A harrowing time at the hands of ICE unites the LA crowd

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

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A congressional hearing Monday in Los Angeles on the Trump administration’s immigration actions offered a searing look at a program that is equal parts stupid and cruel.

One witness after another appeared before the House Oversight and Reforms Committee and described their experiences at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which descended on Los Angeles in June, sparking outrage with a theatrical assault on the city’s immigrant communities.

A man who has lived in Los Angeles for 23 years and is married with four children dropped his younger children off at school on June 6 and headed to work, where ICE agents detained him. He ended up at an ICE facility in Adelanto, struggling with his health, waiting days to see a nurse or doctor. He was eventually released and is at home in Los Angeles.

A young woman, who did not attend the hearing but was represented by a friend, got up early one morning to sell tamales in front of a local school. ICE agents threw her to the ground, injuring her so badly she had to be hospitalized. She is an American citizen and was released, but is now so scared of ICE that she refuses to leave her home. She has been inside for 158 days.

Another man, detained on June 10 by masked men who did not have identification or a warrant for his arrest, remained detained by ICE until September 16, when he was released on bail. He described his 98 days of detention: rotten food, orders not to be silent when visiting officials, an atmosphere of danger.

His voice broke as he admitted that he had been raped. The experience, he said, “reminded me of the violence I experienced in my country, Honduras.”

Their stories were poignant, piercing through any glossy stereotypes about immigrants, documented or undocumented. These were not dangerous criminals who needed to be removed to protect this country. They are working men and women working to support their families and loved ones.

President Donald Trump promised to go after the “worst of the worst,” but his agents ended up harassing and ravaging these decent people. And their detentions were of no use to anyone.

There are also costs to others around them. Witnesses from local organizations testified that school attendance is down, church pews are half-empty, summer youth programs are struggling to stay afloat and businesses are suffering from a lack of employees and customers.

Some people are afraid to come out because they don’t have proper documentation. Others are afraid because they simply “look illegal.”

This was clearly the case with Andrea Velez. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Velez was born in the United States and is therefore an American citizen.

On June 2, her mother dropped her off at work in the fashion district. But before Velez could get inside, she was rushed by ICE agents who took her into custody. She didn’t carry any proof of American citizenship—few people do—and ICE wasn’t interested in her driver’s license. She was handcuffed and taken into custody.

Denied food, she was told she could only have water if she bought a glass. She was rebuffed in her requests to contact family or a lawyer. Veles was held for two days, until June 4.

To be clear, Velez has committed no crime and is a natural born American citizen. Her only transgressions were coming to work and being Latina.

She asked for the names of the officers who arrested her, but was also denied. “I was told I didn’t need to know their names,” she said in response to questions from members of Congress who attended the hearing.

One member questioned her further, wondering if she had done anything to warrant such treatment. Velez said she was not carrying any weapons and did not assault or threaten an officer. She is 4 feet, 11 inches tall.

The attitude described by witnesses at the hearing should shock the conscience, but some consciences seem too hardened to be moved.

As Mayor Karen Bass and Representative Robert Garcia, who chaired the session, noted, the cruelty of these policies isn’t a flaw — it’s the point.

“It was over the top from Day 1,” Bass told me after the hearing, “the way they dramatized it by stopping on the street and jumping guns on a woman selling fruit. There’s no way in the world you can tell me they thought she was a criminal. . . . It was designed to terrorize. She had to go in and do maximum damage.”

These senseless attacks on the fabric of life in Los Angeles have at least one positive effect: In a city that has sometimes seen black and brown residents turn on each other, the episode was unifying, something many speakers noted, and that was reinforced by the proceedings themselves: Garcia, a native of Peru and a naturalized American citizen, sat next to Bass, the first black woman to serve as mayor of Los Angeles.

Support for immigrants came from a wide range of speakers: from Congresswoman Maxine Waters to immigrant groups, from union leaders to prominent Japanese Americans. including some who drew parallels to the 1942 internment carried out under the same legal authority Trump is now using for his anti-immigrant actions.

Monday’s hearing was packed and speakers were often interrupted by cheers and applause. As witnesses finished their sometimes harrowing stories, others stepped forward to hug and comfort them. The session, convened to gather evidence, turned into an opportunity to demonstrate solidarity.

One of the loudest expressions of support of the day came for Waters, when she used her time to denounce Trump, whom she called a “mean, no-good, dirty president.” The audience – white, black, Asian, Hispanic, old and young – cheered wildly for it. Give him credit: Trump brought Los Angeles together.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.