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Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed on the streets of the United States’s second largest city, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and automatic weapons. They’re officially tasked with protecting federal agents, who are, without warrants, kidnapping people of all ages from court hearings, churches, schools, convenience stores, hospitals, and street corners, on orders to arrest 3,000 per day nationwide. Without due process, those snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be disappeared into its secretive network of detention centers, flown to a hellish Salvadorean prison or to countries they’ve never visited. Seven hundred U.S. Marines joined them today on the streets of Los Angeles.

It seems silly, in this context, when the stakes are so high, to talk about Waymo, a robotaxi company most of the country doesn’t know exists because its driverless, for-hire electric vehicles operate only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Phoenix. It is silly. But Waymo has popped up repeatedly in press coverage of the government’s ongoing mass abduction operation, which has left children orphaned, and the sizable protests that began in L.A. and have started spreading around the country. That’s because protesters destroyed some of the cars. It’s not clear exactly how many have been torched and graffitied. Time counted six as of Tuesday. Waymo has suspended service around the area where protests are happening, and has not commented on how much of its 300-EV fleet in Los Angeles was damaged.

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principals to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir, to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreesen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreesen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the U.S., burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood In The Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at four a.m.