Washington Post via MSN – no paywall: “It all happened so quickly. On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended upon Los Angeles, raiding businesses and arresting more than 40 people. Once word got out on social media, protests began and L.A. Taco’s six-person news team headed out to the streets. Investigative reporter Lexis-Olivier Ray captured video of police firing pepper balls at protesters and media outside a federal building in downtown Los Angeles. The next day, law enforcement shot pepper balls at him and other journalists, he said. In five years of covering protests and civil unrest in the city, he had never seen anything like that. “It was shocking,” said Ray, 35. He doesn’t know how many times he was hit but his backpack was riddled with pepper ball residue. “There was a complete disregard that we were press.” L.A. Taco was once a small website “celebrating the taco lifestyle,” and a year ago faced the possibility of shutting down. But it’s become an impactful and (for now) financially viable L.A. newsroom, going deep in the trenches as more than 1,600 people were arrested or detained by ICE in Southern California in June, according to Cal Matters. “The journalism gets better year after year,” said Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano. “And now in this moment when L.A. needs as many eyes on the streets as possible, L.A. Taco has become indispensable.” “This is the issue, not just right now but, honestly, of a generation,” he said of the city’s immigration concerns. “… People are freaked the hell out and they don’t know what to do.”