Immigration enforcement sparks outrage, protests in L.A. — but how many arrests?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's immigration raids throughout Los Angeles and surrounding counties have been splashed all over television and social media feeds for nearly a month.
There were the two women nabbed outside the Airport Courthouse on La Cienega Boulevard on Tuesday after a hearing in a local criminal case.
There was the raid at a Hollywood Home Depot on June 19, in which crews of armed, mostly masked agents converged on a parking lot, blocking gates and surrounding the laborers and vendors.
For all the attention created and fear induced, the results of the operations remained opaque — until recently, when numbers on the actual arrests were released by Homeland Security.
My colleague Andrea Castillo provided the figures, which offer new insights into the size and scope of the operations.
From June 6 to June 22, enforcement teams arrested 1,618 immigrants for deportation in Los Angeles and surrounding regions of Southern California, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The 'area of responsibility' for the Los Angeles field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement includes the L.A. metropolitan area and the Central Coast, as well as Orange County to the south, Riverside County to the east and up the coast to San Luis Obispo County.
As immigration arrests have occurred across Southern California, demonstrators have protested the federal government's actions and bystanders have sometimes confronted immigration officers or recorded their actions.
During the same time span, 787 people have been arrested for assault, obstruction and unlawful assembly, a Homeland Security spokesperson said.
Homeland Security did not respond to requests for information on how many of those arrested had criminal histories, or for a breakdown of those convictions.
Figures about the Los Angeles operation released by the White House on June 11 indicated that about one-third of those arrested up until that point had prior criminal convictions.
My colleague Rachel Uranga reported that from June 1 to 10, ICE data show that 722 people were arrested in the Los Angeles region. The figures were obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a repository of enforcement data at UC Berkeley Law.
A Times analysis found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal conviction and 58% had never been charged with a crime. The median age of someone arrested was 38, and that person was likely to be a man. Nearly 48% were Mexican, 16% were from Guatemala and 8% from El Salvador.
Democrats and immigrant community leaders argue that federal agents are targeting people indiscriminately. Despite the chaotic nature of the raids and resulting protests 1,618 arrests by Homeland Security in Southern California over more than two weeks averages out to more than 90 arrests per day — a relatively small contribution to the daily nationwide goal of 3,000.
But perhaps more potent than the arrests, advocates say, is the fear that those actions have stoked.
For more info, check out the full article.
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