Student journalist detained, shoved by police amid Bay Area protest

Student journalist Sam Grotenstein was detained in a kettle and pushed by police 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, Grotenstein 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 Aarya Mukherjee.

Mukherjee told the Tracker that a splinter group began marching toward downtown, and police eventually declared it an unlawful assembly. San Francisco Police Department officers then formed two lines and encircled the demonstrators using a technique called kettling.

The student journalists were on the opposite side of the street from the protesters, alongside other press and onlookers, but were themselves detained for nearly an hour, despite identifying as press.

“We do actually have quite a lot of footage of us standing at the police line presenting our press credentials,” Grotenstein said. “We were wearing these hard hats that both read ‘Press,’ presenting our credentials to the line, and they were like, ‘No.’”

When they were eventually released, Grotenstein told the Tracker they 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.”

“It wasn’t clear who pushed whom first, but a confrontation arose,” he added.

Mukherjee said that after a demonstrator attempted to escape the kettle, “Everything descended into madness, where police were hitting people on the ground.” As they continued to document what was happening, police seemingly decided that the press were too close and began to push the crowd back.

“A lot of officers, when they initially started pushing back the line, there was a lot of, ‘We do not care that you are press,’” Grotenstein recounted. “And then they fired a pepper ball into the crowd of recording onlookers.”

During that advance, an officer pushed Grotenstein over a curb, sending him to the ground. Mukherjee was then nearly struck with a pepper ball that caused him to immediately begin coughing from exposure to the chemical irritant powder.

The officers made their intentions clear, Grotenstein said: “They did announce, and I think we have it on video as well, ‘We will use force on press.’”

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

Both Grotenstein and Mukherjee 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.”