Immigration enforcement used for political intimidation, officials and experts warn

After U.S. Border Patrol agents swarmed outside an L.A. news conference led by Gov. Gavin Newsom last week, questions are swirling around the Trump administration’s escalation of immigration enforcement — and whether the administration is using federal agencies to instill fear in immigrant communities and intimidate political opponents.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, known as CHIRLA, is looking into whether the press conference action and other recent enforcement by federal agents violated a restraining order issued last month that bans detentions based on racial profiling, according to spokesperson Jorge-Mario Cabrera. On July 11, a federal judge put the temporary order in place after finding immigration officers had likely violated the constitutional rights of people they detained in the L.A. area.

But some detentions have continued since then. The same day as the Newsom press conference, for example, federal agents conducted an operation at a Monrovia Home Depot that ended in the death of a man who ran from agents and was struck by an SUV on the 210 Freeway. Angelica Salas, executive director of CHIRLA, called the operation cruel and a “racist roundup.”

Newsom has criticized the Trump administration’s approach on social media and in interviews since the Border Patrol operation outside his news conference. That event, held at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, aimed to promote Newsom’s redistricting proposal. The proposal is part of a push by California Democrats in response to a Trump-backed redistricting proposal in Texas that emerged over the summer. Newsom announced Sunday that his office has formally requested information about the Trump administration’s involvement in the operation.

Mayor Karen Bass told reporters at the scene that the federal agents’ actions were a “provocative act.” In a statement posted on social media after the event, her office went on to say, “This raid was not a coincidence — it was a conscious effort by the federal government to politically intimidate the second largest city in the country.”

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told LAist in an emailed statement that two people were arrested near the press conference and that agents “patrol ALL areas of Los Angeles every day.”

“DHS is focused on enforcing the law, not on [Newsom],” McLaughlin said.

After multiple requests by LAist, the Department of Homeland Security did not provide a reason for federal agents targeting Little Tokyo on Aug. 14. They also did not respond to questions asking for the names of those arrested and whether warrants were issued prior to the arrests.

Turning to history to understand today

Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor of history at UCLA, said she is concerned about what she sees as an escalation by federal agents in recent months, but she said the politicization of immigration enforcement isn’t new.

“There's always this very political edge to immigration control of trying to suppress speech or ideas that are unpopular in the United States,” Lytle Hernández said, “and certainly we have seen that in the last six months here in the country as well.”

Lytle Hernández pointed to the first immigration ban in the U.S., which was passed in 1803 and banned any “negro, mulatto, or other person of color” from being brought into the country. She said the law arose from a fear that Haitian revolutionaries might immigrate and inspire enslaved people in the U.S. to organize a revolution for their own freedom.

Immigration enforcement later increased during World War I, she said, targeting communists, anarchists and others who were against the war, and then again during the Cold War for similar reasons.

While Los Angeles finds itself in the spotlight due to the recent federal crackdown on immigration, Lytle Hernández said the city also has a long history in immigration politics.

“At the turn of the 20th century,” Lytle Hernández said, L.A. was considered by some to be “the nation's white spot,” or the “Aryan City of the Sun.”

The mass immigration of Anglo-American settlers became central to the city’s identity in early years, she told LAist. The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned Chinese laborers from entering the country, and when the ban was expanded through the Geary Act of 1892, L.A. became  ”a capital of Chinese incarceration and deportation,” Lytle Hernández said.

Tension continued to grow in the early 1900s, when more Latino, Asian American and African American immigrants began moving to the city.

Past and present bias

Supporters of anti-immigration campaigns in the 19th century used much of the same rhetoric heard today to justify immigration enforcement actions.

For example, an 1879 amendment to the California Constitution targeting immigrants from China gave the state Legislature authority to make regulations to protect the state from “the burdens and evils arising from the presence of aliens who are or may become vagrants, paupers, mendicants, criminals or invalids afflicted with contagious or infections diseases, and from aliens otherwise dangerous or detrimental to the well-being or peace of the State.”

That amendment stayed in place until 1952, despite evidence at the time that immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than native born people. That continues to be true, according to numerous studies by institutions like Stanford University and the Cato Institute.

For months, President Donald Trump has said his administration would deport “the worst of the worst” of immigrants who were dangerous criminals. But fewer than 30% of people currently detained in ICE facilities nationwide have been convicted of any crime, according to an LAist analysis of ICE detention data.

LAist found that as an average since last October, only about 18% of those detained in California ICE facilities have had any criminal convictions.