‘They run, we chase’: Immigration raids test limits of ‘probable cause’
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Matilde suffered a heart attack after she was held by immigration agents at a Lowes parking lot and can no longer go to the store without breaking down. Narciso Barranco, a gardener accused of threatening heavily armed agents with a weed whacker, still wakes up with headaches after he was beaten during his arrest. Jaime Alanís Garcia died after falling 30 feet from a rafter as agents stormed his workplace.
The aggressive tactics led by Border Patrol agents hundreds of miles from their posts have left communities jarred, people injured and businesses gutted.
“I can’t erase the masked faces from my mind,” said Matilde, a 54-year-old mother who is still gripped with fear about the raid in Pacoima. In a bystander video posted on social media, she appears to faint after agents grabbed her from behind. A doctor told Matilde, who asked that her full name not be used, that she had a heart attack.
Civil rights activists, city leaders, immigrants and their advocates were hopeful that the indiscriminate sweeps targeting Latinos were over in July after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, ruling that Border Patrol agents’ profiling tactics violated the 4th Amendment. They were even more heartened when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s argument that their tactics were lawful and upheld the restraining order.
But this week, Customs and Border Protection struck in Los Angeles again, raiding a car wash and a Home Depot, grabbing anyone who ran from them.
“We are not leaving,” said Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino, who has been leading the operations in California.
The temporary restraining orders prohibits agents from stopping someone solely based on their race, language, job or location.
Mayor Karen Bass said it appears as if the Wednesday raid at a Home Depot in Westlake — dubbed “Operation Trojan Horse” — violated the order, but city attorneys are still trying to determine the facts.
The legal wrangling will continue over the ways agents decide who to target and the level of use of force they use for non-criminal enforcement. The government on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the judge’s order.
Now other parts of the country are watching the events in California, expecting federal agents to target their immigrant communities, particularly in states with no judicial orders blocking them.
“We saw the videos, the images coming out of Los Angeles. We definitely thought we would be next,” said Rey Wences, with Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which runs a hotline that monitors raids. “We’re just waiting for the shoe to drop.”
The Times reviewed dozens of witness and surveillance videos, pored through criminal complaints and interviewed lawyers, advocates, bystanders and experts to understand how on-the-ground operations have unfolded this summer and where the points of contention are.
Are ‘roving patrols’ simply racial profiling?
Border Patrol agents were driving down West Olympic Boulevard in Montebello — a largely Latino community — when surveillance footage captured their white SUV make a U-turn and pull into the driveway of a tow yard at 4:32 p.m on June 12.
As Homeland Security Investigations special agent Nicholas DeSimone later wrote in a federal criminal complaint, the operation was not preplanned but rather part of a “roving patrol”— a controversial tactic that lawsuits link to racial profiling and was widely used in the Los Angeles area after the raids started in June.
“Roving patrols,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, involves agents on foot or in a vehicle simply looking for people who might be undocumented, a practice traditionally focused on the border region.
Within minutes, agents had arrested two people at the tow yard. They also cornered a U.S. citizen, Brian Gavidia, who is now part of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these stops.
Video of the stop taken by his friend went viral and raised red flags early in the crackdown that agents were indiscriminately targeting people because of the way they looked.
“I’m an American, bro,” Gavidia can be heard saying to the agent, as his friend narrates. “These guys, literally based off of skin color!”
Border Patrol agents on ‘roving patrol’ arrest U.S. citizen on assault charges. Fear of widespread racial profiling gains momentum as Home Depots and car washes raided.
The purpose of a roving patrol is for border agents to deter or respond to illegal activity, according to the agency. These tactics are a departure from agents targeting specific immigrants based on information they have on the person, such as serious criminal histories or removal orders. And while agents have been carrying out roving patrols for more than a decade, they are controversial and untested at such a large scale in the interior of the country.
In July, the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel, other groups and private attorneys filed a lawsuit in L.A. challenging the constitutionality of the roving patrols and requesting the temporary restraining order. During a hearing, Mohammad Tajsar, an ACLU attorney, told U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong that plaintiffs had documented an “overwhelming record” showing the government “has a policy and practice of conducting so called roving patrols throughout this district to stop individuals without ever making a particularized, individualized assessment of reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”
“This practice is officially sanctioned,” Tajsar said during the hearing.
ACLU lawyers had already sued over indiscriminate sweeps in February, after Bovino oversaw roving patrols in Kern County the month before. They argued the agency had a history of detaining people during these patrols without establishing reasonable suspicion of their immigration violation, and of threatening physical harm against those who refuse to comply.
“Border Patrol’s interior sweeps demonstrate a pattern of noncompliance with the statutory and constitutional limits on its authority,” attorneys argued in that case. Specifically, they alleged the agency was relying on race or ethnicity to justify stops, using physical abuse if a person refused to voluntary questioning and detaining people who declined to talk.