Protest ‘agitators’ have a long history – in myth and fact

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.”

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