LOS ANGELES – A white supremacist group rallied against ******* immigration in downtown Los Angeles Saturday as hundreds of counter-protesters gathered to shout them down in a tense standoff that included several arrests, thrown rocks and police in riot gear.
Police officers stood between the white supremacists and counter-demonstrators on the south lawn of Los Angeles' City Hall, where about 50 members of the National Socialist Movement waved American flags and swastika banners for about an hour.
Five people, all of them counter-protesters, were arrested on suspicion of throwing items, police said.
The white supremacists, many of them wearing flack helmets and black military fatigue uniforms, shouted "Sieg Heil" before each of their speakers took the podium to taunt counter-protesters with racial, anti-Semitic and misogynistic epithets.
"We will meet you head on," one of the white supremacists, whose name could not be made out over the fuzzy public address system, warned the crowd from behind several phalanxes of police in riot gear.
Members of the Detroit-based group said they picked the location for their rally because of Los Angeles' large immigrant population. They accused some of the immigrants of stealing jobs and committing crimes.
