As the Los Angeles Police Department moved to box in a group of protesters outside the city’s downtown federal building last weekend, several people suddenly rushed the line.
Chunks of concrete flew through the air, recalls Martín Hoecker-Martinez. He says a woman then ran up and down the group of bystanders, exhorting others to join the attack.
“Whether she recruited people, I don’t know,” says Mr. Hoecker-Martinez, a college physics professor who had been peacefully walking the Los Angeles streets waving U.S. and Colombian flags. But she was “clearly communicating to get more people” to push back against the police.
Why We Wrote This
President Donald Trump and others have stirred discussion of whether paid “troublemakers” are trying to foment chaos. But protests are messy, and it can be almost impossible to determine in real time whether actions have been planned by an organized group.
The protests against the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Los Angeles have featured flashes of violence, with protesters setting driverless cars on fire and officers responding to crowds with tear gas and rubber bullets. The tension has triggered fraught debates around the administration’s immigration policies and its decision to deploy the military in a major U.S. city against the wishes of the governor.
But they’re also sparking a more basic question: Who, exactly, is doing the protesting?
For days, President Donald Trump and many of his allies have been insisting that the participants are not ordinary citizens simply exercising their First Amendment rights, but are “paid insurrectionists.”
“These people are agitators,” said Mr. Trump Tuesday on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. “They’re troublemakers. I believe many of them are paid. I watched them breaking up the sidewalks with a big hammer, handing pieces of the concrete to other people.”
Los Angeles police Chief Jim McDonnell made a similar charge at a separate press conference Tuesday. “They’re people that do this all the time,” said Chief McDonnell. “They get away with whatever they can. Go out there from one civil unrest situation to another, using the same or similar tactics frequently. And they are connected.”
Claims of “outside agitators” seem to crop up whenever waves of protests sweep the country. Recent examples include the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol; the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020; and the Gaza-Israel protests on college campuses last year. Some of those claims were later substantiated by arrest records and news reports.
At the same time, pointing fingers at shadowy outside forces can be a useful political tactic – whether it’s coming from movement sympathizers hoping to distance themselves from protest-related violence, or from politicians who want to discredit large-scale opposition to their policies.
By their very nature, protests are messy. In many cases, including in LA this week, experts say it’s almost impossible to determine which actions have been sanctioned by an organized movement, and who, exactly, “belongs” at events that often happen organically, in open spaces.
“There are people in this country, like every country, who want to … create chaos and therefore undermine the movement,” says Timothy Zick, a law professor at William & Mary and the author of “Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest.” Separating them out from “real people” who are concerned about the current administration’s policies and just want to be heard can be extremely difficult, he adds. “It’s hard to pry these things apart.”
Whether part of any organized effort or not, several people were charged Wednesday by LA law enforcement with crimes including burglary and assault of police.
“There is a big distinction between [typical protesters and] basically anarchists,” LA County Sheriff Robert Luna said in announcing the charges, calling instances of violence “isolated.”
The “outside agitator” claim was famously used during the Civil Rights Movement to delegitimize it as “fake or phony,” notes Professor Zick. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed it directly in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in 1963, arguing that anyone who lives in the United States “can never be considered an outsider.”
Whether the intention is to discredit a protest or to shore up its legitimacy, “outsider” claims are often unsubstantiated. Following the Jan. 6 attack, for example, Mr. Trump and many of his supporters blamed the violence on undercover government agents and far-left antifa activists – a claim that has been denied by both leaders of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and many rioters themselves. But some of those arrested were linked with far-right extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters.
In 2020, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz suggested that most of the violence that ensued after the murder of George Floyd was precipitated by out-of-state actors, but an Associated Press review found that 41 of the 52 people with protest-related arrest citations had Minnesota driver’s licenses.
“It’s almost like a convenient bogeyman to blame, but often the evidence of outside agitation turns out to be pretty slim or nonexistent,” says Ed Maguire, a criminologist who studies the policing of crowds at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Still, there are recent examples of “outsider” accusations that were later affirmed by evidence. New York City officials found that nearly half of the 282 people arrested during last year’s campus protests over Israel’s treatment of Gaza were not affiliated with the schools. The University of Texas at Austin reported similar statistics.
Some conservatives say there’s evidence to suggest that well-funded groups advocating for foreign powers have participated in, or even planned, protests in recent years.
“My theory … is that there are foreign regimes and enemies of the United States – especially China and Russia, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela – that feed these nonprofit groups that then organize riots and protests to destabilize the United States,” says Daniel De Martino, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Last year, The People’s Forum, a tax-exempt advocacy group, hosted 100 masked anti-Israel protesters before they occupied a hall at Columbia University, according to a report in The Washington Free Beacon. The group’s executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, told the group to “make it untenable for the politics of usual to take place in this country,” the report said.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Mr. Trump’s then-acting Homeland Security chief confirmed that some white supremacists, as well as other “violent opportunists,” had played a role. Many racial justice protesters were frustrated that some people used the protests as an excuse to commit crimes such as looting and arson.
“If you don’t know a way to be heard, you need to find a way. Because this is not the way,” Andre Ross, a resident of Kenosha, Wisconsin, told the Monitor in 2020 as he surveyed the charred rubble of his downtown.
Still, very few among the hundreds arrested during that summer’s protests, mostly for misdemeanor crimes, were affiliated with extremist groups, according to a report by The Associated Press. Many were actually young adults from suburban neighborhoods.
“The history of every social movement in the U.S. is a combination of orderly and unruly protests,” says Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at the City University of New York and a protest veteran. “If you’re insisting that any evidence of unruliness is evidence of a conspiracy, you’re flying in the face of hundreds of years of American history.”