Mother Jones illustration; Getty
Car horns. Tambourines. Trumpets. Call-and-response chants. Wacking a spoon against a metal folding chair. Demonstrators outside Los Angeles-area hotels—where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are believed to be sleeping—are employing creative methods to keep those ICE agents awake. “No sleep for ICE” is the rallying cry, and the medium is noise.
ICE raids targeting Los Angeles County businesses are entering their eighth day, and the Trump administration clearly has been eager to keep tensions high in the area, appealing a federal order to withdraw the National Guard troops that California says were illegally deployed to the city. Protests have continued, too. For the past several nights, demonstrators have gathered outside hotels where they believe ICE agents are staying, almost all of them in small cities within Los Angeles County but outside LA proper, including Glendale, Pasadena, Whittier, Arcadia, and Burbank.
“Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.”
KTLA reported that “a large crowd” gathered outside a DoubleTree in Whittier on Wednesday night, while a widely-circulated TikTok video from independent photojournalist Jeremy Lee Quinn shows demonstrators on a sidewalk outside a Hilton Garden Inn in Arcadia. A second TikTok video claims that ICE subsequently left the building. Journalist and filmmaker David Farrier shared footage of a protest outside a Hilton in Glendale, writing, “Everyone just started doing laps while blasting horns so the little fuckers had a terrible sleep.” He added, “And maybe Hilton will think twice about taking these rioting goons in again.” An Instagram video posted by the account All Things Labor shows a person exuberantly playing a trumpet, with text overlaid: “Heard ICE is trying to sleep. Time to pull out the trumpet. No sleep for kidnappers. ”
It was not immediately clear if ICE agents were actually in all of the targeted hotels. None of the hotels named in information circulating on social media responded to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Magazine reported that hundreds of demonstrators gathered earlier this week in front of Pasadena’s AC Hotel to protest the reported presence of ICE agents there. One Instagram reel from a local musician who attended the event showed demonstrators chasing white cars marked “POLICE” through the hotel’s parking garage, cheering and shouting “Fuera ICE”—”Out ICE”—as they drove away.
“The hotel asked them to leave after we put on pressure,” text on the video read, over footage of people in black uniforms wheeling a loaded luggage cart out of the building. An AC Hotel employee speaking anonymously to Los Angeles said that some ICE agents had left “but the tires on their cars had been slashed (which is why they remained parked on the lot’s seventh level hours after checking out of AC Hotel.)”
In one case over the weekend, an elected official confirmed that ICE agents had been spotted at a hotel but evidently had since left. Besides making noise, demonstrators have also left a deluge of one-star Google reviews for the targeted hotels, many of them noting the presence of “rats.”
“Late last night and early this morning, we received several reports of immigration enforcement officers here in several Pasadena hotels,” State Senator Sasha Renee Perez said in a Sunday, June 8 video on Twitter/X. “We know that they actually have checked out of several of those hotels. And in many cases, several hotels have actually asked them to leave.”
There’s no clear timelines on when ICE might withdraw from the city, and the National Guard troops are expected to stay through the weekend. Large rallies are planned across the country, although downtown Los Angeles, choked with National Guard and law enforcement, may not see the same crowds as earlier in the week.
