The New Yorker:

Over the weekend, Donald Trump’s deportation agenda met its fiercest resistance yet as federal officials conducted worksite raids and clashed with residents.

By E. Tammy Kim

On Friday and Saturday, federal officers descended on streets and workplaces across Los Angeles County to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. There was a large raid at Ambiance Apparel, in the fashion district, and a showdown, thick with tear gas and flash-bang grenades, between protesters and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Paramount, in southeast L.A. Some immigrants who appeared for check-in appointments at the federal courthouse in Little Tokyo were taken to the basement, then removed, by van, to unknown locations. Homeland Security had recently confirmed that a nine-year-old elementary-school student in Torrance, who’d been detained after a hearing in late May and relocated to a prison in rural Texas, would now be deported. These were not the first immigration-enforcement actions taken by President Trump, who has struggled to fulfill his campaign promise to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” But these tactics were, as Oscar Zarate, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, told me, “lawless, just not normal.” Lawyers were being denied access to detainees; workers were being picked up on the basis of their racial appearance, he said. “There are rules of engagement that are not being followed. It’s incredibly dangerous, not just for immigrants but for citizens.”

Los Angeles is, of course, an immigrant town. A third of the county’s residents were born outside the U.S., and more than half speak a language other than English at home. L.A. is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state: local authorities are not permitted to coöperate with federal immigration enforcers. And so, as word of the recent detentions—described to me by immigrant advocates as “kidnappings” or “abductions” or “disappearances”—spread through text messages and social media, thousands of people showed up to confront an influx of federal law-enforcement personnel from various agencies. Protesters marched and chanted and put their bodies in the way of vehicles and arresting officers; some lit trash on fire, threw rocks, and sprayed graffiti (“Fuck ICE”; “Can’t Stop da Raza!”). Officers responded with drones, batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. At Ambiance Apparel, they arrested David Huerta, the president of the California branch of the Service Employees International Union. They also blocked a delegation of elected officials and immigration advocates from seeing detainees at the courthouse, a previously routine form of oversight.

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