Inside the Bakersfield raids that showed how Trump's immigration policies will sow chaos
On Jan. 7, the phones of immigration advocates in Bakersfield began lighting up with calls from immigrant farmworkers. The messages said the U.S. Border Patrol was conducting an indiscriminate dragnet in the area, pulling over vehicles presumed to be carrying immigrants to work and taking dozens into custody.
To the advocates, this didn’t seem right. The Border Patrol — a unit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection — had not been seen operating in anyone’s memory in Bakersfield, some 300 miles from the patrol’s California offices in El Centro, a few miles from the Mexican border.
Although there are two detention centers in Bakersfield run by ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — none of the detainees could be found in either one. The Border Patrol, a sister agency of ICE, staged its raids not at ICE installations, but out of a parking lot at a facility of the Interior Department, which has nothing to do with immigration or border security.
The Border Patrol eventually asserted that it had conducted a four-day “targeted enforcement” operation aimed at undocumented immigrants with criminal records, ultimately detaining 78 individuals mostly for crimes such as drug trafficking, burglary and child abuse.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-01-22/column-inside-the-bakersfield-raids-that-showed-how-trumps-immigration-policies-will-sow-chaos
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