Latino influencers support Trump amid deportations, ICE raids
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Axios
an hour ago
- Axios
Noncriminal ICE arrests spiked in Louisiana in June
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of people in Louisiana with no criminal charges or convictions surged in June, per newly obtained data. Why it matters: The numbers illustrate a major shift that came soon after the Trump administration tripled ICE's arrest quota. Zoom in: The June 22 arrest of 64-year-old Mandonna "Donna" Kashanian, a Lakeview mom who was born in Iran, prompted a community outcry. Kashanian, who has since been released, was part of a national wave of arrests of people without criminal records. Driving the news: People with no criminal charges or convictions made up 39% of ICE arrests in Louisiana in early June, which is up from 21% for the entire month of May, before the arrest quota increase. How it works: That is according to agency data obtained by the UC Berkeley School of Law's Deportation Data Project through Freedom of Information Act requests, and is based on seven-day trailing averages. The big picture: The increase in noncriminal ICE arrests came despite the Trump administration claiming to focus on criminals living in the country illegally. The spike also happened after the Trump administration told ICE to arrest at least 3,000 people daily, up from a previous quota of 1,000 people daily.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
How ICE is using the LAPD to track down immigrants for deportation
When Los Angeles police arrested Jose Juarez-Basilio in March on suspicion of threatening his ex-wife's new romantic partner, he was released after spending less than 24 hours in jail. The short stay behind bars was all it took to trigger his deportation roughly three months later. Even though no charges were filed against Juarez-Basilio, the seemingly routine run-in with police put the 35-year-old undocumented Mexican man on the radar of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which tracked him down and removed him from the country. For months, L.A. Police Department leaders have gone out of their way to reassure the public that the department has strict limits on cooperating with immigration officials. But the case of Juarez-Basilio and several dozen others identified in federal court records show how L.A. police are nevertheless enabling ICE to find new targets by routinely sharing fingerprints with federal law enforcement. The basic question for the LAPD of what it means to cooperate with immigration authorities has taken on fresh urgency amid the Trump White House's continued crackdown across the region. Hundreds of people have been detained in raids by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents, triggering protests and an ongoing court battle over the use of so-called 'roving patrols' to indiscriminately round up suspects. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has frequently pointed to a longstanding policy known as Special Order 40, which bars officers from stopping a person for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status. The policy, implemented in 1979, seeks to assure the city's growing immigrant community that they can come forward as witnesses or victims of crimes without fear of deportation. But given how complicated the country's immigration landscape has grown in the half century since, it's time that the LAPD took steps beyond the policy, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez said. 'I thought Special Order 40 was the right thing to do at that time,' he said in a recent interview. 'Do I think it meets the moment right now? Of course not.' Of particular concern, he said, is the LAPD's handling of data collected from automated license plate readers, devices deployed around the city that track the movements of vehicles. Police officials have insisted that the information is not shared with ICE. But other local law enforcement agencies have flouted their own similar rules in the past, raising concerns that the LAPD may not keep its word. 'If there is even the slightest possibility that the LAPD is sharing any data with ICE,' then the city needs to take a look at such loopholes, Soto-Martinez said. This month, Mayor Karen Bass ordered the creation of a working group to examine — and possibly update — the LAPD's immigration policy. At a news conference, McDonnell said he believed that Special Order 40 still achieved its original mission of building public trust. 'We can't be effective if people are not willing to come forward and report crimes that they're a victim of or a witness to,' he said. But the chief reiterated that his officers would not interfere with federal law enforcement operations — even if they violate a recent court injunction that temporarily blocked federal agents from racial profiling. If Angelenos had concerns, he said, they could file complaints with the feds or pursue other legal remedies. In a city whose population is more than half Latino, that stance is wearing thin with critics who claim that the department is tacitly supporting ICE by providing crowd control when raids draw angry protesters. 'You can't go through something like this for a month and expect the public to trust any law enforcement that participates in this,' said longtime civil rights attorney Connie Rice. 'The immigrant community is asking: 'Aren't you supposed to be protecting us?'' Juarez-Basilio's case shows how the LAPD indirectly enables ICE to conduct deportations even while abiding by Special Order 40 and officially staying out of immigration enforcement. Records show he was taken into custody March 23 on suspicion of making criminal threats. Court filings describe an incident in which he was accused of holding an unknown object under his T-shirt while menacing his ex's new partner. When Juarez-Basilio was booked into a San Fernando Valley jail and fingerprinted, it pinged the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, an ICE facility in Orange County. Court records show an ICE agent investigated Juarez-Basilio and learned that he had been deported three times previously and illegally reentered the country, which is a federal crime — not just a violation of civil immigration laws. Juarez-Basilio posted bond and was released before ICE agents could arrest him. The Los Angeles County district attorney's office declined to file charges, citing a lack of evidence. ICE agents were waiting to take him into custody after a hearing in federal court last month. He was one of at least 30 people arrested by the LAPD in recent months who were subsequently detained by immigration agents for illegal re-entry after deportation, according to a review of criminal court filings. In Juarez-Basilio's case and several others, charging documents make no mention of past criminal behavior apart from their border crossings. In a handful of cases, the people arrested had prior convictions for violent felonies. In several others, the LAPD alerted federal authorities to felony arrests, as in the case of two United Kingdom citizens who were arrested for possessing guns after being pulled over in Hollywood in late June for failing to halt at a stop sign in a black Rolls-Royce. Both men had overstayed their visas, court records show. Police in some states, mostly in the South, have for years assisted ICE by handing over jail inmates accused of immigration violations. Trump has threatened to cut off federal funding to cities such as L.A. that refuse total cooperation on immigration enforcement. Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor who once worked for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, said cities that defy Trump face a choice. Refusing to back down risks losing federal funds. It also imperils cooperation with agencies such as Homeland Security Investigations, which sometimes partners with local law enforcement to take down drug cartels, prevent terrorism and investigate other major crimes. Such ties are only expected to grow tighter with L.A. set to host the 2028 Olympic Games. But working closely with the feds in this moment risks damaging hard-earned trust in vulnerable immigrant communities where people already are wary of cooperating with police, Lopez said. 'You cannot keep a city safe if a large swath of its population doesn't trust the police,' she said. Earlier this year, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a prominent watchdog group, sent a letter to the city's Police Commission warning that information collected by LAPD officers during routine pedestrian and traffic stops is flowing into massive databases — where they can be mined by immigration authorities to aid in tracking down a wanted person. 'Immigration enforcement can't happen without a vast network of local police and prosecutors who serve as the federal government's eyes and ears on the ground, ensuring that any person booked into custody for any arrest — no matter how trivial and no matter if ultimately false or thrown out in court — is immediately put on ICE's radar,' the letter said. Since it was enacted nearly 50 years ago, Special Order 40 has faced repeated attacks both from factions within the LAPD as well as anti-immigration activists who have challenged it on constitutional and practical grounds, saying it gives a free pass to criminals in the country illegally. Stephen Downing, a former LAPD deputy chief who helped draft Special Order 40, said that it was intended as more of a 'law enforcement tool' to address the city's encroaching gang violence than a means 'really to protect immigrants from immigration.' 'It recognized that these people were in the community, they were part of the community, and we needed them for crime control. We needed them to report crime,' said Downing. 'It wasn't so altruistic as it may have seemed at the time.'
Newsweek
3 hours ago
- Newsweek
Republicans Passed the One Big Beautiful Bill to Secure Our Borders—Here's What We Must Do Next
Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the product of many months of hard work by Congress and the unwavering leadership of President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson. The legislation stands as a landmark achievement, and it represents a sea change for border security and immigration enforcement. That change is long overdue, particularly as we work to undo the devastation of the Biden-Harris border crisis. President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speak to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speak to members of the media at the U.S. Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, the turnaround are historic investments in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Among other achievements, Republicans approved more than $46 billion to finish construction of the strategic border barrier system, $45 billion to expand ICE's ability to detain illegal aliens, and approximately $35 billion to recruit, hire, and retain thousands more CBP and ICE officers, agents, and support personnel. But the work to ensure long-lasting border security and interior enforcement is far from over. While Republicans maintain majorities in Washington, we must advance the ball even further. There are three key areas in which we still have a long way to go—but the path is clear. First, we must act quickly to codify President Trump's executive orders. As we learned when President Joe Biden took office and ended essentially every effective border security and enforcement policy of the first Trump administration, executive actions can be undone—sometimes with devastating consequences. If we want the policy wins of the second Trump administration to be guaranteed for future generations, we must turn those executive orders into law. The reconciliation process allowed us to secure many key victories, but the rules of that process also prevented us from enacting policy changes without a clear fiscal impact. That means there are numerous reforms still on the table demanding our attention and action. For starters, to prevent future abuse of our immigration laws and protect our families and communities from the scourge of the fentanyl crisis, we must advance and expand upon the policies put forward in H.R.2, the Secure the Border Act, a historic border security and immigration reform bill that passed the House last Congress but was ignored by the Democrat-led Senate. Some of those reforms include explicitly prohibiting mass parole and nationality-based parole programs, closing asylum and catch-and-release loopholes, expanding expedited removal, cracking down on visa overstays, and expanding grounds for inadmissibility. The American people support such strong measures. They resoundingly endorsed these policies in the 2024 election after President Trump ran on a platform of mass deportations. Poll after poll shows continued support for that platform, despite increasingly outrageous Democrat rhetoric. Second, Republicans need to ramp up our investigative and accountability efforts, starting with looking deeply into the Biden-era officials who crafted, implemented, and defended the unlawful open-borders policies that caused untold harm to our nation. The burgeoning "auto-pen" scandal of the Biden administration—which casts into doubt whether President Biden was of sound mind and personally responsible for many of the policy decisions of his administration, even from its earliest days—sparks some troubling questions. Chief among these is how many of the radical policy decisions on border security and immigration enforcement were driven not by the president, but by others in the White House who saw the opportunity to systemically undermine longstanding U.S. immigration law in pursuit of open-borders, anti-enforcement policies? We have already identified a number of individuals involved in the Biden transition team and the administration that played a role in this crisis, and we must aggressively expand our investigation into them and pursue accountability where we can. Third and finally, we need to hold accountable the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that helped facilitate the Biden-Harris administration's border crisis. The House Committee on Homeland Security has devoted substantial time and effort into uncovering how these NGOs served as a conduit for illegal immigration under the previous administration, often to their own substantial financial benefit. A few weeks ago, we sent a letter to more than 200 NGOs suspected of providing services and benefits to illegal aliens, seeking information about how these groups have used federal taxpayer dollars. We need to expand these probes, and as chairman of the Committee's Border Security and Enforcement Subcommittee, I fully intend to do so. No organization should be allowed to subvert or undermine U.S. laws, and they most certainly should not be doing so with taxpayer money. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and we need to not only prevent further abuse via legislative solutions but also demonstrate that those who do will answer for their actions. This is a bold agenda for the House Republican conference and the House Committee on Homeland Security. But the American people have spoken unequivocally. Just like President Trump, they want the border secured, illegal aliens removed, and their communities made safe. They also want accountability for the harm caused to our country and a firm commitment to advancing President Trump's proven border security agenda. We must show that we are up to the task. Congressman Michael Guest is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement and is currently serving his fourth term as the U.S. representative for Mississippi's 3rd Congressional District. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
