Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained several people in the Los Angeles area on Independence Day.
The agency has detained more than 1,600 people in the region in recent months, according to the Los Angeles Times. Among those arrested on the Fourth of July were two car wash workers who had been employed there for decades and a beloved food vendor who runs a birria stand, the outlet reports.
A man whose father was detained, who asked to remain anonymous, told NBC 4 LA that he was unsure what prompted the raids.
“He’s not a criminal,” he said. “He wasn’t doing anything he wasn’t supposed to. He came in to work on the Fourth of July.”
West Hollywood officials were also critical.
“On a day meant to honor the ideals of liberty, democracy, and freedom from oppression, we instead confront a deeply troubling reminder of federal overreach. Independence Day should be a time for reflection and reverence, not fear and persecution,’’ they said in a statement on the city website.
Anti-ICE protests also continued on the holiday. The Los Angeles Police Department arrested five people in connection with downtown demonstrations, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Fans of the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team walked out of the stadium on Friday in protest against the owners’ lack of public support for immigrants. Fans also held up a banner that read: “Fight Ignorance, Not Immigrants.”
Earlier in the week, ICE raided three Los Angeles-area Home Depots and arrested a total of 37 people, KTLA reports.
President Donald Trump also signed his sweeping spending and tax bill into law on Independence Day while attending a picnic for military families. That bill will provide ICE with roughly $45 billion over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants.
This comes as part of Trump’s promise to carry out the “largest deportation program in American history.”
The new funds make ICE the “single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council told Democracy Now!.
“We’re talking nearly 20 years’ worth of detention funding to be spent only in a four-year period, and an increase to ICE’s enforcement budget beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, allowing the agency to expand mass deportations over the next four years to every community nationwide,” he said.
Trump has also praised a new ICE detention center in Florida, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” The president visited the site on Tuesday, saying it will soon house “some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”
A YouGov poll found that almost half of Americans disapprove of the new detention center.
