Los Angeles City Controller Says Anti-ICE Riots Already Costing the City $32 Million
“More than $29 million, or 92% of the cost, is for the Los Angeles Police Department’s response. Part of these funds will also cover the cost of the citywide tactical alerts.”
The ‘mostly peaceful’ anti-ICE riots in Los Angeles have already put city taxpayers on the hook for upwards of $32 million, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia.
This news comes as the city is struggling to rebuild large swaths of various neighborhoods that were destroyed by wildfires earlier this year. Imagine if the leftists tearing the city apart had put that kind of energy into helping to rebuild.
FOX News reports:
Los Angeles taxpayers to foot millions for ‘peaceful’ anti-ICE protests
The violent and destructive Los Angeles anti-ICE protests cost taxpayers $32 million, according to a report by the city budget chief.
Controller Kenneth Mejia posted the figures on X, detailing what the money from local taxpayers will be funding. City taxpayers are on the hook for emergency services, cleanup and public property damage, all stemming from the protests that turned into riots, according to Mejia’s post.
More than $29 million, or 92% of the cost, is for the Los Angeles Police Department’s response. Part of these funds will also cover the cost of the citywide tactical alerts.
A little more than $1 million will go to the city’s efforts to clean up the city and repair damage to public property, according to Mejia’s post.
The rest of the money will be distributed to various departments, such as the Los Angeles Fire Department, the city’s street services, general services, tourism and others.
Mejia noted the funding did not factor in potential lawsuits that could arise from the unrest.
The protests, described as “peaceful” by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and the liberal media, saw demonstrators violently clash with the LAPD over multiple days, prompting President Donald Trump to deploy both the National Guard and active-duty military personnel.
All of this destruction, and for what? Did it stop ICE?
🧊 UPDATE: ICE RAIDS HAVE NOW COST LA TAXPAYERS $32 MILLION
🚔 $29.5 million or 92% relates to LAPD's response to protests against ICE including citywide tactical alert costs
🛠️ $1.4 million relates to clean-up / public property damage
🧑⚖️ Does not include potential lawsuits pic.twitter.com/6sWZALDKeZ
— LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia (@lacontroller) June 20, 2025
How is the rebuilding going after the wildfires? Not great.
The Daily Caller reports:
California’s ‘Lightning Speed’ LA Fires Rebuild Moving At Snail’s Pace
Five months after fires ravaged Los Angeles, Democratic leaders’ promise of “lightning speed” rebuilding has yielded only sluggish progress with few permits issued.
The January blaze destroyed over 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County and the cities of Los Angeles, Pasadena and Malibu. Democrat Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom promised swift recovery, but bureaucratic delays are hindering the process, with only 3.7% of permit applications submitted to Los Angeles County being approved to date.
“It’s just a culture of bureaucracy,” Steven Greenhut, the director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Doing anything in this state is just so difficult that you can’t just wave the magic wand and have that whole process go away.”
What has been done to California is absolutely criminal. Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass seem to spend more time on Twitter than they do dealing with actual government business.
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Like any Democrat has the slightest care what anything costs.
Take it from the BILLIONS you flushed down the toilet on your ‘high-speed rail’ crap.
That $32m that could have gone to help rebuild the Palisades, and other burned areas, but no.
I suspect they still want tax revenue from business and allowing mobs in the street put a damper on that. If LA and CA leadership can’t gain proactive control of the streets driving the mobs off to keep the City safe it will the tax base.
One easy way to emphasize this is for the Trump admin to ‘temporarily pause’ all non LEO Federal operations in LA out of an abundance of caution for the well being and safety of Federal employees to include FAA at LAX, Customs operations at the Ports so unfortunately both LAX and the sea ports closed as would be Social Security offices, Post Offices and so forth. Just a temporary pause for safety concerns that will unfortunately have an outsize influence on tax revenues.
32B is pretty cheap for the cause. Here’s an idea. Implement a state tax on remittances to Mexico, Central and South America. You’ll raise a boatload of money,
Not 32B.
32M.
Less than the amount they spend on free healthcare for illegals in a single day.
My mistake while typing. We’re all use to typing B. It’s why 32M is peanuts.
I see peeps showing up at my local grocery with hundreds and thousands in cash to wire to Mexico. How is this not money laundering?
How much would it have cost to stop the riots, or prevent them from starting in the first place?
How much would it cost? The cost of a 9 mm round multiplied by the number of “peaceful protesters” with a an additional 50% for good measure.
Funny how “violent and destructive” = “mostly peaceful!”
I can’t quite wrap my head around peaceful protests result in $33M in damage.
Must be Karen Bass Maff.
Time to look for some money.
Wonder what they could get for the water in the hydrants?
Maybe throw in the police radios and some ambulances?
And that does not include the cost of hiring and equipping the rioters
California is not trying to rebuild homes destroyed in the fire. Delaying as long as possible so people give up and Cali can seize the land is the plan. As for the riots, they are not caused by ICE, they are caused by thugs. If they are peaceful then why the price tag and I wonder just how expensive it has to get before Newsom and Bass realize their TDS blinded them to the point they have a real problem. I doubt this Administration will be overly eager to send them money to rebuild damage they let happen. Our DOT head already told LA to count them out.
In my “follow the money” assessment, they are either being paid off by the Chinese to deliberately devalue the land so a 3rd party can buy it for cheap, or they are devaluing the properties via “no tenants” in order the do a tax lien seizure. Unfortunately, I think that they overshot the mark and people have now woken up to see Portland as a corpse and thus of no value. The hemmorage of wealth from the area has started and no amount of financial bleed-stop is going to change it. When I moved here 30 years ago every storefront was occupied and no place sat empty for more than 30 days. Now I’d say that somewhere between 25 and 50% are empty and there is a significant percentage of them which are simply fronts for money-laundering from the weed operations. Any conservative who points this out is immediately attacked by the lib-tards who are in constant denial. A fentanyl addict has a better shot at changing than a Portland liberal. That is why they hate Trump so much. They fully know that their fabricated universe built on cards will not withstand any true test. As dystopian as this town has become in the last 10 years, we are nowhere near the bottom that they have set up. Amazingly (or fraudulently) a huge school building levy was recently passed, even though it was shown that decreasing enrollment will require a closure of 3 of the 11 high schools in the next ten years. I have purposely divested myself down to where a week and a UHaul is enough to get me out of here. Which is why we now have a 17% tax on one-way rental trucks out of the area. A buddy saved over $1000 by driving 5 miles south and getting his truck in the adjacent county.
“Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass seem to spend more time on Twitter than they do dealing with actual government business.”
Well, now, let’s be fair here. “Actual government business” = delaying and denying building permits. I’d say they’re doing a grand job of that. Did you think that “actual government business” in California meant being ~helpful~ to people? That’s downright silly. You’ll outgrow that soon. Be patient.
It’s incredible, but not entirely unexpected, that leftist politicians are claiming the riots were justified reactions to the absolutely lawful ICE enforcement actions and protected free speech.
Rioting, assault (including throwing explosive devices around), arson, and other violent mayhem, are not protected speech.
If they’re really worried about the money, why don’t they find the people who actually bankrolled the riots and make them pay for it?
No, they haven’t. The raids haven’t cost LA taxpayers one red cent. It’s the riots that have cost $32M.
Blaming ICE for the cost of policing the riots is like blaming blacks for the cost of policing a KKK riot, on the grounds that if the blacks had only not been so uppity the Klansmen wouldn’t have rioted.
Hopefully, not one dime from federal taxpayers. It is LA’s riots, caused by LA’s mayor and California’s governor. What do Texas taxpayers have to do with it?
Absolutely nothing.
Those might be direct costs. The BLM-antifa riots in Portland cost about $5B when you factor in the death of a downtown and the massive real-estate losses. Portland and Multnomah county are also seeing an exodus of higher net-income residents who are subject to the “preschool for all” tax being levied on them. I had a friend who had a home-based business in Portland. When they jacked up the business taxes, he and a couple of buddies rented a small office in Beaverton and moved the financial aspects of their operations to that literally “empty” office. It was about half the cost of what the new business taxes would have been. I am pretty certain that some Marxist in city hall is trying to sort out getting businesses back in Portland by raising taxes even more.