Ahisary moved from her home in Mexico in 1993 to South Central Los Angeles, where she worked multiple jobs and raised three children. In all her years in LA as an undocumented migrant, she has never experienced anything like the fear of the past few weeks.
Masked officers from the country’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) have descended on the city, rounding up undocumented migrants like her in parks, workplaces, retail store parking lots and courthouses.
“People are afraid that it’s not safe to go out,” Ahisary, who asked that her name be changed for her safety, said through an interpreter. “It’s unfortunate because people have to go to work. If they don’t go to work, how are they going to pay their bills?”
When outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants during his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But this has widened to include anyone without legal status, especially in large Democrat-run cities.
ICE is tasked with turning Trump’s mass deportation vision into reality, and the agency’s aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout the country’s immigrant communities.
The “fear factor is [an] extremely important part of the overall mass deportation initiative”, said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, an ICE precursor.
In order to meet demands from the administration to rapidly increase the number of deportations, ICE officers have fanned out across the country, arresting suspects outside their homes, on the street and during their commutes.
The agency is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with criminal convictions each week, according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank. The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1,300 per cent from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis.
Data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal enforcement activities, shows that of the 56,397 people held by the agency by June 15, 71.7 per cent had no criminal record.
“I think the shift is that the administration is realising that if you continue to focus on the criminal population [they’re] never going to get to those [deportation] numbers that [they’re] looking for,” said John Sandweg, an acting director of ICE during Barack Obama’s administration.
“Generally the criminal population is a little harder to find [and] it takes some more work before you can make an arrest.”
The agency’s efforts to round up undocumented migrants have been accompanied by a turbocharged PR campaign. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem has posted videos of herself taking part in raids wearing an ICE vest and even brandishing an assault rifle, and regularly urges undocumented migrants to “self deport”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s media briefings are often held against a background of TV screens showing “arrested” posters.
The messaging and the show of force send a clear message: leave before we come and get you.
“Everyone recognises that it would be extremely difficult to try to identify and arrest and then remove millions of people,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think-tank. “It’s more efficient and it’s more humane to send the message that people should go home on their own.”
ICE was established in 2003 as part of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terror attacks. It encompasses two law enforcement directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
ERO is charged with enforcing US immigration laws and has 6,100 deportation officers. HSI has about 6,500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not usually participate in domestic immigration operations.
However, with deportations becoming a top domestic priority, HSI agents — along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — have been put on immigration enforcement duties, but do not always agree with the shift in priorities.
“HSI special agents, we wanted no part of” immigration enforcement, said John Tobon, a former HSI assistant director. Many “still want no part of it”, he added.
In LA, Trump sent in Marines and National Guard to support the migrant roundups — prompting the ire of Governor Gavin Newsom and local officials. They have also been deployed to other states.
The Trump administration “has taken a whole-of-government approach” to mass deportations, so “we are seeing a far greater range of effort and support for ICE” from other parts of the federal apparatus, said Meissner.
The deportation drive has been boosted by Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, which allocates about $170bn for immigration enforcement and border security, including $45bn to increase ICE’s detention capacity and about $30bn to hire 10,000 new ICE personnel.
Almost $34bn will go to immigration and border enforcement agencies — two-thirds of all federal law enforcement spending, according to Bier’s analysis. The FBI, by comparison, will get $4.2bn
Last month, Trump ordered ICE to step up its arrests in Democratic strongholds, including LA, Chicago and New York, claiming without evidence that Democrats in the largest cities want undocumented immigrants to vote illegally for them.
The expanded arrest campaign sparked protests in LA that grew, with ICE’s role becoming a national flashpoint. The agency’s growing empowerment has also fuelled disquiet as Democratic politicians, including Senator Alex Padilla and former New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander, were handcuffed and detained when intervening to try and prevent arrests of undocumented migrants.
“When you start removing people with strong ties to the community, that always evokes a significant emotion in people,” said John Torres, a former ICE acting director.
For Ahisary, the administration’s push to increase deportations has left her feeling “hopeless and helpless” about her fellow immigrants who have been caught up in the raids.
“These people are not criminals — they’re coming here to work and provide for their families,” she said. “It makes no sense. They all pay taxes.”
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