This weekend, tensions boiled over in the Los Angeles area after a week of immigration sweeps in the region sparked violent protests against the Trump administration and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
President Donald Trump’s decision to send 700 US Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops to the Los Angeles area to support the federal response to the unrest has opened a volatile chapter in his mass deportation campaign.
The location of the raids and subsequent protests – a liberal-leaning city in a state controlled by Democrats – also gave the White House an ideal public foil as it seeks to show progress on removing illegal immigrants and instilling law and order.
Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and prominent critic of the president, wrote on X that the troop deployment was a “deranged fantasy of a dictatorial President”.
The raids in America’s second-biggest city are unfolding against the backdrop of an aggressive push to raise arrest and deportation numbers, as the administration has been disappointed with its current pace.
The agency arrested 2,200 people on 4 June, according to NBC News, a record for a single day.
The network reported that hundreds of those arrested were enrolled in a programme known as Alternative to Detention, which allows for the release and monitoring of individuals not deemed an immediate threat.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the man widely seen as the intellectual architect of the deportation policy, has repeatedly said the White House hopes that ICE can scale up to 3,000 arrests a day, up from 660 or so during the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency.
“President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day,” Miller told Fox News in late May.
Yet for much of the first 100 days of the administration, deportations were on par with, and at times below, those recorded during the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.
The White House stopped publishing daily deportation figures early in 2020.
“I’m not satisfied with the numbers,” the administration’s border tsar, Tom Homan, told reporters at the White House at the end of May. “We need to increase.”
Homan added that the Trump administration had “increased the teams a lot” and that “we expect a fast increase in the number of arrests”.
Several senior ICE officials – including Kenneth Genalo, its top deportation official – have left their roles at the agency in recent months.
In February, ICE also moved two top officials overseeing deportations, as well as the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello.
At the time of the more recent reshuffle, the agency characterised the move as organisational realignments that will “help ICE achieve President Trump and the American people’s mandate of arresting and deporting illegal aliens and making American communities safe”.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a press release that the immigrants detained in the recent Los Angeles raids included individuals convicted of sex crimes, burglary, and drug related charges, among other offences.
Local immigration advocates and community members, however, say that families have been torn apart and nonviolent immigrants detained.
At a rally on Monday, Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado said that a Friday raid at a warehouse in the Fashion District “was not about public safety, it was a fear driven, state violence designed to silence, to intimidate, to disappear”.
While opinion polls show that Trump’s immigration policies are popular with a majority of Americans, some of his backers have expressed concern about tactics.
The co-founder of Latinas for Trump, for example, Florida State Senator Ileana Garcia, wrote on X that “this is not what we voted for”.
“I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens, but what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings – in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims – all driven by a Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal,” she added.
Federal authorities have conducted more frequent immigration raids across the US, in states that lean both towards Democrats and Republicans. Some Republican-controlled states, like Tennessee, have assisted federal authorities.
“California was willing to resist,” said John Acevedo, an associate dean at Emory Law School, who studies free speech and protests in the US.
Images of violence and resistance on the streets of Los Angeles gave Trump a catalyst for the deployment of the National Guard.
“For his base, it does quite a bit. It shows he’s serious, and allows them to show he will use all means necessary to enforce his [immigration] rules,” Prof Acevedo said.
Protesters in Los Angeles – which calls itself a sanctuary city, meaning it limits co-operation with federal immigration enforcement – did not relish the role they believed the administration had chosen for their city.
“This is my people, you know, I’m fighting for us,” said Maria Gutierrez, a Mexican-American who protested for two days in Paramount, a city in LA County that saw protests after residents spotted ICE agents in the area.
The unrest there involved looting and at least one car burning. Authorities used rubber bullets and tear gas.
She said there are some protesting in LA, including those in the nearby city of Compton, that share a belief that they were protecting the city from immigration enforcement and saw the Trump administration’s threats as a challenge.
Ms Gutierrez believed undocumented immigrants who commit violent offences should be targeted, but not those who she believes work hard and aspire to a better life.
“This is our city. We’re angry, we know how to protect ourselves and this isn’t going to scare us,” she said.
But the community is not united in support for the protests that have captured national attention.
Juan, who lives near Paramount, came to the US illegally and later became a citizen, but supports ICE’s actions.
“ICE agents have a job to do, just like you and I,” said Juan, who asked the BBC to withhold his last name given the federal operations in the area.
He said he worked for years as a day labourer, but gained citizenship and has four children who graduated from college.
“It’s hard,” he said. “I have family who don’t have papers, too.
“But you can’t really fight it if you’re here and you’re not supposed to be.”
“A crime is a crime,” he said.
