Student journalist detained, shot at with pepper balls at Bay Area protest

Student reporter Aarya Mukherjee was detained in a police kettle and shot at with pepper balls while reporting on anti-deportation protests in San Francisco, California, on June 9, 2025.

The protests were in solidarity with those that began in Los Angeles on June 6, following Trump administration immigration raids and the administration’s deployment of the California National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass.

On June 9, protesters gathered and marched through San Francisco’s Mission District, Mukherjee told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. He was on assignment for The Daily Californian — the student-run newspaper of the University of California, Berkeley — alongside fellow student journalist Sam Grotenstein.

“I guess a smaller splinter group of that protest decided that they wanted to take some more action and started marching toward downtown. Eventually, the police announced that it was an unlawful assembly and they created two lines and kettled us,” Mukherjee said, referring to the tactic of encircling a crowd before making arrests.

He said that he and Grotenstein were on the opposite side of the street from the protesters, alongside other press and onlookers, but were themselves detained.

“They announced that we were all under arrest and they kept us there for like 45 minutes,” Mukherjee said. “The whole time, we kept saying to every officer on the line, ‘We are press. We are press.’ We were actually being kind of annoying about it, because we weren’t able to see what was going on on the other side and we wanted to report.”

Both journalists were also wearing hard hats with “Press” written across them.

When they were eventually released, the student journalists moved to the other side of the street to document the arrests of the demonstrators, who had formed what Grotenstein described as a “human shield.”

Mukherjee said that after a demonstrator attempted to escape the kettle, “Everything descended into madness, where police were hitting people on the ground.

“That’s what we were obviously trying to record and watch and report on,” he told the Tracker. “And in that moment, I guess the police decided that the press were too close. They decided to push the whole protest line back.”

During that advance, an officer pushed Grotenstein over a curb, sending him to the ground. Seconds later, officers shot pepper ball munitions at the journalists, and Mukherjee told the Tracker he immediately began coughing from exposure to the chemical irritant powder.

The officers made their intentions clear, Mukherjee said: “They just kept saying, ‘We’ll use physical force against you, we don’t care if you’re press.’”

The San Francisco Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Both Mukherjee and Grotenstein were similarly detained while covering anti-deportation protests the previous night.

The Daily Californian’s top editors condemned the detention and assaults of its journalists, writing in an editor’s note, “While our staffers were released after about an hour, their detainment prevented them from reporting on the events of the night and, most importantly, actively threatened their safety.

“The duty and purpose of our newsroom is to cover important and relevant issues within our community, and we have the right to do it in a safe way without fearing the kind of assault or retaliation that took place over the last two nights.”