Los Angeles police officers have begun working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement once again despite warnings from the city’s mayor that ICE is a disruptive force threatening the community.
For the first time since early 2020, Los Angeles County authorities in May began handing over jail inmates to ICE, transferring eight prisoners said to be illegal residents to federal agents that month, and a dozen more in June.
Los Angeles is a sanctuary city, generally preventing local authorities from assisting ICE with carrying out immigration enforcement efforts through actions such as detaining or deporting illegal immigrants.
However, the Trump administration is using a loophole to resume some level of cooperation between the Los Angeles police and ICE, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Trump administration obtained federal judicial warrants to secure the transfer of prisoners from local jails to ICE custody, capitalizing on a provision marking an exception to sanctuary policies that allows city authorities to cooperate with the government on cases that involve criminal offenses.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the recent transfers involved federal warrants for prisoners who reentered the country illegally after having been previously deported, a federal crime that can carry a multiyear prison sentence, per the outlet.
The sheriff’s cooperation with federal agents comes despite Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s public animosity toward ICE, which she has accused of disrupting immigrant communities through raids targeting illegal immigrants for deportation, including many working in industries heavily reliant on migrant labor.
“Maybe we are part of a national experiment to determine how far the federal government can go in reaching in and taking over power from a governor, power from a local jurisdiction, and, frankly, leaving our city and our citizens, our residents, in fear,” Bass said in June.
The following month, Bass made an in-person appearance at MacArthur Park, a local immigrant hub, to stop ICE from carrying out a raid in the area. The tense standoff ended without any arrests made by agents, who were accompanied by National Guard troops and military vehicles.
“Minutes before, there were more than 20 kids playing—then, the MILITARY comes through,” Bass said following the encounter. “The SECOND I heard about this, I went to the park to speak to the person in charge to tell them it needed to end NOW. Absolutely outrageous.”
Anger over the Trump administration’s deportation effort was highlighted during anti-ICE protests in June, some of which turned into riots where demonstrators attacked law enforcement officials.
Amid the unrest, federal officials, “border czar” Tom Homan among them, have warned that ICE agents are at risk of murder, as assaults on officers surge.
Cudahy Vice Mayor Cynthia Gonzalez, a southern California city councilwoman, is among those who have been criticized for stirring tensions due to a video she recently posted on social media that appeared to call on gang members to “help out and organize” resistance efforts against ICE. She apologized after posting the video, which referenced Florencia 13 and 18th Street, two violent street gangs in Los Angeles with a history of murdering police officers.
Immigrant advocates in California have accused ICE of racial profiling to carry out arrests, mounting a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, alleging “individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.”
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ACLU attorney Mohammad Tajsar said Brian Gavidia, one of the U.S. citizens detained during a disputed ICE operation in the Golden State, was “physically assaulted … for no other reason than he was Latino and working at a tow yard in a predominantly Latin American neighborhood.”
A federal judge ruled last Friday that ICE officials cannot rely on profiling factors, such as race, ethnicity, or speaking Spanish, to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop. The decision was hailed by Bass as a major victory, and by the DHS as a “ridiculous” stunt.