Donald Trump ordered the FBI to investigate protesters in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against the president’s immigration crackdown, according to a whistleblower complaint.
US senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat who represents California and serves on the Senate judiciary committee, said his office had received a copy of the complaint, which makes sweeping allegations about the Trump administration’s response to protests in LA in early 2025.
Demonstrators had been protesting against Trump’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to push the president’s agenda.
“These allegations are deeply alarming,” Padilla, who also serves as the top Democrat on the border security and immigration subcommittee, said in a statement. “Using the FBI to target Americans for exercising their first amendment rights directly undermines our nation’s foundational values. I won’t rest until we get answers.”
NBC first reported on the allegations after viewing a copy of the disclosure, which identifies the whistleblower as Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, who made the complaint following the federal response to anti-ICE protests around the city’s federal buildings, and in residential area, in February last year.
Fields alleges that Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told Akil Davis, the head of the field office to open an investigation into protesters’ activities outside federal buildings, even...
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