Underlying the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles are some basic misunderstandings about immigration law, such as who can be arrested and where and when it can happen.
The anger is mirrored in growing clashes across the country as ire at ICE’s aggressive tactics under President Trump, such as masked officers arresting foreign students on the streets or smashing car windows to reach targets who aren’t cooperating, has sparked a massive backlash.
“ICE get the f—- out of LA,” Rep. Norma Torres, California Democrat, said in a video posted to social media this weekend.
As Mr. Trump pushes for more deportations, flare-ups between ICE and communities are becoming more common.
ICE says it has seen a 400% spike in assaults on its personnel as people, angry over arrests, lash out with words, fists, rocks and — in Los Angeles — commercial-grade fireworks aimed at authorities.
Experts say much of what they argue is misguided at best and, in some cases, dangerously wrong.
“That’s part of the problem with all these NGOs that are putting out these ‘know your rights’ things, is they’re being extrapolated to all these other situations that don’t apply,” said Rosemary Jenks, a lawyer and policy director at the Immigration Accountability Project.
One example is viral videos showing officers attempting to make an immigration arrest of someone in a vehicle. The occupants refuse, and the officers smash through the window to extract their target.
They have been compared to Nazi tactics and labeled “kidnappings.”
However, the law is on the side of ICE, Ms. Jenks said.
“You can refuse to answer questions. You have an absolute right to remain silent. But that does not mean you have a right not to be arrested and pulled out of your car,” she said.
An ICE employee said there are several exceptions to warrantless search restrictions regarding vehicles, including the ability to note any evidence in plain view. For ICE, the person is the evidence, so if there’s a positive ID on the target, ICE can lawfully make the arrest.
Some protesters in Los Angeles expressed dismay that ICE was able to make arrests despite the city’s resistance.
“It’s a sanctuary city,” said one protester, standing near a police blockade.
The ICE official said those people don’t understand the situation. Although sanctuaries refuse to cooperate with federal enforcement, they cannot actively thwart it. Federal agents and officers can enforce national laws anywhere.
“As a federal agent, I can arrest anyone I have probable cause to believe in public where the general public can be,” the ICE employee said.
The employee said protesters’ objections are grounded less in the law and more in the shock of going from the Biden administration to the Trump administration.
“The fact is, we are doing no different than any other country does when they deport their illegally present. We just had four years of absent-minded policy and lack of enforcement, which fuels this,” that source said.
ICE officers’ use of masks has proved to be a particular flash point.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu called ICE a “secret police” and compared officers to members of a neo-Nazi group that also wears masks.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seemed to say ICE officers who were involved in confrontations with members of Congress would get unmasked.
“Every single ICE agent who’s engaged in this aggressive overreach and are trying to hide their identities from the American people, will be unsuccessful in doing that,” he said. “Every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will, of course, be identified.”
Ms. Jenks, though, said ICE officers and agents have plenty of reason to mask up.
“They’re being doxxed repeatedly by all these lefty loonies who are then threatening their family members,” she said, adding that it could be even worse. “There’s a bunch of cartels out there who would love to kill ICE officers and their families. Publishing information about who they are, where whey live and who their families are is extremely dangerous.”
To be sure, ICE is expanding the boundaries of enforcement.
That includes arresting the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who tried to gain entry into an ICE detention facility in his city.
The agency has also dismissed Biden-era restrictions on where and when illegal immigrants can be arrested, leaving it to officers and agents to judge what’s best for safety.
The Department of Homeland Security has freed officers to make arrests of anyone in the country illegally, undercutting a Biden-era policy by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that had specifically ordered officers not to attempt to deport someone merely for being in the country illegally.
Several federal judges have ruled that some of ICE’s arrests and deportations went too far.
A judge in Maryland said the March arrest of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man whose deportation sparked a clash between Mr. Trump and the courts, was “unlawful.”
In Massachusetts, a federal judge ruled that eight major felon illegal immigrants the U.S. tried to deport to South Sudan last month didn’t receive due process and deserved new hearings. That same judge also spurred the Trump administration to return a Guatemalan man mistakenly sent to Mexico.
In Washington, Judge James Boasberg last week compared the arrests of hundreds of Venezuelans who the government says are part of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” saying ICE gave them the runaround when they tried to find out why they were being booted out so quickly.
Many of the complaints about ICE focus less on legality and more on Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric, which promised mass deportations and a heavy focus on those with criminal records.
“How do you go from violent criminals to people who are at a workplace?” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told Brian Tyler Cohen, a YouTube personality.
The number of people ICE is arresting without criminal records has increased fourfold since January, according to the agency’s latest data, but more than 75% of the people ICE had arrested and were detaining at the start of this month had either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.
