Photojournalist struck with baton, press credential damaged at LA protest

Independent photojournalist Nick Stern was pushed by police and then, after retrieving his damaged press credentials, struck in the face with a baton in Los Angeles, California, while covering anti-deportation protests on Aug. 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.

Stern told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker that it was the first demonstration he had gone to cover since his leg was severely injured while documenting a protest in Compton on June 7, and he planned to be very cautious.

“It’s been incredibly frustrating for me watching this go down and not being able to get there and document it,” he said. “My plan was to go and, if it looked like things were getting sideways or if an unlawful assembly order was called, to either leave the area or get to an area which I considered very safe.

“I wasn’t given that option,” he added.

After the crowd began its march toward downtown, Stern said he instead drove the two miles, as he is still recovering from an emergency surgery and is incapable of walking the distance.

Three police vehicles arrived, and LAPD officers exited with batons and crowd-control weapons drawn.

“Within a matter of minutes, dozens of police started to form skirmish lines,” he said. “There was no unlawful assembly or dispersal order called. They just started laying into people.”

Stern told the Tracker he attempted to move away from the line and was pushed from behind by police, then fell into a group of people and onto the ground. When he got up, he realized that the cord holding his press credential around his neck had broken and his press pass was on the ground behind the advancing officers.

“I went back to retrieve it, and said, ‘I’m press, I need to get my badge. It’s down there on the ground.’ The first cop just pushed me aside,” Stern said. After telling another officer the same, a third picked it up and passed it to Stern.

“I then showed the cop who was immediately in front of me my press ID again, at which point one of the cops then brought a baton across my face, causing a laceration to my chin,” he recounted.

Multiple journalists covering the protest told the Tracker that Stern appeared dazed from the strike. Soon afterward, he and three colleagues left together to find an open urgent care center, but were unsuccessful.

Stern said that his wife — a nurse and wound care specialist — later examined his injury and said that while it should have received stitches, it had stopped bleeding and would heal with strong antibiotic cream.

The LAPD did not respond to an emailed request for additional comment. 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.”

Stern disputed the department’s characterization of the protest. “It was peaceful: There were people with drums, people chanting, people with banners. I saw no acts of violence, no acts of criminal damage or vandalism or conflict or anything,” Stern told the Tracker. “We just met this line of brutality.

“In 2020, with the George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests, LAPD and law enforcement were universally condemned about their brutality, their tactics, their lack of planning, their lack of strategy and the way they were brutalizing people. And since then, they’ve gotten worse.”