Finneas said that he was tear-gassed while attending a protest in Los Angeles over immigration raids on Sunday.
“Tear-gassed almost immediately at the very peaceful protest downtown — they’re inciting this,” the Grammy-winning music producer wrote on Instagram. A rep for Finneas didn’t immediately respond to request for further comment.
The incident occurred at one of several protests around the city Sunday, as thousands in the city took to the streets protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids aimed at undocumented immigrants in the region. “Fuck ICE,” Finneas wrote on his Instagram Sunday, reposting several other messages about the protests and raids, including one that said “if you are into this fascist shit you are small and weak and will lose.”
President Donald Trump deployed California’s National Guard Sunday over the protests, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom responding with a formal request for the Trump Administration to “rescind their unlawful deployment of troops in Los Angeles county and return them to my command.”
“We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved,” Newsom wrote Sunday. “This is a serious breach of state sovereignty — inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”
Finneas wasn’t the only prominent musician voicing his support for the protestors this weekend, as Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong posted a video on his Instagram Sunday captioned with the middle finger emoji and an ice cube.
With the protests taking place in downtown LA, the BET Awards — set to take place at the Peacock Theater Monday night — reaffirmed Sunday that the show will proceed as planned, but added that the network “remains committed to the safety of our guests and staff. We are working closely with LAPD and monitoring the situation.”
