detention center in Los Angeles to protest immigration enforcement. The president responded by sending soldiers.

Someone preserved the evidence. Now we have to decide what it means.

Special thanks to the USC Digital Imaging Lab for their support in digitizing these items.