People Take to Streets in Resistance as ICE Raids Descend on Los Angeles

Protesters took to the streets in Los Angeles on Thursday evening after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly raided homes and communities around the city and detained over 100 people in a mere three hours.

Reflecting the growing community-level resistance to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, protesters chanted “not one more deportation!” in front of an ICE detention center and later formed a human chain in the street:

While an ICE spokesperson defended the citywide immigration raids as routine, local immigrant advocacy groups say the volume of reports of detentions they received is unusual and frightening, and a part of Trump’s harsh crackdown on immigrants’ rights.

“This is the kind of situation we feared would happen, and here it is,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

The alarming raids came the same day a mother of two who has lived in the U.S. for over 20 years was deported from Arizona to Mexico, despite protests from her community and pleas from her children. The deportation was widely seen as just the beginning of Trump’s xenophobic campaign against peaceful undocumented immigrants.

Indeed, while ICE claimed its detentions in Los Angeles targeted people with violent criminal records, CHIRLA said that many people detained on Thursday had no criminal convictions to speak of.

Moreover, CHIRLA policy director Joseph Villa also told a local TV station that despite CHIRLA’s efforts to speak to those being detained, “ICE is not releasing their names. ICE is not allowing them to see their attorney.”