Clad head to toe in combat gear, including body armour, helmets and face masks, and backed by armoured personnel carriers, a helicopter, 90 National Guard soldiers and a line of horsemen, dozens of heavily armed federal immigration agents descended on Los Angeles last week in an intimidating show of force.
The military cavalcade advanced menacingly through the city’s MacArthur Park – dubbed the ‘Ellis Island of the West Coast’ after New York’s historic migrant processing centre – on Monday, in a so-called ‘immigration enforcement operation’ codenamed Operation Excalibur.
US border tsar Tom Homan said federal agents from Immigration And Customs Enforcement, better known as ‘ICE’, targeted the park because it is a hotbed of human-trafficking activity and a place migrants go when they’re trying to obtain fake Green Cards or social security numbers.
Sadly, the drug dealers, criminal gangs and addicts – many in the US illegally – who often hang around the park had known for days that the feds were coming and were nowhere to be seen.
Only some children playing football at a summer camp were hurriedly rushed indoors as the force marched across their pitch.
Homan said no arrests resulted from the operation, because plans were leaked in advance: indeed, the area had been plastered for days with flyers warning about it.
Local Democrat leaders were furious at the intrusion, saying the operation was a political stunt intended to ‘spread fear’.
Los Angeles police fire tear gas at activists protesting against immigration raids in the city last month
‘What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,’ said Left-wing LA mayor Karen Bass, who as a US Congress member regularly visited conflict zones. ‘It’s the way a city looks before a coup.’
That powerful observation will resonate with Donald Trump critics who increasingly accuse the President of effectively creating his own personal army out of ICE. An army that, say opponents, is free to behave as it likes and which is flouting the US constitution.
Estimated to be home to 900,000 undocumented immigrants, LA has so far been the focus of the ICE crackdown. In June the city was racked by days of violent clashes as Trump ordered in thousands of US Marines and National Guardsmen to contend with anti-deportation protests.
But ICE is continuing to make tens of thousands of arrests across the US, its rifle-toting agents suddenly descending on a neighbourhood, bursting out of unmarked cars in plain clothes bearing no identifiable police insignia, and snatching migrants off the street, in their homes and workplaces.
They are then held in what civil rights campaigners call ‘dungeon-like’ facilities.
Witnesses say arrests are sometimes so aggressive that they look like kidnappings, and there have been reports of criminals impersonating ICE agents.
Ninety National Guard soldiers in combat gear, backed by a line of horsemen (pictured) and dozens of heavily armed federal immigration agents, descended on MacArthur Park in LA last week in an intimidating show of force
But Trump administration officials insist they need to get tough against what the President calls an invasion of illegal aliens.
However, for a nation that prides itself on existing under ‘the rule of law, not the rule of kings’, it is noteworthy that due process has been suspended for ICE’s activities. It is the only law-enforcement agency that can detain people without charge or even a hearing, then deport them.
ICE did this in March, when it sent several plane-loads of alleged gang members back to Central America.
Family members insist innocent people have been mixed up in such raids. Some suspects have allegedly been arrested simply for having a suspicious-looking tattoo.
Others have reportedly been targeted for speaking out against Trump’s foreign policy – a clear breach of the US constitution’s protection of free speech.
As Mayor Bass complained, it’s all disconcertingly ‘un-American’ but, as Trump repeatedly makes clear, the terror that ICE is spreading across the country is entirely intentional: it sends a sharp and effective deterrent message to those considering trying to enter the US illegally.
The military cavalcade advanced menacingly through the city’s MacArthur Park last week, in a so-called ‘immigration enforcement operation’ codenamed Operation Excalibur
Now ICE is about to get vastly more powerful after Trump’s new budget dramatically increased spending on the agency.
Around £125 billion has been set aside for immigration enforcement and border security, of which £55 billion will go to ICE over the next four years.
This lifts the agency’s annual budget to an estimated £28 billion – higher than the defence spending of most countries. Not for nothing have some spoken of the agency as the ‘shock troops’ and even his ‘personal Gestapo’ of this presidency.
Much of that money will go on expanding ICE’s network of about 100 detention centres where migrants – sometimes entire families – are held while officials arrange their deportation. The White House envisages a system that can accommodate 116,000 deportees at a time and process one million people per year – an industrial quantity in a country estimated to have at least 12 million undocumented migrants.
In addition, the Department of Homeland Security, which controls ICE, intends to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, bringing the total to 30,000.
That will make it by far the biggest law-enforcement agency in the US, dwarfing even the FBI.
A protester in Los Angeles makes clears her opposition to Operation Excalibur
Homan, a former ICE boss, calls the new investment a game-changer. He boasts: ‘This funding is going to give us thousands more beds, which means we arrest thousands more people.’
Those beds include 3,000 placed inside cages in a remote, temporary ICE camp in the Florida Everglades, which has been dubbed Alligator Alcatraz because the surrounding wilderness is teeming with deadly reptiles, also including pythons.
Trump visited recently and chuckled: ‘We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.’
Vice President JD Vance said that when it came to government spending, everything else paled beside the importance of the ICE money.
There is a political imperative here: polling shows that along with the economy, immigration mattered more to US voters – especially Trump supporters – than any other issue at last year’s election.
Trump was elected on bold promises to deport illegal immigrants. And drastically reducing the flow of migrants over the Mexican border – which soared to record numbers during Joe Biden’s administration – has been one of the biggest successes of his presidency.
A recent YouGov poll shows many Americans still support Trump’s immigration policy – 45 per cent of all voters and 87 per cent of Republicans.
Having said that, it appears many Americans chiefly wanted to see drug dealers, gang members and violent criminals – the illegal migrants Trump has called animals and the ‘worst of the worst’ – expelled, not the millions of migrants who wash their cars for them, pack their groceries and pick the fruit they buy.
However, spurred by immigration zealots like his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump has ordered ICE to arrest 3,000 undocumented migrants per day.
Experts scoff that such a target is almost impossible (a month ago, ICE was managing only about a third of that figure) but it has necessitated ICE targeting whoever it can to make arrests.
Agents no longer have to produce target lists of suspects: they now simply raid places where they think illegals might be. That has meant sweeping up street taco sellers, construction workers, car-wash workers and migrants who gather in the car parks of DIY stores to find day labour.
ICE’s supporters say it hasn’t helped that Democrat-controlled states and cities, such as New York and California, continue to stop the agency from accessing jails – the easiest places to pick up undocumented migrants who have committed crimes. As a result, a majority of those who’ve been detained by ICE don’t have criminal records.
But the desperation to keep up the arrest numbers has led to ICE officers turning up at courts to arrest migrants coming for hearings on their asylum application.
Meanwhile, ICE’s critics have been incensed by what they see as its growing lack of accountability – vital, of course, to any leader’s personal army.
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court last month quashed the ability of lower court judges to block Trump’s initiatives. ICE’s in-house watchdog has been scrapped and it has refused to obey a law allowing members of Congress to visit its detention centres at will.
Out on the streets, making individual ICE agents answerable for their behaviour is an immense challenge when their faces are hidden behind masks, while they carry no visible ID.
The Rev Tania Lopez said an ICE agent pointed a gun at her after she remonstrated with a group of them who came on to the grounds of her LA church to make an arrest.
‘When we said we don’t want this on our property, this man just shouted, “The whole country is our property!” ’ she claimed.
US border tsar Tom Homan said federal agents from Immigration And Customs Enforcement, better known as ‘ICE’, targeted the park because it is a hotbed of human-trafficking activity and a place migrants go when they’re trying to obtain fake Green Cards or social security numbers
ICE bosses and law enforcement unions counter that masking protects agents, who have sometimes been assaulted and whose faces have been posted on social media.
ICE’s recruitment and vetting standards are already lower than for other law enforcement agencies. Morale is so low that many agents may leave. Critics fear
the new hiring drive will make it more likely that extremists or MAGA (Make American Great Again) fanatics will be able to join – and that when Trump wants any ‘dirty work’ done, they will be happy to oblige.
Left-wing commentators warn that Americans had better get used to ICE becoming an intrusive presence in everyday life, and forecast it will damage the US economy: it’s estimated that up to one in ten workers in California alone is an illegal migrant.
‘The impact will be utterly unfathomable,’ says Daniel Costa of the Economic Policy Institute think-tank. ‘We’re heading straight into becoming a surveillance state and a police state. You’re going to see ICE agents at schools, parks, hospitals, car washes, grocery stores – just about everywhere that immigrants work.’
The MAGA world will no doubt counter that only illegal migrants will need to worry.
David Biers, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian think-tank, told The Mail on Sunday it was ‘undisputable’ that ICE was already behaving like Trump’s personal army and being used to clamp down on those expressing opinions he dislikes.
Biers cited the case of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, a former Fulbright scholar who ICE arrested without charge in March after her visa was revoked for writing a pro-Palestinian article in a student newspaper.
He added that Trump had also made clear he was ‘going after the Democrat cities’ with ICE, saying: ‘It’s political, it’s a spectacle and they want to create fear in the political opposition.’
