For days, whispers had been going around that the federal government was going to do a huge immigration enforcement sweep in Los Angeles County on Sunday. This put officials on high alert and made many immigrant communities feel scared and uneasy.
But by the middle of the afternoon, it looked like the operation, if it had even happened, wasn’t nearly as broad as many people had thought.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wouldn’t say if there had been any special operations or give out the number of arrests for the day. People from the FBI, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and the Los Angeles Police Department either told people to ask ICE, didn’t know anything, or said they weren’t involved in federal immigration activities.
Two people who know about the situation say that officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, which is run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, were told to get ready for up to 120 new bookings because of expected immigration raids this weekend. Officials said that the downtown center only has staff on hand during the week to take in new prisoners. In order to handle weekend intakes, staff had to be called in on their days off.
The staff did what they were told, but by midafternoon, one of the sources said, immigration officials had only dropped off a dozen people to be processed.
“We’ve heard they’re not getting the numbers they want,” the source said, adding that the numbers could go up if later in the evening, inmates from San Bernardino County were brought in. Both people asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t allowed to talk about the matter in public.
A federal prison spokesman told me by email that the agency is helping ICE by housing some inmates, but he wouldn’t say anything about plans to house migrants in the Los Angeles detention center. He said that the office would not say anything about “the legal status of a person” or “the legal status of people assigned to any particular facility,” so he did not give any numbers or locations.
Videos on social media showed police officers in vests and unidentified cars showing up at homes all over Los Angeles County, from Alhambra to Highland Park.
On the other hand, an immigration defense group said on Facebook early Sunday morning that it had followed ICE agents from a holding area in the Alhambra Target parking lot to a home. There were parts of their video that showed police officers in bulletproof vests standing outside of a stucco apartment building with their faces hidden.
Nearby residents said that two dark cars pulled up around the low-slung two-story apartment building soon after dawn.
FBI agents yelled, “Open the door!” and found 56-year-old Los Angeles traffic cop Felipe Espinoza doing planks and getting ready for work behind the door of the house.
There were more than six spies outside of his house. With his hands on the screen, he thought of all the cop shows he had seen. They asked him over and over for his father-in-law, whose car was registered to the house.
“I haven’t seen him in a while,” he said. At the same time, his wife and 7-year-old son came to the door and told the police they couldn’t come in without a search.
Espinoza said that he finally went outside to talk to them, and that they showed him a three-page paper that they said was a warrant. But they only showed him the first page.
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