Sometimes, American protests unfold with ritual precision—hand-painted signs, rhythmic chants, and a timeline that reliably ricochets between hope and exasperation. And yet, every so often, a particular moment slices through the crowd, cutting right past abstractions and ideology. Suddenly it’s not about slogans; it’s about someone on the concrete, wincing in pain, with the rest of their life changed in an instant.

The Wide Lens: Tension and Turnout

This past weekend, Los Angeles once again strutted its dual nature: city of spectacle and city of the deeply personal. “No Kings Day” demonstrations—ironic hats, balloons, and all—secured their place in the visual archive of the decade, drawing what the Los Angeles Times described as tens of thousands into the streets of downtown and outlying neighborhoods. The backdrop: aggressive ICE raids, a fresh deployment of Marines and National Guard troops (much to the chagrin of local officials), and an atmosphere where rumors of enforcement at schools or supermarkets had people scanning the news with something between dread and disbelief.

With American, Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran flags jostling shoulder to shoulder, creative signs (“ICE belongs in my Horchata, not my City!”—a personal favorite) and families from toddlers to grandmas, the mood at these protests was described by the Times as both festive and anxious. Music, dancing, and chants tried to outshine the drone of helicopters and the threat of federal raids. But with armored agents descending on venues like the Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet—where one eyewitness told the Times, “If you looked Hispanic in any way, they just took you”—the border between celebration and fear remained, let’s say, very porous.

Protest Gets Personal: The Case of Martin Santoyo

It’s easy, amidst the numbers and symbols, to forget there are low-key horrifying details rolling in under the headlines. Enter Martin Santoyo, whose Monday night trip out to protest ended not in catharsis, but in the kind of medical report most people never wish to see next to their name.

According to KTLA’s reporting, Santoyo, 33, was maneuvering a bicycle and reaching for a water bottle in the crowd near Temple Street when things got complicated. He never heard a dispersal order. Police, moving in, began shouting “Move back!” while—by his account—he was already trying to pack up and comply. Instinctively, he told one officer not to push, and within moments, another officer just two or three feet away fired a rubber bullet directly into Santoyo’s groin.

Santoyo, ever the stoic, told KTLA: “It sucks to sit down.” But beneath that understatement was a blunt recitation of damage: his left testicle badly bruised, his right “shattered.” Surgery offered no promises of full restoration, just a vague hope of “some function.” KTLA notes that, post-discharge, Santoyo can’t walk and has no concrete timeline for recovery. Notably, despite all this, he told the outlet he intended to attend the next protest—if not on foot, then in a wheelchair. Is there a Purple Heart for this sort of thing?

Not So “Less Lethal”

For anyone keeping score at home, rubber projectiles are officially classified as “less-lethal,” a phrase that feels increasingly loaded with irony when delivered from two feet away. The Times chronicled how the street quickly filled with blue rubber bullets, scattered like some demented parade confetti. Several protesters—adults and teenagers alike—were struck in the crowd, and one scene involved bystanders administering makeshift stitches to a protester shot in the nose. Another had her finger broken, according to those patching her up on the curb.

LAPD Deputy Chief Emada Tingirides told KTLA and reiterated to the Times that officers exercised “extreme patience” before deploying rubber rounds, only escalating when rocks and bottles were allegedly thrown from a bridge. Yet eyewitnesses, including Santoyo, remained baffled by the sudden shift from assembling to stampeding. The Times documents frustrated shouts of “Peaceful protest!” amid a backdrop of flash-bangs and pepper balls, with some protesters literally scaling fences to escape policing tactics they didn’t see coming.

The notion that “less-lethal” means “mostly harmless” doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, especially if you’ve ever witnessed a grown man limping away with a shattered testicle and a new perspective on crowd control.

Who Gets Hurt, and Who Gets Heard?

The physics of the American protest always seems to involve a strange inversion: those with the most at stake face the highest barriers to showing up. Undocumented immigrants who were the very reason for the protests often stayed home out of fear, as recounted by several protesters interviewed by the Times. For every Martin Santoyo who stands up (and now, possibly, wheels up) for “the people who are too scared to go,” there are many more watching it unfold online, weighing the risks of citizenship-versus-safety. The Times paints a picture of solidarity, but also of palpable dread—neighborhoods gone quiet, once-lively food halls like Grand Central Market now eerily empty, and vendors talking in whispers about ICE’s next move.

All the while, city leaders tried in vain to control the narrative. Mayor Karen Bass’s distinctly measured plea for peaceful demonstrations (“the eyes of the world” are on us, she reminded the city) was broadcast before the protests kicked off. The Times notes her frustration at the lack of communication from federal authorities and her unease with trying to manage a city under curfew, hemmed in by troops she never requested.

When politicians invoke historical precedent to justify calling out the Marines, and protesters invoke the Revolution to justify calling them out, you know something has gone askew in the American civic toolkit.

Is This What Anyone Had in Mind?

Every big protest is, at heart, a swirl of macro and micro stories—parades, arguments, and the unpredictable aftershocks of policy when it collides with a crowd. So to recap: one busted demonstration, one shattered testicle, and a city’s worth of collateral stress, all underscored by the overwhelming noise of democracy functioning, noisily and imperfectly, in the street.

No matter your politics, you have to marvel a bit at the randomness of it all. One moment you’re refilling your water bottle, the next, you’re making history for reasons you hope nobody else has to repeat. Is that the price of protest, or a sign that something else has broken along the way? Even after reading every dispatch, does this feel like the “order” those rubber rounds were supposed to restore—or just a painful, very personal reminder that these things are never as abstract as they seem?

Some injuries, as Santoyo could now explain in unusually graphic detail, stick with you long after the crowds have dispersed.