美執法官員宣布對參與洛杉磯騷亂暴徒提起刑事指控

Good morning everyone, I'm Bill Isseli, United States Attorney, Central District, California. This morning we are announcing that we have filed federal criminal complaints against two defendants who engaged in violence during the recent civil unrest in downtown Los Angeles and in Paramount. The last few days we have seen vicious attacks on our agents and our properties here in the federal government. The escalation of violence by these rioters poses a serious threat to our agents and the safety of the public. Throwing rocks, explosives, assaulting agents and committing other acts of violence are extremely dangerous and will not be tolerated. The President had no choice but to call in the National Guard to protect our assets and our personnel. Our agents and our law enforcement were overwhelmed and we are grateful for the help of the National Guard that we've received. The defendants charged in the complaints are accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at police officers and sheriff deputies who were called in to restore order after two demonstrations against federal immigration enforcement turned violent. As alleged in the complaints, these defendants, one in Paramount, the other in downtown Los Angeles threw Molotov cocktails at police officers. Last Saturday, one defendant, Emiliano Galvez, hid behind a fence and threw the destructive device at a sheriff's deputy, then ran away. Deputies gave chase and arrested him. That's the video you actually see playing right there. The following day, a police officer apprehended the other defendant, Racky Quigley, after spotting him with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. Officers witnessed him throw the device in the air and then arrested him with a lighter in his right hand. I commend our prosecutors and our law enforcement partners for swiftly taking action against these individuals. Our community must be kept safe for peaceful protests and against thugs and criminals looking to start trouble. We expect more charges to be filed in the coming days and weeks. If you took part in these riots and were looking to cause trouble, we will come looking for you. These defendants are charged with possession of an unregistered explosive device in violation of 26 United States Code Section 5861D. Possessing a Molotov cocktail or another destructive device is punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. They are presumed innocent until proven guilty. I now introduce the Los Angeles special agent in charge of the ATF office here, Mr. Kenneth Cooper. Good morning, everybody. I just want to stand here and represent ATF and announcing to the public that ATF is firmly committed to our whole-of-government approach to providing public safety, especially with what's going on here in Los Angeles. I want to make it very clear that we are not putting our state and local partners with L.A. County Sheriff's Office or Sheriff's Department or LAPD. We are not pulling them into Title VIII investigations. We understand their restrictions with state law. So this is us coming together when violent acts are committed against the citizens of Los Angeles. And in cases like this, the facts of the case are fairly simple. If you guys see the defendant here, Mr. Galvez, this was during the Paramount riots where Border Patrol was utilizing gas because they were having rocks and fireworks thrown at them and they were being assaulted. L.A. County Sheriff's Department responded to assist. This individual was identified even by open-source media preparing to assault them with a destructive device. And as you can see, by the grace of God, when he deployed that in a fireball, it luckily did not hit one of the deputies as it clearly would have caused substantial physical injury or death. ATF is firmly committed. These are the most aggressive criminal acts. And we will aggressively work with our state, local and federal partners to investigate the use of destructive device, arson explosives or firearms to assault our public citizens and our public safety first responders. I guess I didn't even highlight our partnership, too. The second case with LAPD, both incidents ATF was able to work with each of these police departments to get an arrest on individuals that were attempting to harm the police officers with destructive devices. The Los Angeles Police Department appreciates the partnerships with both our federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, especially during this time of unprecedented civil unrest. We're going to continue to work with them to ensure that our community remains safe during this challenging time, especially when it involves cases where violence is being conducted against both of our local law enforcement uniform officers as well as our federal officers during this time. We'll continue to work together to make sure our community remains safe and target those individuals that are doing harm to both our community members as well as our law enforcement officers as they try to keep peace in our communities right now. Thank you very much. And I'll introduce Commander Ruiz from Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Good morning, everyone. This is going to be brief. I just want to say thank you to our federal partners for working together with us and moving forward with these prosecutions. On behalf of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and all of the local law enforcement agencies in LA County, thank you. If there's any questions, we can take a couple right now. Yes. We'll get you those hard numbers later. I know there was at least nine people charged over the weekend. We've had more people charged this week for throwing rocks at officers. These two cases for throwing Molotov cocktails. We've had, I think, a couple others. But we can get you that full list. We might even do a bigger briefing tomorrow with all the federal agencies to go over that in more detail. Today we want to highlight these specific cases because we find this particular act of violence to be extremely dangerous. As you saw in Colorado, these Molotov cocktails have the ability to seriously harm or kill a person and a police officer that they were thrown at. So we want to highlight these two cases today. We'll get you more numbers. The importance of charging people federally is for people to know that there are serious consequences for their behavior, for their conduct. You have the right to peacefully protest. No one's going to stop you. But as soon as you cross that line into violence, you're throwing stuff. You're throwing rocks. You're throwing bombs. That's unacceptable. It will not be tolerated. And we're going to come down with a really heavy hand. And this isn't state. This isn't state court. This is federal court. So you're going to go to federal prison. And you're going to go for many years. So the consequences in federal system are much greater usually than they are in the state system. That's the importance of it. Yes, sir. There's two separate cases. So let's take one at a time. We'll start with the LAPD case. Good morning, sir. Specific to the Los Angeles Police Department case, we have a situation where our police officers are trying to keep the peace during a very difficult time on Sunday afternoon when the city was facing this unprecedented violence in many areas of the downtown area. In this particular case, we had a police officer who identified this person holding what he believed to be a Molotov cocktail and fortunately was able to identify and several officers were able to apprehend him safely without causing any harm to anyone, especially our police officers. And I just want to point out not only the keen observation skills of our police officers right now during a difficult time, but the courage they've had in trying to take these people into custody. Remember, all of our officers are working long hours right now and they're tired, but they're still doing the best job possible to keep this community safe and protect our critical infrastructure. Cover the sheriff's case for a minute. Yes. So initially I will tell you we were in the command center here and seeing that live being reported by... and we don't know exactly what media source that we were seeing that. So live footage of that pending attack. The defendant clearly was physically demonstrating his intent on deploying it. We were quickly trying to contact the L.A. County deputies on scene to warn them of this pending attack and then essentially try to vector into that arrest. He did evade arrest. They had him detained at the time, but they didn't quite have the overall information that was coming in on it to make the probable cause arrest. So he was detained and identified and then good old-fashioned police work put it together in a quick period of time. Working hand in glove with the detectives from L.A. County Sheriff's Department with our agents. HSI, this individual is an illegal alien. He is in the country unlawfully. They helped with an initial detention of him. So it was a combination of data, some open source stuff that we were looking at. It was a combination of search warrants, interviews, canvassing. We were able to deploy our canine dog to that scene and recover remnants of that device including pieces of the wick, the bottle, and we were taking soil samples. That obviously will go to our lab to make the determination of the flammable liquid that was used in that. So does that kind of answer your question of how this was essentially a very complex investigation that we were able to put together in a short period of time because of the partnership between all federal agencies and our state and local partners? I think we have some stills from... There's some body cameras. It's not as good as this footage, but if we haven't put that out... Yeah. Yeah. We just posted the videos on our X account, so these videos are available on X right now on our account. I think this was posted on social media. We're not aware of any connection between the two suspects, but obviously both appear to be motivated by similar motivations. This was an attack on law enforcement. Presumably they're motivated by our immigration enforcement efforts and wanting to make a statement, which you can make a statement, but you can't throw bombs or Molotov cocktails. That's not acceptable. So we are... Let me just be clear. This is just the two cases we have been able to charge now. We are looking at hundreds of people. We have video. We have FBI collecting video. We are collecting body cam. We're collecting social media. We're collecting everything, and we're going to take our time. We're going to identify people. They think the mask is saving them. It's not saving them. We're going to identify them, and we will bring charges. We will bring charges for attacks on local law enforcement. We have a federal statute for that. In a time of civil unrest, we can charge them with a federal statute. We can bring arson charges, explosive device charges. We can bring Hobbs Act robbery charges for the looters. We're coming after all these people. So let's be clear. This is the beginning, not the end. Other questions? I'm not sure if I have that information on hand. I think... Was he the visa overstay? He was a visa overstay. 2014 timeframe, 2014-2015. I don't have his criminal history in front of me, and I'm not sure that... I don't know that I have that right now, but I believe he's here lawfully. He's a U.S. citizen. Yeah, he's a U.S. citizen. Anything else? The district attorney? Yeah. Absolutely. No, we work hand-in-hand with the district attorney, Mr. Hockman. To be honest with you, we have a very good relationship with our law enforcement partners, LAPD, the sheriffs. They both provided assistance to our agents on Friday and Saturday. I know it took them some time to be able to get the appropriate resources to handle the unprecedented and unexpected crowds. So we have a good relationship with him, the district attorney's office. They're going to bring their charges. You've got people failing to disperse and some of the lower-level stuff, but the more serious stuff, the robberies, the arson, the Molotov cocktails, the assaults, we want to bring those federally because I think our partners understand that there's greater consequences for them in the federal court system than there is in the state court system. Yes. Is this the... Yeah. Yeah, well, these organized and orchestrated and it appears to be, we're looking into it, well-funded agitators are coming into town and they are resisting federal law enforcement operations. Some people apparently have the notion that California really is a sanctuary from federal immigration laws. Let me assure you, there is no sanctuary. Federal laws are applicable here and they will be enforced. And nothing they have done to date has impacted our ability to carry on our immigration enforcement efforts. And they are continuing as we speak. Yes, ma'am. I can't speak about the details of the investigation because it is ongoing. That is one of the charges I think that was mentioned that we're looking at, but there are several charges. And that was done under a search warrant. That search that was done there was authorized by a federal court judge based on probable cause of evidence of a crime. And that's what the agents were doing there at that time. If not, we're good. I want to just say, I want to really thank our partners. I want to thank the ATF. The ATF really has a special skill set. This is what they do. They do explosives. They do bombs. They do firearm investigations. And we really thank them for their expertise in helping us file these cases very quickly. And I want to thank our partners at the L.A. County Sheriff's Office and the LAPD. And like I said, we just posted the videos on our X account, so you can pull them there. Thank you guys very much.