They called them “the worst and worst.” For over a month and a half, the Trump administration has been posting barrages of undocumented mugshots of immigrants with long rap sheets.
Authorities are shedding the spotlight on Cuong Chanh Phan, a 49-year-old Vietnamese man who was convicted of second-degree murder in his role in killing two teens at a high school graduation party.
They share blurred photos on Instagram of numerous offenders of convicted offenders, including Rolando Venesion Enriquez, a 55-year-old Filipino man convicted of sexual penetration with foreign bodies involving force intended to commit a felony in 1996 and assault. Eswin Uriel Castro was convicted in 2002 of child abuse and in 2021 of fatal weapon assault.
However, the immigrants displayed by the Department of Homeland Security in X’s posts and news releases do not represent the majority of the immigrants who swept Los Angeles.
Seven of the 10 immigrants arrests in June were not criminally convicted, as the number of immigrant arrests in the LA area quadrupled from 540 in April to 2,185 in June. This is the trend that immigrant advocates say is targeting “heinous, illegal criminals” who represent threats to public safety.
According to an analysis of ice data from the Los Angeles Times Deptation Data Project, the percentage of uncriminal immigrants arrested in LA and seven surrounding counties skyrocketed from 35% in April to 46% in May and 69% from June 1 to June 26th.
Austin Cocher, a geographer and assistant research professor at Syracuse University who specializes in immigration enforcement, said the Trump administration is not entirely honest about the criminal status of those arrested.
He said officials can justify enforcement policies that have proven to be unpopular as they follow a strategy that focuses on the minority of violently convicted offenders.
“I think they know that if they’re honest with the American people, they cook our food, wash our food in the kitchen, and take care of the people in nursing homes, people who live in parts of the community.
In Los Angeles, the attack wiped out clothing worker Jose Ortiz. Jose Ortiz was plagued by the June 6th attack after working in an inspiring apparel clothing warehouse in downtown Los Angeles for 18 years. Car wash worker Jesus Cruz, a 52-year-old father, was taken from Westchester Hand Wash, just before his daughter’s graduation on June 8th. and Emma de Pas, the latest widow and Tamale vendor of Guatemala who was arrested June 19th outside Hollywood’s Home Depot.
Such arrests could have influenced the public’s perception of the attack. Several polls support Trump’s immigration agenda slips as masked federal agents plunge more and more undocumented immigrants from the workplace and the streets.
According to ICE data, approximately 31% of migrants arrested across the LA area from June 1 to June 26 were criminally convicted, 11% filed criminal charges, 58% were classified as “other immigrant violators,” and ICE defines them as “known convictions or pending individuals in ICE records at the time of enforcement action.”
The LA area surge in non-criminal arrests was more dramatic than the US as a whole. The arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions have risen nationwide from 57% in April to 69% in June.
The federal attack here is becoming more ferociously contested in Southern California, particularly in LA County, where more than two million residents live with undocumented or undocumented families.
“The central element of their message is that this is about public safety and the people they are arresting are a threat to their community,” said David Bier, director of immigration research at Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “But it’s hard to argue that this is about public safety when you’re out and just arresting people who work in your life.”
Trump never said he would arrest only criminals.
As soon as he took office on January 20th, Trump signed a bundle of executive orders aimed at significantly suppressing immigration. The administration then moved to expand arrests from immigrants.
But while officials continue to argue that they are focusing on violent offenders, White House spokesman Caroline Leavitt issued a warning.
As Tom Homan said, “If you’re illegally in the country, you’re in trouble.”
Still, things didn’t actually pick up until May, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller ordered Ice’s top field officials to move on to more aggressive tactics.
Miller has set a new goal: arrest 3,000 undocumented people a day. This is an assignment that immigration experts say is impossible to reach by focusing solely on criminals.
“The United States does not have enough criminal immigrants to fill the arrest allocation and get millions of deportation, which is something the President has explicitly promised,” Bea said. “Immigration Customs Enforcement says there are 500,000 removable non-citizens who have been criminally convicted in the United States. Most of them are non-violent. Transport, immigration crimes. That’s not millions.”
By the time Trump celebrated his six months in office, DHS had boasted that the Trump administration had already arrested more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants.
“70% of ice arrests,” the agency said in a news release that it is “an individual who has been criminally convicted or charged.”
However, the claims didn’t seem true anymore. 78% of undocumented immigrants arrested in the US in April were either criminally convicted or faced pending charges, but that number plunged to 57% in June.
In LA, the difference between what Trump officials said and reality on earth was even more severe. Only 43% of those arrested across the LA area were either criminally convicted or faced pending charges.
Still, Ice continued to insist that it was “putting the worst first.”
As stories spread across the community about the arrests of law-abiding immigrants, there are indications that support for Trump’s deportation agenda is declining.
A CBS/YouGov poll issued on July 20 shows that around 56% of those surveyed approved Trump’s immigration handling in March, but fell to 50% in June and 46% in July. Approximately 52% of poll respondents said the Trump administration is trying to deport more people than expected. When asked who the Trump administration prioritizes deportation, only 44% said “dangerous criminals.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and La Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly accused Trump of conducting a national experiment in Los Angeles.
“The federal government is using California as a playground to test indiscriminate behaviours that meet dangerous arrest allocations and mass detention goals,” Newsmo spokesman Diana Croft Perayo told The Times. “They chase all immigrants, whether they have a criminal history or not, whether they target American citizens, legal status holders, foreign-born and native-born American citizens.”
When ICE presses on why they arrest immigrants who have not been convicted or faced with pending criminal charges, Trump administration officials tend to argue that many of those people are violating immigration laws.
“Ice Agents are planning to arrest people for being in the country illegally,” Homan told CBS News earlier this month. “We still focus on public safety and national security threats, but if we find illegal foreigners in the process of doing so, they will be arrested too.”
Immigration experts say it undermines the message that it is removing communities of people who threaten public safety.
“It’s a big backtracking from “these people kill people, rape people, and harm them in demonstrable ways,” and from “these people violated immigration laws this way,” Bea said.
The Trump administration is also trying to find new ways to target California criminals.
They are threatening to withhold federal funds in California due to “sanctuary state” laws. This will limit the county jail’s coordination with ICE unless it involves immigrants convicted of serious crimes or felony such as murder, rape, robbery, or arson.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice provided data on all prison inmates who are not US citizens to California counties, including LA, to help federal immigration agents prioritize those who commit crimes. “But by definition, all illegal aliens violate federal law,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release that “people who continue to commit crimes after doing so show that they pose a higher risk to the security and security of our country.”
As Americans are being hit by stories of good and bad immigrant duels, Kochel believes that the question we need to address is not “what is the data saying?”
Instead, we should ask, “How do you distinguish between immigrants who have been seriously criminally convicted and immigrants who live peacefully?”
“I don’t think it’s reasonable or useful to represent everyone as a criminal, or to represent everyone as a saint,” Kocher said. “The fundamental question that probably plagues our criminal justice system is whether our legal system can distinguish between people who are genuine public safety threats and people who are simply caught up in bureaucracy.”
Kocher said the data shows that ICE is currently unable or unwilling to make that distinction.
“If you don’t like the way the system works, you might want to rethink whether there’s a need for a system that should have a path for people who live in the country and work in the economy according to the law,” Kochel said. “And the only way to do that is actually change the law.”
In a hurry to explode some of the most criminal LA immigrants, the Trump administration has ruled out a key part of the story.
The staff notified ICE on May 5th of Venellasion’s pending release, according to the California Department of Corrections.
However, Ice was unable to pick up Venellasion and canceled his hold the day before he was released on parole on May 19th.
A few weeks later, federal agents arrested Veneracion at their ICE office in Los Angeles on June 7th as ICE increased the attacks.
The same document celebrated the capture of fans who served in prison for almost 25 years after being convicted of second-degree murder.
The CDCR said that after fans were paroleed in 2022, the Parole Trial Committee, coordinated with Ice, was released to ice custody that year.
However, these details did not stop Trump officials from praising his arrest and accusing California leaders of loosening their fans.
“Governor Newsom and Mayor Bus are tired of continuing to protect aliens for violent crime violations at the expense of the safety of American citizens and communities,” DHS Deputy Director Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
