Have there been recent large-scale protests against ICE in New York City or Los Angeles in 2025?

1. How the June wave began in Los Angeles

The immediate trigger was a series of ICE workplace and site raids in early June 2025 that prompted mass public outcry and nightly demonstrations across Los Angeles County, described in contemporaneous reporting as hundreds of protesters at initial gatherings and then expanding into larger coordinated actions such as “No Sleep for ICE” actions around hotels and detention-related sites ^{[1] [3] [4]}.

2. New York’s response: solidarity and direct confrontations

New York City saw rapid solidarity protests on June 9–10, 2025, when crowds gathered in Lower Manhattan and at federal buildings and other sites to condemn the raids and to attempt to block enforcement activity; local reporting documented large turnouts and multiple arrests by the NYPD during demonstrations outside the Federal Building and other locations ^{[2] [1]}.

3. Nationwide ripple and media mapping of demonstrations

News outlets and aggregators mapped dozens of sister demonstrations across major cities after the Los Angeles unrest, noting organized rallies in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Tampa and San Francisco in solidarity with those targeted by ICE operations and specific detainee cases — coverage characterized the events as a coordinated national response rather than isolated local protests ^{[5] [3]}.

4. Size and intensity: from hundreds to 'thousands' depending on timeframe

Contemporaneous accounts reported hundreds at many Los Angeles actions in the first days and then larger turnouts over the following weeks; retrospective and rights-group accounts later described “thousands” participating in downtown Los Angeles protests in the weeks after the raids began, indicating that scale varied by day and by how broadly one defines the protest period ^{[3] [4] [6]}.

5. Law enforcement reaction and arrests — what the records show

Police responses included mass arrests at several demonstrations: local reporting documented dozens arrested in New York City actions on June 10, 2025, while a protest in San Francisco linked to the same wave ended with about 148 people detained; reporting also notes clashes, some use of force and confrontations as demonstrators attempted to impede ICE movements ^{[2] [1] [5]}.

6. Movement dynamics and sustained tactics

Organizers in Los Angeles adopted sustained pressure tactics — nightly demonstrations, hotel pickets where ICE staff were alleged to be staying, and rapid-response networks to warn communities of raids — tactics that were explicitly described in feature reporting and which helped spread similar protest models to other cities, including New York ^{[4] [5]}.

7. What this means for assessing 'large-scale' in 2025

The term “large-scale” fits Los Angeles most clearly: reporting documents multi-day, high-turnout actions and later summaries characterizing the weeks after the raids as mobilizing thousands ^{[1] [6]}. New York’s protests during that same early-June period were substantial and visible — with significant turnout, arrests and attempts to physically block ICE operations — but generally framed in coverage as solidarity and targeted direct actions rather than a single continuous mass occupation on the scale described in Los Angeles ^{[2] [1] [3]}.

8. Bottom line

In sum, Los Angeles experienced large, sustained anti-ICE protests in June 2025 that catalyzed nationwide solidarity demonstrations; New York City mounted significant solidarity and direct-action protests on June 9–10, 2025 (with subsequent actions later in the year), and both cities saw arrests and confrontations reported by multiple outlets ^{[1] [2] [5]}.