Immigration Raids In Los Angeles: Trump Raids By ICE In LA And Mass Deportation

Immigration raids were made Thursday in Los Angeles and in several other major cities throughout the United States by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency – or ICE – to apprehend hundreds of illegal immigrants so they could be processed for deportation. As reported by ABC7 News, the immediate result of these immigration raids in LA was chaos, as mass protests blocked roads.

According to CNN, fear gripped Los Angeles Hispanics after these immigration raids, with many concerned these were the long expected Donald Trump operations intended to sweep up all illegals across the country. Some are wondering whether these immigration raids are the first step in the mass deportation of illegal immigrants in the United States Trump has promised.

Immigration Raids and Official Policy

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump guaranteed his supporters immigration laws in the United States would be enforced through more immigration raids – despite the fact that Barack Obama was actually responsible for the deportation of more illegal immigrants through ICE than any other president.

ICE officials denied there was any direct connection between the immigration raids being carried out in Los Angeles – and elsewhere across the United States – and the political promises made by Donald Trump regarding immigration policy.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers conduct enforcement actions every day around the country and here in Southern California as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to uphold public safety and border security. Our operations are targeted and lead driven, prioritizing individuals who pose a risk to our communities.”

These officials also suggested that those being swept up by these immigration raids were dangerous criminals whose presence on the street posed a hazard to American citizens. This number supposedly included the following

“… known street gang members, child sex offenders, and deportable foreign nationals with significant drug trafficking convictions. To that end, ICE’s routine immigration enforcement actions are ongoing and we make arrests every day.”

Illegal Immigration Raids Expansion

Of course, a skeptic might suggest that if ICE were in the process of implementing the first stages of Donald Trump’s long-term mass deportation policies, they would naturally start their immigration raids with people the average American would have no objection to them removing.

But by easing their way into mass deportations through these carefully targeted immigration raids, it might make it easier in the future for ICE to ramp up the raids over time to include first thousands – and then millions – more.

After all, despite Donald Trump’s insinuation that all undocumented Mexicans living in the United States are gang members, drug dealers and rapists, the only crime the vast majority of illegals caught in immigration raids have committed is living here without the necessary permission.

So it may be that by carrying out these smaller, slightly less objectionable immigration raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the Donald Trump administration is laying the groundwork for other raids on a much more massive scale that tie into his long-term plan for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

But as Keith Olbermann has pointed out, the reality of the logistics involved in such a mass deportation of 3 million to 11 million undocumented individuals living in the United States suggest that raids gathering up all of these illegals in immigration raids will be the easy part.

Quickly deporting the people swept up in immigration raids in such numbers may prove to be impossible, which would mean that millions taken in raids would instead be kept in large, enclosed warehousing facilities across the United States. As Olbermann notes, it would be difficult to describe these facilities as anything except “camps.”

[Featured Image by Charles Reed/AP Images]