The Trump Administration’s Racial Dragnet: Immigration Enforcement in Los Angeles

Abstract :

President Trump’s mass deportation campaign has targeted Los Angeles and its large Latina/o populations. Comprising roughly half of the city’s population, Latina/os are being stopped, questioned, and rounded up by roving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols. A legal challenge claims that the patrols are engaging in unlawful racial profiling on a mass scale. 

For years, critics have roundly condemned racial profiling, also known as Driving While Black or Brown, by police. That, however, is not the case when it comes to immigration enforcement. In 1975, the Supreme Court held that immigration enforcement officers can rely on race as one factor in an immigration stop but also found that race could not be the exclusive factor for the stop. That decision makes the ultimate outcome of the Los Angeles litigation difficult to predict. Nonetheless, the litigation responds to what many Latina/os believe is the Trump administration’s undue, if not exclusive, reliance on race in targeting people for questioning about their immigration status.

Because many U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants are Latina/o, the demographics of contemporary Los Angeles, which is roughly half Latina/o, make it problematic to rely on Latina/o appearance as a legitimate factor to consider in deciding to question a person about her immigration status. Citizens and lawful immigrants have been caught up in the city-wide dragnet and suffered racial indignities as well as arrests and detention. As demonstrated in past episodes, race-based immigration enforcement will undermine the Latina/o community’s sense of belonging in the nation for generations.