LOS ANGELES _ The immigration agents surrounded the small home on a quiet street in East Los Angeles. One trained his rifle on the back door. Another knocked loudly out front, shouting for the people inside to open up. Someone else barked the commands in Spanish.
Their target was a 47-year-old Mexican man who they suspected had crossed into the United States illegally and later done time for felony assault and battery.
The man's wife came to the door after a few minutes with her own demands: Did the agents have a warrant?
Told that they didn't, she refused to allow the agents in the house and said her husband would not speak with them.
Thwarted, at least for that day, the agents departed. As they walked to their SUVs, a neighbor stood in the street recording them on his phone.
As that recent stalemate suggests, President Trump's calls for a dramatic increase in deportations has brought changes for ICE agents on the ground. A determined push by immigrant groups has led to more encounters with people aware of their rights.
And, after receiving relatively little attention for years, agents acknowledge the atmosphere and politics of the job has become more fraught as they work under increased scrutiny from politicians and activists.
"That's just the climate that we're in," said Dave Marin, director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE in Los Angeles, "because this issue has brought up such heated concerns on both sides."
But while arrests by ICE are up 35 percent nationwide since Trump took office, they remain relatively flat in Southern California. Arrests of immigrants without criminal pasts have remained low in the L.A. region as well, as agents do little, if anything, differently from what they were under the previous administration, Marin said.
The charged dynamics were evident when the Los Angeles Times accompanied a team of ICE agents as they carried out a series of early-morning arrests late last month.
