LOS ANGELES — Less than 48 hours after Juan Fernando was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement at his job at a clothing factory, he was transported back to the country he had left behind.
The 23-year-old member of Mexico’s Indigenous Zapotec community had been living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States with his parents for four years. His arrest at Ambiance Apparel in Los Angeles on Friday and removal happened so quickly that his parents said they didn’t have time to get an attorney.
On Sunday, federal authorities dropped him off at an international bridge and told him to cross back to Mexico, his family recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. He told them he thought he had signed a consent to a coronavirus test but may have inadvertently signed off on his deportation instead.
“The way they deported him wasn’t right,” said his father, Javier, 42, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used because he does not have legal immigration status. He said his son does not have a criminal record. “He is a calm, working man. We are asking for justice because they violated his rights.”
As
protests over workplace raids in California’s largest city continued Monday and the
Pentagon announced it would be sending 700 Marines to backstop National Guard troops, immigration lawyers, advocates and relatives were scrambling to find information about those detained. Mexico’s foreign minister said four immigrants detained in the raid had already been removed from the United States, a speed that some advocates said was unusual.
The Trump administration has not released a total count of immigrants picked up in the raids that sparked a wave of unrest in Los Angeles and demonstrations around the country. But as the protests continued, a picture of who was detained was slowly coming together.
The Department of Homeland Security released information on 16 people who the agency said had criminal histories that included charges or convictions of crimes including robbery, sexual battery and drug possession, according to the agency. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin on Monday told Fox News that those picked up in the raids represent the “worst of the worst.” But immigrant advocacy groups say they have collected information indicating that more than 200 people were detained and that many do not have criminal records.
Eva Bitran, director of immigrants’ rights and a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California, said that among the people detained is a woman who was pulled over while dropping her 4-year-old son off at day-care.
“The people who have been arrested are our neighbors and community members and the workers that make the city of Los Angeles run,” Bitran said. “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.”
The administration has sought to ramp up its daily arrest numbers as part of an effort to fulfill President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said in May that the administration’s goal is for ICE to make a “minimum of 3,000 arrests” every day. Since then, the administration has increased its arrest numbers in an effort to meet that goal.
A senior DHS official last week credited ICE’s “enhanced enforcement operations and increased cooperation from local law enforcement partners” for the increase in arrests. The senior DHS official said that 2,368 people in the country illegally were arrested on Wednesday and 2,267 on June 3. Those numbers are a dramatic increase from the approximately
660 arrests a day that the Trump administration touted during its first 100 days.
Officials attributed the increase, at least in part, to the mobilization of other law enforcement units to bolster ICE’s operations. These include the FBI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
While DHS highlighted the arrests of some of those detained in Los Angeles, the agency did not answer further questions about the operation, including whether any employers were among those arrested and how many of those picked up had a criminal record.
Immigrant and community advocacy organizations have established a hotline and a “rapid response” network to quickly assist people facing detention and deportation. As of Sunday night, their emergency line had received more than 120 calls from distraught families, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesman for CHIRLA, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
Cabrera said that advocates have obtained information for about a third of those taken into custody and that they include undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for decades. Many also do not have legal representation and are being transferred quickly to detention facilities far from their homes, he said.
Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen was among a group of attorneys who waited for hours Sunday outside ICE’s Metropolitan Detention Center hoping to speak with detainees. She said she had succeeded in speaking with only one of the more than a dozen individuals detained at Ambiance Apparel, whose relatives she is assisting.
“We’ve been consistently deprived access to them,” Vermeulen said. “There’s a robust coalition of immigration attorneys ready and willing to consider representation for folks if they are kept in California, but we can’t do that until we have access to them. It’s been effectively impossible.”
The garment factory operation devastated members of the tight-knit Indigenous Zapotec community, which has roots in southern Mexico. Many had been working at the warehouse for years before ICE descended on the location.
The Biden administration ended workplace immigration raids and said merely being in the United States illegally wasn’t cause for removal. But Trump has renewed the worksite raids, which can lead to arrests for alleged crimes. They can also lead to the detention and deportation of workers for being in the United States without legal papers, a civil offense.
U.S. Attorney Bilal “Bill” Essayli said federal agents were conducting a criminal investigation and served a search warrant on Ambiance Apparel related to an investigation about fake employee documents. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday that ICE’s raid in the Fashion District “wasn’t an immigration raid” and that authorities were carrying out “criminal warrants” connected to money laundering, tax evasion and customs fraud investigations.
When asked on MSNBC whether everyone arrested had a criminal record, Homan replied, “Absolutely not.” He added: “We’re going to enforce immigration law” and said they’d do so “especially in sanctuary cities.”
Carlos Gonzalez’s brother and uncle were two of those detained by ICE. The 22-year-old was half asleep when he got a call and said he could hardly believe it. He went down to the Fashion District and watched as several members of his Indigenous community were put in chains. He said he felt powerless.
“You don’t know how to help,” Gonzalez said. He was particularly concerned for his mother, who had already lost one son. “It almost hurts more knowing your son is alive but you don’t know how to reach him.”
Gonzalez represented one of six families demanding that ICE liberate their loved ones during a news conference Monday just outside the factory’s iron gates. Sons, wives, uncles and daughters held up signs with blown-up family photos.
Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Juan Ramón de la Fuente said two of those removed back to Mexico had final deportation orders while two others opted to leave voluntarily. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum called on the Trump administration to respect the rights of those detained in the immigration sweeps while also urging protesters to refrain from violence.
“We make a respectful but firm call to United States authorities for all immigration procedures to be carried out with adherence to due process, within a framework of respect for human dignity and the rule of law,” she said at a daily news briefing.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said anyone picked up with a final deportation order has few options.
“If they had final orders of removal and especially if they weren’t responding, that means they had orders and never left,” he said. “The position of the administration is that you don’t even get a hearing, you already had a hearing and we’re just executing the old order.”
Yliana Johansen-Méndez, chief program officer at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said her organization has confirmed with family members that two people were deported the same day as their arrest.
After she heard about the first removal, she said, she thought, “That seems really fast. Maybe we got it wrong.” But then, “the next day we heard the same thing.”
