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Tensions Flare in L.A. as Protests Grow Over ICE Raids; Trump Orders Marines, More National Guard Troops to L.A.; Federal Judge Says OPM Violated Privacy Act by Allowing DOGE Access to Sensitive Data. Aired 7-7:30a ET

Aired June 10, 2025 - 07:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[07:00:00]

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: The breaking news overnight, a fourth night of unrest in Los Angeles. Violent clashes with police protests against ICE workplace raids, President Trump escalating the feud with California's leaders even more, sending in more military. 700 Marines are activated.

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right, health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. removes all vaccine experts from a key advisory panel. This has more than 300 National Institutes of Health employees push back against the administration's policies.

I'm John Berman with Kate Bolduan, Sara Sidner on the ground in Los Angeles. This is CNN News Central.

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: The news this morning, overnight and into the morning, I could hear flash bangs, destruction happening, as well as police sirens piercing the night sky. You could really hear that until about 2:00 in the morning. There was a group of protestors, but they had dwindled to a couple of dozen. But still, the damage to businesses and federal, state, and local buildings very apparent.

We, for the first time in days, have been let very close to where these protests tend to pop off. We are right here. At the Federal Detention Center behind me, you'll see the federal court jutting up there, and then to my right you will see the V.A. clinic, which is where the National Guard and some of their members have stationed themselves. You see some Guardsmen outside this morning, you also see some of their vehicles preparing for what could be a fifth day of protest.

And now the city is anticipating something that we really haven't seen in modern history, and that is the president putting in motion hundreds of Marines, 700 to be exact, set to be deployed on U.S. soil after the fourth night of clashes between police and protesters here in Los Angeles, all of it against immigration raids that have been happening across California.

Now, let me let you see some of what we experienced and some of what our reporters experienced last night, tensions blowing up again between police and some protestors. Obviously there are different kinds of protests that have been happening here in the daytime. It has been peaceful. As the night comes, it starts to get more and more rowdy.

But the crowd tends to get smaller and smaller, but you are seeing some of the destruction there and the back and forth between police and protesters. The Pentagon now sending 700 Marines to Los Angeles. President Trump has also mobilized an additional 2,000 National Guardsmen to the city, doubling the initial deployment of those troops over the objections, we must add, of the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom.

Amid the chaotic scenes, we are also witnessing this overnight, CNN colleague Jason Carroll out in the streets reporting with his crew. They were escorted briefly out of the protest zone. Their hands put behind their back, but they were not handcuffed by police. Two security personnel working with the crew were briefly detained by the LAPD as well. They have all since been released without any charges.

And then these anti-ICE protests not just happening in Los Angeles, happening across the United States now, demonstrations in New York, in Dallas, in Atlanta, Seattle, and several other cities and states, and I want to be joined now by my colleague and friend Stephanie Elam. She is also downtown to give us a look at what happened once some of these protesters broke off and some destruction occurred. Give us some sense of what you're seeing in downtown right now, Steph.

STEPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes. Good morning, Sara. I'm about a mile or so away from where you are. And you and I have covered so many protests and we know as nighttime comes, things change, the energy changes. And this is exactly what we've seen, this Adidas door here in downtown Los Angeles broken into and looted based on the fact that I see some shorts and shoes that are out here on the street here.

[07:05:01]

The police officers just left from this area and have been cordoning this off until they could come and block it up and, you know, block up with this door.

But you listen to Mayor Karen Bass talk about just what this difference is between the people who are out here protesting ICE and the people who were out here vandalizing, take a listen to what the mayor had to say.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR KAREN BASS (D-LOS ANGELES, CA): To see the level of obscene graffiti all over buildings, and I just say that anybody that does that don't come and say that you are supporting immigrant rights, the rights of immigrants. You can't possibly be supporting immigrants and vandalize our city.

You will be held accountable and, frankly, need to be separated from the people who are really fighting on behalf of our immigrant community.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ELAM: And so you look at how this has played out here, and you can see down the street that there's different places that people have tagged. There's graffiti all over downtown. And when we do have protests here in Los Angeles, they tend to stay concentrated here in downtown Los Angeles. 95, 99 percent of the city is completely unaffected by this, but out here you can see this drama, this damage and the tagging, the graffiti this time, is so much more than we've seen in other times, and it is more of an aggressive expansion of where we've seen the destruction in other protests. That's the big difference that we're seeing out here, Sara.

SIDNER: Yes, I think it's really important to give the scope and the scale of this. This is not a sliver just of Los Angeles. It's really a sliver of downtown. Much of the rest of the city is functioning as per normal. This morning, however, there has been a real scene here where the word F expletive ICE is all over the place, all over the building surrounding me. Just about anywhere you look, whether it be, you know, businesses or whether it be federal buildings, court, I saw it on city hall as the police are outside of their own building. So, you're really seeing that, is the pervasive thing happening across here that we have not seen in this way before.

Stephanie Elam, thank you to you and your crew out there for giving us the scene just a mile into downtown, and I'll toss it back to you, John.

BERMAN: Yes, great. Sara Sidner, thank you so much, great to get a picture of what's going on there on the ground this morning.

The state of California has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the deployment of the National Guard and Governor Gavin Newsom says it will do the same over the Marines now on their way somewhere in Los Angeles.

With us now, CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig. Talk to us about the Marines in general, the legal justification and what it tells us about what they will and won't do.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: So, ordinarily, John, there's a strict separation between the military in this country and law enforcement. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, et cetera, not allowed to execute police functions. However, there's a law called the Insurrection Act that under certain very dramatic circumstances, the president can invoke. However, Donald Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act here. So, how could he send Marines?

The answer I'm inferring here is that the Marines are not going to perform law enforcement functions. They're not going to be policing, they're not going to be making arrests and doing search warrants. Instead, what I would expect they'll be doing is protecting federal assets, protecting federal buildings. Arguably, that does not require an invocation of the Insurrection Act.

BERMAN: Which has not been used right to this point. So, how is the federal government explaining what they're doing and how is the State of California arguing the law doesn't say what you say it does?

HONIG: Yes. So, with respect to the deployment of National Guard, so in the lawsuit that's been filed last night, the state of California's challenging Trump's sending of the National Guard in. But Trump uses a separate statute for that, a separate law that says specifically gives the president the power to deploy the National Guard if the president is unable with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States. That's the actual provision the president's relying on.

In its lawsuit challenging this California says, yes, but the law also says that you can only deploy the National Guard if the orders go through the governor of the state. So, California's argument is Gavin Newsom, the governor, has not approved this, therefore it's illegal to send the National Guard. I think what we'll hear today from the Trump administration is, no, that's simply a technicality. We just have to send it through you. It's up to the president, not the governor.

BERMAN: And notwithstanding we saw Stephanie Elam outside alluded Adidas store, and there were protests in some clashes last night. The volume and the intensity was less than we saw that up night before. If this gets less violent and smaller, how does that impact the arguments here?

HONIG: Well, a couple things could happen. So, the president has deployed the National Guard for a period of 60 days.

[07:10:02]

He could at some point say, I don't think it's any longer necessary. The other thing is that provision that I read you from the law that the president has to show he's unable with regular forces to enforce the law, as the protests shrink, that argument also shrinks, right? If there's not mayhem on the streets, if it gets to a point where you can enforce the laws with the LAPD, with the local sheriff's office, then that really undermines this claim that there's a need to have the National Guard there.

BERMAN: Elie Honig, Counselor, great to see you this morning. Thank you very much. Kate?

BOLDUAN: A federal judge says the Office of Personnel Management broke the law in granting DOGE access to personal data of millions of federal employees. Where this now heads today.

And this morning, more than 300 employees of the National Institutes of Health speaking out declaring very publicly they dissent and disagree with the direction that the new NIH director is taking the agency. Two of those employees that are speaking out will be joining us this morning.

And could it be the catch of the year? An unbelievable over the wall snag from a 25-year-old rookie.

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[07:15:00] BOLDUAN: New this morning, a federal judge has ruled the Office of Personnel Management broke federal privacy laws when it granted the DOGE team data access. OPM holds sensitive and private data on millions of federal employees.

CNN's Hadas Gold is tracking this one for us this morning, and there's a lot of questions I have about this. What is the federal -- what is this judge saying and what does this mean?

HADAS GOLD, CNN MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: So, let's just start with what OPM is. OPM is essentially the government's H.R. system, and it was one of the first landing places for Elon Musk's DOGE people because of its importance in terms of the data that it holds, the information it holds, all of those infamous emails, the fork in the road emails, trying to get federal employees to resign, what did you do last week, five things emails, those all came from OPM.

BOLDUAN: It feels like a million years ago, Hadas, yes.

GOLD: But it's a very important sort of heartbeat of the federal government.

And so unions sued because they say that the way these DOGE agents accessed all of this data, not only on current federal employees, former federal employees, future federal employees and their beneficiaries violated the Privacy Act and went against OPMs own cybersecurity protocols. There's a fear there could be misuse, there could be hacking. And this is founded in 2015. There was a massive hack of OPM systems. More than 20 million people's data was taken.

And so the judge agreed, and you can see here, she said, those agents who had no legal right of access to those records, and in doing so, the defendants violated the Privacy Act and departed from cybersecurity standards that they are obligated to follow. And then she has some really harsh words. She says this was a breach of law and of trust.

This may be one of the most substantial opinions we've seen so far when it comes to DOGE and their access to data. We've seen other cases around social security data and the like. Okay. But this has been some of the harshest and I think most significant ruling on this that we have seen so far.

So she granted a preliminary injunction. Okay. What that means is that this Friday she's going to. Like formally decide what that means. Does that mean that DOGE agents have to completely get their hands off this data? They might even have to delete some of the data that they have currently used. So, it's going to be really interesting to see what does DOGE do going forward, you know, Elon Musk is no longer around and how are they going to respond to all of this?

Now we do expect them to appeal this. A lot of these cases of revolving around DOGE, they have been appealed to the Supreme Court and so far the Supreme Court has seemed pretty willing to side with DOGE, with the Elon Musk sort of mantra of what they want to do in government. BOLDUAN: Because this could set a very important precedent if this ruling would stand, and what they would have access to now and going forward. So, this appeal is going to be an important.

GOLD: Yes, so definitely one to watch, especially as it goes up to the Supreme Court.

BOLDUAN: Absolutely. Hadas, thank you so much, great reporting.

Coming up still for us, President Trump is now doubling the National Guard presence in Los Angeles. Protests there over ICE immigration raids and confrontations with law enforcement are now stretching into a fifth day, and what the president really means when he said it would be a good idea to possibly arrest California's governor.

And tempers flare in game three of the Stanley Cup final.

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[07:20:00]

BERMAN: Defending Stanley Cup champions, the Florida Panthers, one step closer to a repeat, a game full of drama and a standout performance from a universally beloved former Boston Bruin.

CNN's Andy Scholes with us now. This was a game, Andy.

ANDY SCHOLES, CNN SPORTS ANCHOR: Yes. I mean, you could say that, John. I mean, Florida and Edmonton, they went to seven games in last year's final. The first two games of this series went to overtime.

So, these two teams definitely getting tired of one another in. The chippiness flowed over in game three. Brad Marchand, he opened the scoring in this one, getting the Panthers on the board with this goal just a minute into the game. Then in the second, look at this hit Aaron Ekblad put on Connor McDavid as he was trying to weave his way through.

It was 4-1 Florida by the end of the second period, and then in the third, Oiler Center Trent Frederic. Well, he went after Sam Bennett with a crosscheck, broke his stick, and then he just wanted to fight. Those two start to scuffle. Everyone else starts exchanging blows. There were 140 penalty minutes doled out in this game. It was the fourth most in final history.

Florida wins in a rout though in the end, 6-1 to take a two one lead in this series.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRAD MARCHAND, FLORIDA PANTHERS FORWARD: Emotions in all these games are extremely high. You know, and obviously this is the time of year when you're playing and you're enjoying every minute. So, you know, it doesn't really matter what happened tonight. We both have to reset and we're both the next one now. KRIS KNOBLAUCH, EDMONTON OILERS HEAD COACH: I don't think we would've acted or played like that, had the game been a one goal or two goal game. I think our guys were just trying to, I don't know, boys being boys.

CONNOR MCDAVID, EDMONTON OILERS CAPTAIN: Obviously, it wasn't our best, not our best at all. I don't think our best has shown up all series long, but it's coming.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SCHOLES: Yes. Game four this series is going to be on Thursday and you can watch it on TNT.

All right, in baseball, meanwhile, we had the catch of the year last night. I think this may be the catch of the decade, catch of the century. Nolan Schanuel hit this ball deep to left center. The A's Denzel Clarke tracking it, he leaps on the wall, hangs over the top of it and makes the catch. I mean, that ball was going to clear the fence by five feet. And Clarke, he brought it back in. He said he just did what the ball told him to do, go up there and get it.

But, I mean, John, you've watched a lot of baseball in your life. I mean, that's top five for me ever. I always -- my favorite catch ever was that Ken Griffey Jr. catch that was very similar to that. That's always been my top one, but that might've matched it right there.

[07:25:00]

BERMAN: We spent a lot of time backstage analyzing this catch. We are in broad agreement here in New York, Andy, that's one of the best catches we've ever seen. And he was tracking it the whole way. I mean, the thing is he knew what he was doing the whole way. Oh, it's just incredibly impressive.

SCHOLES: And he made it look so easy, John. Those walls in the outfield are not short. And look how high he got up there to get that ball, incredible.

BERMAN: All right. Well congratulations to him. Congratulations to you, Andy Scholes, nice to see you this morning.

All right, dissent in the ranks. Employees at the National Institute of Health speak out against administration policies.

A new night of protests in Los Angeles, our Sara Sidner is there.

SIDNER: Yes. Clashes between police and demonstrators spilling into the morning this morning as the city anticipates a doubling of the National Guard, and President Trump preparing to deploy or deploying more than 700 Marines to the city. This is unprecedented. We will talk about it coming up.

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