Following a non-lethal gunshot strike while recording the standoff between police and demonstrators in the US city of Los Angeles, a British news photographer has had emergency surgery.
On Sunday, Nick Stern was reporting the demonstrations opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when he felt a three-inch “plastic bullet” rip into his leg.
For three days, demonstrations against immigration sweeps have been raging in Los Angeles; on Sunday, they erupted outside a Home Depot shop in Paramount, south of LA.
Originally from Hertfordshire before moving to the US in 2007, Stern claimed he had been photographing from in the middle of the road all day when at 21:00 local time he was hit by a bullet.
“I tried hobbling away [but] I couldn’t give any weight on my leg.”
Before a medic cut his pants off, he said, up to eight demonstrators hurried forward to transport him away from the “danger area,” apply a pressure pad to the wound, and tie a tourniquet.
“From the moment I was hit I felt terribly faint.”
After emergency surgery to remove the bullet from his leg, he is healing at Long Beach Memorial Medical Centre.
Stern claimed he usually makes a point of being “very deliberate and very obvious” and has a lengthy history of documenting demonstrations and riots all throughout the world.
Though injured, Stern claimed he was ready to go back to work.
“I intend, as soon as I am well enough, to get back out there,” he remarked.
“This is too important and it needs documenting.”
US President Donald Trump has vowed major deportations of illegal immigrants since his comeback to the White House.
ICE agent arrests have climbed throughout Trump’s second term.
Declaring the federal government would “step in and solve the problem,” Trump announced he has sent 2,000 National Guard troops to California to handle the turmoil around the immigration sweeps.
Alleging the White House of aggravating tensions, the Democratic governor of California has urged to Trump to have National Guard units pulled from the city.
Stern remarked: “The communities in Los Angeles are really intimate and tightly bonded.
“So an outside organisation like ICE coming in and removing – whatever you want to call it, removing, kidnapping, abducting people from the community – is not going to go down well at all.”
