LA lamigrate tactics raise legal questions

From Sergio Olmos., Wendy Fry., Lauren Hepler and Aante rubyCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Masked agents are quickly pulled out. They jump from unmarked vans or trucks. They wear blue jeans or combat fatigues. They approach Latin American men, sometimes screaming and wearing assault rifles. When someone runs, they are taken. When they do not answer the question, they are taken. When they cannot produce documents, they are taken.

Their families will not know what happened to them. They will be chained, discarded in another condition, forced to withstand the days of potato chips, apples, water and random cold sandwich. They will sleep on the floor with Mylar blankets without access to showers or even working baths. These are not enemy fighters in a war zone, but people who live and work in the second largest city in America.

In the last three weeks, federal agents have flooded Los Angeles County, rounding 1,600 people where they work where their children play where they are shopping. They made whole families hide. Videos of these meetings, shared on social media, suggested Quickly., trembling flashes of chaos.

But there have been a few details about what is happening to those who are taken. Calmatters talked to a number of men who were detained on the streets of Los Angeles during the first weekend of attacks. These are the stories that three of them told about how they were arrested, how they were treated in state detention, and ultimately how they were pressure to leave the country voluntarily.

***

At 15:10 on Sunday, June 8, Mauricio Oropza waited 33 at the corner of the boulevards of Lincoln and Venice, in Santa Monica. He was deployed from his buildings for cleaning apartments for a maintenance company. It was a trip with two cheeks and he was halfway.

There were a few more people – three men, a woman and her daughter – were waiting for the same bus. No one seemed to know what to do with the truck that suddenly pulled out in front of them, or from men in jeans and baseball hats that came out of the vehicle. One of them held a photo of a Latin American man with the word “booska” – Spanish for “wanted” – printed from above.

“Have you seen this person?” he asked.

When two of the travelers started running, Oropeza did the same. Then several border patrol vehicles stopped in front of them, he said, and armed men in a tactical gear jumped. One of the agents removed the Oropose and nailed it to the ground.

“Don’t resist,” he told him.

The agents took his mobile phone and the Mexican passport. He was loaded on one of the vehicles along with the other men at the bus stop, all of them struggling to adapt to their new reality. They wouldn’t go home that night. They will not call their families to explain.

As they left, the agents noticed two Latin American men walking on the sidewalk. Oropeza said they had embarked on their radio, said “two more”, and then another vehicle peeled off to chase them.

***

Less than two hours later, and right, Omar Sanchez Lopez left his apartment on Rose Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard, in Venice, with his apron draped over his shoulder. He was about to work with table tables at a nearby Italian restaurant when Honda Civic got into the parking lot of the apartment complex. Lopez thought the driver, who was in jeans, a T -shirt and a baseball cap, was there to visit one of his neighbors. But then the man came out of the car and approached him. He kept a piece of paper with photos of four Latin American men, and Spanish asked Lopez, “Do you know these people?”

27 -year -old Lopez didn’t answer. But the man continued, “Do you speak English? Where do you work? How old are you? Are you a citizen? Do you have documents?”

When Lopez asked, “Why do you ask me these questions,” the man pulled out his badge and said, “Ice.”

Lopez thought about turning to return inside, but a masked border patrol agent came out of the vehicle and told him to put his hands behind his back. In minutes, he was handcuffed and was sitting in the back of the car.

“What are you doing in the United States?” He said the agent asked him as they left. “This is not your country.”

Lopez didn’t answer. He looked out the window to the move, as the sedan pulled him further and further from home, his family, his life.

***

By the time Lopez and Oropeza were taken, Juan Flores Morales was arrested for more than 24 hours. On Saturday, he took a break for lunch with three other men from his construction crew, eating pizza outside the restaurant, where they renovated Inglood when they masked the border patrol agents rolling in a truck.

Morales felt for a moment as if he were paralyzed. “Fear is crazy, ”he said.

Then two agents came out of the vehicle, and the 27 -year -old Morales ran into the restaurant. He sought a frantic escape, but the border patrol agent burst out the door and nailed it.

“Transcilo,” the agent told him. “Don’t move.”

They handcuffed him and asked him if he had participated in the immigration protests that began the night before after the first attacks.

“I’m not getting involved,” he told them. “You have us at work. You were driving us while you work.”

They took his mobile phone, he said, and plugged him into a device that unlocked him, allowing them to look at his contacts and communications.

Morales thought his lack of criminal record would help him. But it wasn’t. “I don’t know why they don’t want us in Los Angeles,” he thought.

The agents kicked him down, leaving his tools at the restaurant.

***

Lopez, Oropeza and Morales are already in Chiapas, Mexico City and Puebla respectively, and we talked to them on the phone. Their accounts for their arrests, detention and rapid removal suggest that federal agents work from a new gaming book that is released from the long -standing practice of target arrests and relies only on the worst pretext, as a wanted poster to approach people who look Latin.

In April Federal Judge issued a preliminary order Holding raids without ghosts in the central valley. “You just can’t get closer to people with brown skin and say,” Give me your documents, “said US District Court judge Jennifer L. Robteon, finding that the undisputed stops may have violated the defense of the Constitution against unwise search.

The man who runs this operation, the head of the El Centro sector Gregory Bovino, Now it is at the forefront of operations in Los Angeles.

Men’s stories also suggest that agents prompt people to sign forms to remove before they can call home or talk to a lawyer. Ahilan Arulanat, co-director of the UCLA Immigration Law and Policy Center, said these tactics would be “grossly illegal”.

“You can’t condition access to the phone for nothing,” Arulanat said. “They have the right to call their family. They have the right to call a lawyer.”

He also expressed concerns about the treatment that men described in government facilities. “It is not permissible to manipulate the conditions of detention in order to encourage people to abandon their rights,” he said.

Migrants can challenge the legality of arrest and detention, he said, but they should usually be in the country and be able to call a lawyer.

The Ministry of Interior Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Immigration Centers for Detention are well above capacityAnd the men we talked to were almost immediately moved to an ice tent camp in Texas and within days across the border to the immigration facility in Sidad Juarez.

Before the Trump administration launched its mass deportation campaign, many immigrants arrested away from the border were released on a link to appear in the immigration court. Those with criminal history were usually held in detention facilities.

Now, Bovino became clearHe considers anyone who has crossed the border without documents – the farmer’s worker, the work worker, the Parataro – a criminal.

“Bad People,” he called them during a press conference with Minister of Interior Security, Christie Nova earlier this month.

New Immigration and Customs Application from June 1 to June 10, analyzed by Los Angeles TimesIt shows that 69 percent of people detained in the LA area have never been convicted of a crime.

A search of criminal files in Los Angeles and the California Orops, Lopez and Morales prison system did not return results. Oropeza and Lopez said they were caught at the border and deported years ago.

***

From the bus stop on Venice Boulevard Oropza was taken to a parking lot in Santa Anna, where agents put him in chains. There were chains on the wrists, ankles and around your waist. They then loaded him on another vehicle and took him to a place, which he described as a type of prison. There were no beds, he said, and everyone was sleeping on the floor. Lopez and Morales were also there.

At 5 o’clock the next day, all three were taken to an airport near the Mojave Desert, where they boarded a plane to Texas with about 35 other men from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Over the next few days, they were detained in an ice tent camp in El Passo. Lopez said he was given a small bottle of water, potato chips and apple. The cells are maintained unpleasantly cold, he said, and the detainees only receive Mylar’s blankets. When he wanted to call the phone, he was told that he would have to share detailed information about the person he is calling – their name, address, place of work. He decided against it.

He said the agents told him that if he tried to talk to a lawyer, he would remain there, under the same conditions, for eight months to a year. On Wednesday, just two days after he arrived at El Paso, he agreed to sign the documents for voluntary deportation.

“How they treat you there, I prefer to leave,” he said.

Oropeza signed the forms for voluntary removal that day. Thirty minutes later he was allowed to call.

“I have a family, I have to provide them,” he said. “I didn’t want to get there.”

The next day, Lopez, Oropeza and Morales were run across the border to Juarez, they said, along with dozens of other men from their cells who agreed to sign the forms. There, in a shelter created by the Mexican government, they were able to bathe, eat hot food and call their families.

They were also given 2500 pesos – the equivalent of about $ 130 – to make a way to somewhere else.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.