Los Angeles leaders said Tuesday the city would join a lawsuit against the Trump administration over immigration raids in the local area.
The city will join the American Civil Liberties Union in suing the federal government, alleging officials are using “unlawful tactics to achieve its intended arrest numbers.”
“The federal government has concentrated thousands of armed immigration agents, many of whom lack visible identification, and military troops in our communities, conducting unconstitutional raids, roundups and anonymous detentions, sowing fear and chaos among our residents,” Hydee Feldstein Soto, city attorney of Los Angeles, said in a Tuesday release.
“Today’s motion to intervene shows we will not stand by and allow these raids to continue or to become the standard operating procedure in our communities.”
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) denied the allegations.
“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence,” McLaughlin told The Hill, denying that arrests are not made based off of the color of someone’s skin.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) have both railed against the president’s decision to send National Guard soldiers to Los Angeles last month in an effort to quell protests against immigration policies.
“I have said that I think this is an experiment. I think LA is a petri dish, and they are essentially pressing the envelope to see how far the American public will tolerate the federal seizure of power from a governor and in this random thing is just a way of creating a sense of … terror and fate and fear in our community,” Bass said during a Tuesday press conference.
“It is having profound economic impact. It is obviously impacting and traumatizing families, and it is to serve a political agenda, none of which has anything positive to do with our city,” she added.
Groups gathered for multiple days to share outrage over recent immigration raids that resulted in the arrests of dozens, but Bass said they were inaccurately characterized.
“‘Riots’ that were reported never happened. We did have a couple of incidences of vandalism and looting, but the way it was portrayed nationally was like the whole city was up in flames,” Bass told reporters.
She criticized comparisons to the 1992 LA riots following the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, saying they were “completely and 100 percent inappropriate.”
Mayors from the surrounding area joined Bass on Tuesday to call out the Trump administration for an alleged violation of residents’ constitutional rights.
“The lawsuit seeks to hold federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accountable for policies and practices that violate the Fourth and Tenth amendments of the United States Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act,” Montbello Mayor Salvador Menendez said at the press conference.
“And let me be clear, we cannot allow families to be torn apart without due process, and we cannot stand silent while the constitutional rights of our residents are trampled,” he added.
Updated at 5:30 p.m. EDT
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