Some Angelenos rounded up by federal immigration agents have already been deported, according to a new report, as a fuller picture emerges of the immigrants arrested during raids in Los Angeles that have triggered a wave of protests there and in other cities across the US.
The Trump administration has not released a count – but the parents of a 23-year-old member of Mexico’s Indigenous Zapotec community told the Washington Post they had received a phone call from their son telling them he had been dropped off at the US-Mexico border and told to cross over.
The man, who was arrested at Ambiance Apparel in Los Angeles on Friday, told his parents he thought he had signed a consent form to a coronavirus test but may have accidentally instead signed off on his deportation.
“The way they deported him wasn’t right,” his 42-year-old father, Javier, told the outlet. “He is a calm, working man. We are asking for justice because they violated his rights.” They said he had no criminal record and had been in the US for four years.
A spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights told the Post that the organisation’s emergency line had received more than 120 calls from distraught families. Jorge-Mario Cabrera estimated that many of those detained had been in the US for decades, do not have legal representation, and had been transferred to detention facilities far from their homes.
The accounts appear to contradict statements by federal officials who said the raid on Ambiance Apparel was part of a criminal investigation into fake employee documents.
Tom Homan, Donald Trump’s border czar, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that the raid in the downtown manufacturing district “wasn’t an immigration raid” – but that federal law enforcement were executing “criminal warrants” related to money laundering, tax evasion and customs fraud investigations.
Homan then agreed that not everyone arrested had a criminal record. “We’re going to enforce immigration law,” he said.
Mexico’s foreign minister has said four immigrants detained in the Ambiance raid had already been removed from the US, and the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released 16 people who they said had criminal histories.
A DHS official told the Post that 2,368 people were arrested on 4 June and 2,267 on 3 June. The increase from about 660 per day over the first three months of Trump’s second presidency – which began in January – comes after White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said in May that the administration’s goal is for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to make a “minimum of 3,000 arrests” daily.
Other federal agencies are believed to have contributed to the increase in detentions alongside Ice, including the FBI, US Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Immigrant advocacy groups say they have information that more than 200 people were detained and that many do not have criminal records. DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Fox News on Monday that those detained were the “worst of the worst”.
Despite the conflicting accounts, the raids appear to mark a turning point in efforts by the Trump administration to enforce immigration laws that turn the focus from detaining and deporting migrants with actual or alleged criminal histories to a broader deportation sweep of people who do not possess US citizenship.
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“The people who have been arrested are our neighbors and community members and the workers that make the city of Los Angeles run,” Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Southern California, told the outlet.
Bitran said that among those detained was a woman who was pulled over while dropping her young son off at day care: “We know there were arrests at car washes, at Home Depot – really the places where immigrants are just trying to go about their lives and go about their jobs.”
Immigration attorney Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen told the outlet that she had spoken with a dozen Ambiance Apparel detainees after hours waiting at the federal detention center in Los Angeles on Sunday. She said immigration attorneys had been “consistently deprived access to them”.
