Authorities in the United States have extended their immigration crackdown operation in the Los Angeles, California area for a second day following protests at a federal detention centre that were met with police tear gas and stun grenades.
Border Patrol personnel stood in front of an industrial park in the city of Paramount, clad in riot gear and gas masks on Saturday, as bystanders jeered.
“ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] out of Paramount. We see you for what you are,” a woman announced through a megaphone. “You are not welcome here.”
One hand-held sign said, “No Human Being is Illegal.”
The boulevard was closed to traffic as US Border Patrol circulated the area.
ICE arrested at least 44 people on Friday after executing search warrants at multiple locations, including a clothing warehouse in what opponents described as an “oppressive and vile paramilitary operation”.
The raids quickly triggered protests and demonstrators blocked entrances and exits for the Edward R Royal Federal Building in downtown LA, where detainees were being processed.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) denounced the raids and referred to the immigration authorities as “masked goons”.
“We call on our elected officials to uphold their commitment to all Angelenos – immigrants and non-immigrants alike – by taking all action necessary to grind this oppressive and vile paramilitary operation to a halt and keep our city safe and whole,” the statement read.
Senior White House aide, and Trump’s key anti-immigration proponent, Stephen Miller wrote on X on Saturday that the protests against the ICE raids were an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States”.
In a separate post, Miller said LA police chief Jim McDonnell was siding with “invaders over citizens” after he said his officers would not help ICE in any way.
The immigration crackdown is part of President Donald Trump’s pledge to deport a record number of people living in the country illegally, as the White House set a goal for ICE to arrest at least 3,000 immigrants a day.
LA Mayor Karen Bass strongly condemned the raids Friday: “These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city. We will not stand for this”.
ICE acting Director Todd Lyons slammed Bass’s statement, claiming that the mayor had taken the side of “chaos and lawlessness over law enforcement”.
“Make no mistake, ICE will continue to enforce our nation’s immigration laws and arrest criminal illegal aliens,” Lyons said.
Confrontations outside Home Depot
Al Jazeera’s Robert Reynolds reporting from Compton, Los Angeles, said that police used teargas and flash bang grenades to disperse a crowd that gathered outside a home repair shop after news spread that federal immigration officers were conducting raids there.
A protester walks through tear gas fired by law enforcement during a protest in the Paramount section of Los Angeles on Saturday [Eric Thayer/AP Photo]
“The first confrontation started at a home repair warehouse where day labourers, many of whom are undocumented, gather to get jobs by the hour,” said Reynolds.
“[ICE immigration agents] raided that. They arrested a number of people. They saw them being taken away in a white bus with US marshals markings on the side.”
“After that, hundreds of people showed up more or less spontaneously, yelling at the police, demanding that they leave their neighbourhood, demanding that they leave the undocumented migrants alone,” Reynolds added.
“People expressing to us a deep sense of outrage that this is happening in the place where they live, their own neighbourhood,” he said.
“There are police here now in quite large numbers in riot gear, who have been gradually pushing the remaining demonstrators back out of the street,” he said.
Earlier, Reynolds reported that a helicopter overhead warned protestors “this is illegal assembly” and that “anyone who sticks around in this area is going to be subject to arrest.”
The confrontations in Los Angeles come after a “massive increase in the amount of arrests and the amount of enforcement being done by Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” says Marc Christopher, an immigration attorney with Christopher & De Leon law.
“In the past, what we’ve seen is immigration [enforcement] would focus on individuals who had maybe committed crimes or had been arrested, or something of that nature. Now it’s more indiscriminate,” Christopher told Al Jazeera.
