Back to the Los Angeles raids:
Routine immigration operations typically detain three to five people — but a sweep across seven counties to round up people appears to be a direct consequence of Trump’s recent executive order that gives broad power for agents to detain immigrants, advocates said. [...]
Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the Director of Communications at the immigrant advocacy group Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), told ThinkProgress that the immigrants arrested this week were “low-priority.”
Cabrera said that, by late Thursday evening, lawyers were able to consult 16 people detained in the raids who do not in fact have criminal records. One of those detainees has two U.S.-born children, no criminal background, and has spent years living in the United States. Another one was considered a “gang member” simply because of old speeding tickets and tattoos.
One LA attorney who went to the ICE offices to represent immigrants who had been detained said some detainees may have been immediately deported.
An ICE officer told her that one of the people she represents — a father to three children who are U.S. citizens who was likely eligible for a green card — had been deported. But Navarrete couldn’t confirm that because she was denied entry to physically see him. “We don’t know because we don’t believe them,” she said. She is now working to file a stay for the man.
This is how Trump is making America safe again—detaining and deporting people with traffic tickets and tattoos as well as parents of U.S.-born children who have been doing their best to keep their families fed. He’s going to create a generation of American kids who grow up without their parents. Nothing could make America greater than that.
UPDATE: Washington Post added some good reporting here:
U.S. immigration authorities launched a series of raids, traffic stops and checkpoints in at least half a dozen states across the country on Thursday and Friday, sweeping up an unknown number of undocumented immigrants, immigration lawyers and advocates said.
The raids, which appeared to target scores of undocumented immigrants, including those without criminal records, mark the first largescale episode of immigration enforcement inside the United States since President Trump’s Jan. 26 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.
It also appeared to signal a departure from the Obama administration’s prioritized immigration enforcement against criminals.