At a Los Angeles Home Depot this week, masked men jumped from an unmarked truck and immediately began chasing people without so much as a word with their targets. They made 16 arrests. It’s an example of the fastest-growing method for the Department of Homeland Security to juice its mass deportation machine: illegal profiling.
In a new analysis of DHS immigration arrest data for the Cato Institute, I document the shocking number of Latin American immigrants being arrested on the streets with no criminal convictions, no criminal charges and no deportation orders. Nothing that would have put them on the radar of DHS for removal. No reason to seek them out specifically.
In June, one in five DHS immigration arrests targeted a Latino on the streets who had no criminal past nor a removal order against them.
The data was obtained from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request by the Deportation Data Project — a nonpartisan project headed by a law professor at Berkeley. It gives detailed information on each person arrested by DHS as of June 26. It shows DHS took down 15,000 people on the streets without any criminal history or removal orders since Inauguration Day.
But in June alone, the figure was 7,000 — 90% were Latin American immigrants. There was a jump in these arrests immediately in January, but the recent shift has taken the operation to a whole new level. In June, one in five DHS immigration arrests targeted a Latino on the streets who had no criminal past nor a removal order against them.
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an email, “This data is being cherry picked by the Deportation Data Project to peddle a false narrative,” adding: “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE. What makes someone a target of ICE is that they are in our country illegally — not their skin color. DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence.”
However, we already know that agents are stopping people before they know they’re in the country illegally.
ICE officials told The Wall Street Journal that in mid-May the White House ordered them to stop “develop[ing] target lists of immigrants” and just “go out on the streets” and make arrests right away. The ICE officials told the Washington Examiner they were asked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, “What do you mean you’re going after criminals? Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?”
Since the White House marching orders, street arrests of people with no criminal history or removal order spiked threefold to over 1,500 per week.
We can’t know whether there was probable cause for these arrests in every case, but we do know the administration uses sweepingly broad profiling categories because its representatives already told us it does. Deportation czar Tom Homan told Fox News that agents will detain people “based on the location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions like … they walk away.”
DHS describes these interactions as “consensual.” But they are anything but. As a California district court put it, “When individuals have tried to avoid an encounter with agents and officers, they have been followed and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away.”
Since the White House marching orders, street arrests of people with no criminal history or removal order spiked threefold to over 1,500 per week.
In one case, DHS agents pepper-sprayed, tackled and brutally beat a landscaper in Los Angeles after they profiled him outside an IHOP, and — according to DHS — he “refused to answer questions” and tried to leave. After they discovered he was a father of three U.S. Marines, they released him. In another case, agents jumped from a car to arrest a random Latino man on the street who asserted in English, “I have the right to remain silent.”
The one thing that the DHS data does not record: how many times DHS illegally profiles U.S. citizens and legal residents.
Fox News watched agents go “house to house” in a Florida housing development site demanding to see proof of immigration status from workers. The outlet reported agents interrogated 361 workers and arrested just 33. In other words, the number of legal residents being targeted vastly exceeded those who were not legal. These aren’t simply harmless errors. Border Patrol agents shoved Jason Brian Gavidia against a fence when he told them he was a citizen, demanding to know the hospital where he was born. After agents smashed his car window, U.S. citizen and U.S. veteran George Retes was pepper-sprayed, dragged from his vehicle and detained by ICE for three days without charge, as the AP reported. ICE agents tackled a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, Andrea Velez, on her way to work. After they learned she was a citizen, they charged her with impeding their efforts to chase down other people to determine “whether they were lawfully present.” In other words, their defense against charges of illegal profiling was: We were profiling someone else! The charges against Velez were dismissed, according to The Guardian. These tactics are causing chaos in the streets. Bystanders think these arrests could be kidnappings when masked agents don’t identify themselves. A U.S. citizen was pepper-sprayed and arrested trying to stop Velez’s illegal arrest. Surgical center employees were arrested for demanding a warrant from an agent to enter their property to arrest a landscaper whose immigration status he admitted he didn’t know in his affidavit. All this chaos is also illegal. In fact, it is even blocked by a district court order that was upheld on appeal just this week. The appeals court reaffirmed prior rulings that have found it is unconstitutional to stop or detain people based on broad characteristics that would “cast suspicion on large segments of the law-abiding population.” It said this included not just race, but also language ability, occupation and location, such as Home Depot. Not only that, under Section 287 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration agents don’t even have the authority to interrogate someone without a warrant or reason to believe that the person is a noncitizen. Demanding people prove their right to be in the United States isn’t legal. Whether you’re a citizen or not, you have every right to say: Go away. Yet despite the court orders, and failing to meaningfully dispute the allegations of profiling in court, DHS is carrying on. So the real test will come. Will the courts force the administration to follow the Constitution, or will the Bill of Rights be an early victim of the mass deportation campaign?
David J. Bier
David J. Bier is the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. 
