Showing posts with label ICE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ICE. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Independent photojournalist Nate Gowdy was assaulted and detained by police while documenting a protest against immigration raids in downtown Los Angeles, California, on August 8, 2025.

 Via Press Freedom Tracker

August 13, 2025




Independent photojournalist Nate Gowdy was assaulted and detained by police while documenting a protest against immigration raids in downtown Los Angeles, California, on August 8, 2025.

Protests in LA began in early June in response to federal raids of workplaces and areas in and around the city where immigrant day laborers gather, amid the Trump administration’s larger immigration crackdown. Raids at Home Depots in early August took place seemingly in defiance of a July 11 court order temporarily prohibiting federal agents from using discriminatory profiling.

On Aug. 8, two days after an immigration raid in the parking lot of a Home Depot in LA’s Westlake neighborhood, protesters gathered at the store and marched to the Metropolitan Detention Center downtown. The demonstrators and the journalists covering them encountered a violent response from Los Angeles Police Department officers, violating a court order protecting the press from arrest, assault or other interference.

Gowdy, who was visiting from Seattle, Washington, said he had been photographing the Aug. 8 protest with his partner, fellow journalist Carrie Schreck. The two began documenting the demonstration as protesters started to march. The protest remained peaceful, Gowdy said, until the LAPD arrived.

“They basically lined up and without any provocation, in order to move people, started just swinging their batons indiscriminately,” he told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.

Gowdy watched as one journalist, Nick Stern, waving his press badge to officers, was struck in the face with a police baton. Gowdy himself was thrown to the ground by several officers, scraping his elbow and damaging the metal connectors on the strap holding his spare camera lenses.

“They were so aggressive and wild-eyed and violent,” he said of the LAPD.

After police declared the protest an unlawful assembly, officers pushed demonstrators farther from the detention center. Gowdy and Schreck had stopped photographing and were leaving the area when they were suddenly kettled, or herded by police, along with a handful of journalists and demonstrators, just three blocks from Schreck’s apartment.

Some had press credentials, but Gowdy said officers ignored them.

“They said they didn’t care, and that everyone should have to line up against the wall,” Gowdy recalled.

The journalists’ hands were placed in zip-tie restraints. While some were released, Gowdy and Schreck remained detained for not having physical press badges. Despite carrying camera gear and being vouched for by their colleagues, the officers questioned their legitimacy and denied their requests to speak with a public information officer.

Gowdy offered to show digital credentials and suggested a quick online search to verify his work with major news outlets, but was told he’d be cited for failure to disperse. He and Schreck were taken to a nearby police station and eventually released after more than two hours in custody.

Gowdy said such traumatic encounters can discourage journalists from covering protests.

“In this case, the law was on our side,” he said. “But they didn’t seem to know the law, or they willfully disregarded it in order to intimidate and harass us.”

Gowdy said he doesn’t wear a press badge when he covers protests in Seattle, after it made him a police target. Covering the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he saw how press credentials can also attract threats from demonstrators. Still, he said this incident convinced him to carry one just in case.

The LAPD did not respond to a Tracker request for comment about the detained journalists. In a statement posted to the social platform X, the department’s Central Division wrote that an unlawful assembly was declared “due to the aggressive nature of a few demonstrators.”

“The protest went into the late night hours with people refusing to disperse,” it continued. “Central Division will continue to support 1st Amendment rights of all people. However, if violence or criminal activity occurs, laws will be enforced.”


The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker catalogues press freedom violations in the United States. Email tips to tips@pressfreedomtracker.us.

Saturday, September 22, 2018

STEPHEN WILKES: ELLIS ISLAND, GHOSTS OF OUR ANCESTORS


Isolation ward, Statue of Liberty, Island 3, Ellis Island



On the 20th anniversary of Stephen Wilkes documentary project photographing the abandoned buildings on the southern side of Ellis Island, and with the future of immigration and refuge in America in contention, Wilkes takes us on an unforgettable journey through our collective past that reminds us how we became the diverse nation that we are today and asks us to reflect on our own humanity.
Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is pleased to present “Ellis Island: Ghosts of Our Ancestors”, a timely exhibition which opens with a public reception for the photographer on Friday, October 5, from 5 – 7 PM. The exhibition continues through November 18.

Twelve million people passed through Ellis Island from 1892 until its closing in 1954, and tens of millions of Americans today are descendants of immigrants who were thought deplorable by those already here. Wilkes's powerful images of the underbelly of the island—a purgatory between freedom and captivity—ask us to reflect on the defining experiences of millions. Photographed over five years beginning in 1998, the photographs are a visual history of the immigration center and adjoining hospital which grew to 22 medical buildings spread across three islands. In the era before antibiotics, tens of thousands of immigrant patients were healed from illness before becoming citizens. Neglected for almost fifty years, the buildings were in a state of extreme disrepair: lead paint peeled from the ceilings and walls, vines and trees grew through the floorboards, detritus and debris littered the hallways. In rooms long-abandoned, Wilkes captured a spirited new vision of this gateway to freedom.


“I photographed every corner, every crevice, in every light. Strange things happened. I’d photograph a mirror attached to a wall for half a century, only to return and find the mirror shattered. I’d photograph a shoe, only to come back and find it disappeared. I photographed the 500-foot long spine of the hospital, Corridor #9, a long tunnel of decay. In the photograph of it, you’ll see a golden glow of sunshine warming the walls at the far end. In all the times I went back, I’ve never seen this glow again, nor can I figure out its origin.

What I was obsessed to do, almost as if I was chosen to do it, was document the light and the energy and living spirit of this place. I added no light of my own, nor any artifice of the photographic craft. I wasn’t simply interested in graphics born from the patina of ruin. I just wanted to record the place as I found it.”


– Stephen Wilkes