What the foreign flags at the LA protests really mean [View all]

Robert Mackey
Fri 13 June 2025 at 4:31 pm GMT-5·5-min read

At the White House on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters Donald Trump’s decision to dispatch the military to Los Angeles had been triggered by something he had seen: “images of foreign flags being waved” during protests over federal immigration raids.

Leavitt did not specify which images the president had been so disturbed by, but the fact that some protesters denouncing his immigration crackdown have waved Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags, or hybrid flags that combine those banners with the American flag, has been taken as an affront by supporters of his mass deportation campaign.

The architect of that policy, Stephen Miller, has complained bitterly about flag-waving protesters on the streets of his Los Angeles home town, and shared video of demonstrators on social media with the comment: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory.”

Trump himself even claimed, during his deeply partisan speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, that his deployment of active-duty marines to the city was justified because of the protesters he called “rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion”.

But observers with a more nuanced understanding of the Los Angeles communities being targeted in these raids, and of the nation’s history as a refuge for immigrants, suggest that the flags are not intended to signal allegiance to any foreign government but rather to signal solidarity with immigrants from those places and, for Americans with roots in those countries, to express pride in their heritage.

More:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/foreign-flags-la-protests-really-213115659.html