Clash near White House prompts Secret Service to tell press to leave grounds in unusual move

Washington (CNN) A confrontation between protesters and police in the park across the street from the White House on Monday evening led the US Secret Service to take the unusual step of ordering members of the White House press corps to immediately leave the grounds.

At one point, protesters in Lafayette Square tried to bring down a statue of former President Andrew Jackson that stands in the middle of the park before they were driven back by police officers. The square has been the site of largely peaceful protests that have been ongoing following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers.

The Washington Post reported that US Park Police clashed with the protesters and used pepper spray as part of their attempts to push them back. Some protesters responded by throwing objects at the police officers, the paper reported. The incident was apparently touched off by a police effort to clear tents out of a nearby street. Alexandra Picavet, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, acknowledged that US Park Police worked with local police officers and the Secret Service to "prevent the destruction on the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayette Park" and said the park was temporarily closed. She did not provide additional details about the police response, and CNN has reached out to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Protesters also spray-painted "BHAZ" on the pillars of St. John's Episcopal Church, which sits across the street from Lafayette Square. The acronym stands for "Black House Autonomous Zone," an apparent reference to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle where protesters have taken over a six-square-block area of the city and kept out police in order to set up their own self-governing space. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone had been a relatively peaceful protest until this past weekend, when two men were shot in the zone early Saturday morning and one of them later died.

Several journalists, including two CNN employees, were told they had to leave the White House grounds immediately via the south side of the complex, which is not the normal entrance/exit for the press. Typically in security situations at the White House, the press corps is locked down inside the complex.