OCTA ridership sees early 13% ridership decline amid immigration raids
The Orange County Transportation Authority typically sees emptier weekday buses over the summer, but recent statistics show a 13% drop after June 20 compared to the same period in 2024.
'Similar ridership declines carried over into July,' said Eric Carpenter, an OCTA spokesperson, 'so we continue to closely monitor this apparent trend of lower ridership.'
The recent wave of immigration sweeps began on June 6 in Southern California.
Since then, a memo to OCTA bus drivers last month instructed them to comply with any state or federal law enforcement attempting to pull over a bus. The guidance additionally noted that law enforcement present at a bus stop or transit center can't be stopped from boarding.
On July 10, a masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and a Drug Enforcement Administration agent boarded a bus in Santa Ana. They briefly questioned one passenger and left without making an arrest.
Videos of the encounter spread on social media and amplified fears. OCTA released clearer footage from a bus camera, including a passing remark by an agent about the person questioned being the 'wrong guy' they were looking for.
'We are not aware of any other instance of federal agents boarding a bus in Orange County,' Carpenter said.
OCTA officials stressed that the encounter was an isolated incident, but that the federal agencies involved did not notify them of the nature of the investigation before or after it happened.
'The moment an ICE agent boards a bus, trust is lost,' said Dorian Romero, project manager for Santa Ana Active Streets, a group that advocates for progressive transportation policies. 'OCTA needs to work harder to build that trust because this is not safe mobility.'
The same day as the incident, an OCTA official presented declining ridership stats to the agency's transit committee.
Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento, who also serves on OCTA's board of directors, noted that less ridership during the summer is normal, as students are out of school, but the stats signaled a climate of fear amid immigration raids beyond that.
He urged the agency to look at responses — from adjusting the number of bus routes to informing riders of their constitutional rights — should the raids and depressed ridership trends continue.
'I want us to continue to do business as usual because we've always delivered a solid system but these are unforeseeable conditions that we may not have thought about,' Sarmiento said. 'I'm just hoping going forward, as we see now impacts to ridership, that's going to trigger a response that we make sure our riders are more informed about what's happening.'
L.A. Metro, where Latinos comprise more than 60% of bus riders, saw a similar 13.5% drop in ridership from May to June, with last month being the lowest June on record since 2022.
Metro has partnered with the L.A. County Office of Immigrant Affairs to distribute 'Know Your Rights' materials on buses, trains and stations.
OCTA chief executive Darrell Johnson pledged to look into a possible partnership with the County of Orange on a similar initiative that could use 'public service announcement' spaces on buses for multilingual primers on riders' rights.
The topic arose again during OCTA's board of directors meeting on Monday as pro-immigrant activists accused the agency of lying about the lack of ICE activity on buses and at bus stops.
Santa Ana Mayor Valerie Amezcua, who serves on the board of directors, said at Monday's meeting that 'Know Your Rights' signs in English, Spanish and Vietnamese are being looked at for the county's bus fleet.
'I just want to share with the community that we, as OCTA, have been having that discussion,' she added. 'It's very important that our riders do know their rights.'
Romero welcomes OCTA's efforts to look into a 'Know Your Rights' partnership, but believes more can be done to protect riders.
'Bus drivers can be trained, as first responders, on how to encounter these ICE agents, especially if they're masked and not providing identification,' she said.
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12 hours ago
‘When the raids started, fear spread': LA Mayor Bass on Trump's deportation efforts
As President Donald Trump marks six months into his second term, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz that the administration's immigration crackdown has not only sparked protests, but fear among the city's residents. 'Los Angeles is a city of immigrants -- 3.8 million people, and about 50% of our population is Latino. And so when the raids started, fear spread,' Bass said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids started in Los Angeles early June, prompting demonstrations that at times turned violent. While Trump's deportation push was initially said to be centered around undocumented immigrants with criminal records, an ABC News analysis of new data shows that in recent weeks, the Trump administration has arrested an increasing number of migrants with no criminal convictions. Since then, farmers, business owners and immigrant advocacy groups have, like the mayor, said that many residents have been afraid to leave their homes for fear of deportation, affecting the workforce, food supply and the culture of the city. Bass said that the restaurant the interview took place in, located in the predominantly Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood of east Los Angeles, was typically bustling. But now, it — and the neighborhood overall — can feel like a ghost town. 'It's not just the deportation. It's the fear that sets in when raids occur, when people are snatched off the street,' Bass said. "Even people who are here legally, even people who are U.S. Citizens, have been detained. Immigrants who have their papers and were showing up for their annual immigration appointment were detained when they showed up doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing." She criticized ICE for agents for executing enforcement operations without their affiliation being prominently displayed. 'Masked men in unmarked cars, no license plate, no real uniforms, jumping out of cars with rifles, and snatching people off the street, leading a lot of people to think maybe kidnappings were taking place," Bass said. "How do you have masked men who then say, 'Well, we are federal officials,' with no identification?' Raddatz noted that administration says those agents do that because "there have been threats... [and] doxing." "We have a Los Angeles police department that has to deal with crime in this city every single day. And they're not masked. They stay here," Bass said. "The masked men parachute in, stay here for a while, and leave. And so you enter a profession like policing, like law enforcement? I'm sorry, I don't think you have a right to have a mask and snatch people off the street." Bass also touched on the continued presence of federal troops in the city. In response to those protests in early June, Trump deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles after protesters clashed with police. Some protestors threw rocks, fireworks and other objects at police, according to reports, before the arrival of federal troops. Trump signed a memorandum in June saying the National Guard was deployed to address lawlessness in Los Angeles. The California National Guard's 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team posted on X that its objective was to protect federal protesters and personnel. In her interview with ABC News, Bass denounced the violence as 'terrible,' but said it did not "warrant military intervention." 'It did not warrant the Marines coming into our city with basically no real mission, but just to show a force,' Bass said. While the number of National Guard members in the city has been cut roughly in half, Bass said that their objective has not changed since they first arrived — and argued they're presence is still not necessary. 'If you drive by our two federal buildings, you will see them standing out there. But there's nothing going on in those federal buildings. So in my opinion, we are misusing taxpayers' dollars, and we are misusing our troops,' she said. While she disagreed strongly with the Trump administration's immigration agenda, Bass said she appreciated the help the administration gave Los Angeles during the massive January wildfires. 'Well, I will heap praise on the administration for the first six months in Los Angeles with the fires. If you ask me, is there anything that they have done good in terms of immigration? I don't know. I don't think so,' she said. "I think that the viewpoint has been punitive, has been let's make it as miserable as possible so that these people don't come." Bass said that she is still willing to 'work' with the White House, noting both the Olympics and World Cup coming to the city over the next few years. "How does this end?" Raddatz asked. "How do you see the next six months, the next two years for immigrants in your city?"'Well, I am just hoping that this reign of terror ends. I'm hoping that the military leaves, because they were never needed here to begin with. I'm hoping that we can get back to normal. I'm hoping that the next time I come to this restaurant, that it will be filled, because people won't be afraid to come here,' Bass said.
USA Today
14 hours ago
- USA Today
ICE detention is growing in the South. This state was the first.
Louisiana, long known for its 'prison economy,' now houses more ICE detention facilities than any other non-border state. WINN PARISH, LA – Far from the jazz clubs and nightlife of New Orleans, thousands await their fate inside immigration jails. Louisiana has more dedicated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers than any other state besides Texas – nine total – after it converted nearly half a dozen correctional facilities to immigrant detention. Most are remote, scattered near farms and forests. Among the sites is a unique "staging facility" on a rural airport tarmac for rapid deportations. President Donald Trump is increasingly leaning on Republican-led Southern states to detain and deport millions of immigrants ‒ from "Alligator Alcatraz" in the Florida Everglades to the expansion of a sprawling Georgia immigration facility. Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, Mississippi has the ICE jail with the highest average daily population. But Louisiana was the first non-border state to surge immigration detention capacity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and Tulane University Law School. The state opened five new facilities to detain immigrants in 2019, during the first Trump administration, and vastly expanded the number of detainees during the Biden administration. Immigrants are sent here from all over the country, far from their families, communities and, often, their lawyers. The Trump administration has confined some of its highest-profile detainees in Louisiana, including now-released Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard University scientist Kseniia Petrova. The state's largest immigration jail, Winn Correctional Center, is tucked deep into dense pine woods nearly five hours northwest of New Orleans. The site is so remote that, for years, online maps routinely sent visitors the wrong way down a dirt road. A warning sign cautions visitors: "This property is utilized for the training of chase dogs." Other states might follow Louisiana's example as more federal funds flow to ICE detention. Congress recently authorized the Trump administration to spend $45 billion over the next four years to expand immigration jails around the country. That's nearly four times ICE's previous annual detention budget. USA TODAY traveled to four of Louisiana's nine ICE facilities, hoping to see firsthand what life is like for immigrants detained there. But the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied multiple requests for a tour of any of the locations. In an emailed statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE originally expanded its detention capacity in Louisiana "to address the increasing number of individuals apprehended at the border" under the Biden administration. "ICE continues to explore all options to meet its current and future detention requirements while removing detainees as quickly as possible from the U.S.," she said. Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, described the state as key to Trump's promised mass deportation campaign. "Louisiana really is the epicenter for a lot of what is currently taking place with this administration," Ahmed said. "It's an outcropping of a prison economy that Louisiana has survived on for a long, long time." Deportation hub far from the border Louisiana found its foothold as a deportation hub at the end of Trump's first term, when the administration was looking to expand immigrant detention. The state had reformed its criminal justice system in 2017, with bipartisan support, to reduce sentences for low-level offenders. That had the effect of dramatically decreasing the state's prison population and freeing thousands of incarcerated people – mainly Black men and women. At the time, the Black imprisonment rate was nearly four times the rate of White imprisonment in Louisiana, according to the ACLU. Louisiana eventually rolled back the reforms. But racial justice activists briefly celebrated a win. Then ICE came knocking. The first Trump administration, and later the Biden administration, wanted to detain more illegal border crossers. Louisiana offered advantages: empty prisons, employees already trained in corrections, and access to the Alexandria airport with a detention facility and a history of deportation flights. It also has some of the country's most conservative immigration judges, as well as a federal appeals court that, in immigration cases, often sides with the government, lawyers say. "Louisiana had the infrastructure already there," said Homero López, legal director of New Orleans-based Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides free representation. "ICE comes in saying, 'Y'all have got the space. We've got the people. We'll pay you double what the state was paying.' That's why the expansion was so fast." Louisiana's rural communities offered advantages for ICE Many Americans know Louisiana by its crown jewel, New Orleans, the state's tourism mecca, where social norms and politics are as liberal as the flow of alcohol on Bourbon Street. But Louisiana is largely wooded, rural, proudly conservative and deeply Christian. County governments are called parishes and the poverty rate is the highest in the nation. "People want jobs and who's to blame them?" said Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University research assistant professor who studies immigration enforcement. "It's fairly easy to promise jobs by setting up a detention facility." Rural Louisiana used to make a living from oil and timber. Logging trucks still rumble down forested two-lane roads, but the decline in natural resources and price unpredictability drove some communities to look for new industries. Prisons and now immigration detention deliver good-paying jobs and economic development to places like Winn, Ouachita and LaSalle parishes. LaSalle was one of the first to see the potential. In 2007, local leaders in the parish seat of Jena – current population 4,155 – wanted to diversify the economy. A sprawling juvenile detention facility north of town sat empty. When GEO Group, the nation's largest private detention contractor, swooped in with an ICE contract in hand, local leaders welcomed the opportunity. "Not having to build an entirely new facility was probably a key factor to them locating here," said Craig Franklin, editor of the weekly Jena Times. Plus, "our advantage to a strong employee pool was likely a factor." In Ouachita Parish, the mayor and council of Richwood ‒ population 3,881 ‒ debated whether to approve an ICE detention contract. Mayor Gerald Brown didn't have a vote, but he supported the conversion to ICE detention, he said. "Richwood Correctional Center is one of our biggest employers," Brown told USA TODAY. "There was a lot of back and forth. We did town halls, and we had meetings." The town stood to gain new income as an intermediary between ICE and the private operator, LaSalle Corrections. When it was a jail, the town earned a $112,000 a year fee. Now that it's an ICE detention center, the town is getting about $412,000 a year. "The financial windfall for the community was something I certainly couldn't turn a blind eye to," Brown said. Remote ICE has consequences for the detained The willingness of rural communities to house ICE facilities is part of the draw to Louisiana, researchers who study immigration detention say. Another factor: When ICE tries to open new detention centers near big cities, the agency is often met with resistance from immigrant rights activists and residents with "not in my backyard" arguments. But attorneys say the rural locations have real consequences for the people detained. Data shows that having access to an attorney dramatically improves a detainee's chance of winning release and a chance at staying in the United States. But it's hard for attorneys to get to many of the facilities; Ahmed regularly drives three to seven hours to visit immigrant clients across the state. Baher Azmy, legal director of the New York-based Center of Constitutional Rights, represented Khalil, the Columbia University activist, during his more than three-month detention at the Central Louisiana Processing Center in Jena. He visited twice and said he was struck by its remoteness, the utter lack of space for attorneys to meet their clients and the no-contact family visitation conducted behind plexiglass. Accommodations were made for Khalil to see his wife and newborn baby in a separate room, after a court ordered it. "Getting there was an all-day proposition," Azmy said. "It reminded me of my early trips to Guantanamo," the military jail on the island of Cuba, where he represented clients accused of terrorism in the years after the 9/11 attacks. "The desolation, the difficulty getting there. The visiting conditions were better in Guantanamo than in Jena. As horrible as Guantanamo was, I could hug my client." According to ICE, rules and accommodations at different facilities can depend on their design and capacity, as well as contractual agreements. "Allegations that ICE detention facilities have improper conditions are unequivocally false and designed to demonize ICE law enforcement," McLaughlin said. "ICE follows national detention standards." Exponential expansion of ICE detention The United States has consistently grown its immigration detention through both Republican and Democratic administrations. But the average number of immigrants in detention on any given day has risen rapidly over the past six months, from roughly 40,000 people at the end of the Biden administration in January to more than 58,000 in early July. Under President Joe Biden, ICE moved thousands of migrants who sought asylum at the United States-Mexico border over to Louisiana detention centers, said the ACLU's Ahmed. Now, the centers are filled with people picked up in the country's interior. Nearly half of those in ICE detention in early July had no criminal record or pending charges, according to ICE data. They faced civil immigration violations. When determining whether to send a detainee to Louisiana, ICE considers bed space availability, the detainee's medical and security needs and proximity to transportation, according to an agency statement. The average daily population in Louisiana ICE facilities topped 7,300 in early July. That compares to roughly 2,000 ICE detainees in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration, according to data collected by TRAC at Syracuse University. Some of that increase is due to a Trump administration decision to withdraw legal status from thousands of immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration and followed the rules then in place. "These are mothers. These are children. These are students. And these are individuals who often had status that was very much legal, that's then been taken away by the administration," Ahmed said. "So what we are seeing is the rendering of documented people to undocumented by the stroke of a pen of the United States government." More: He won asylum and voted for Trump. Now his family may have to leave. Three times this spring and early summer, Will Trim traveled to Richwood Correctional to visit his colleague Petrova, the Harvard scientist from Russia. He said the buildings looked "like warehouses, featureless beige buildings" encircled with razor wire, separated from a low-income neighborhood by a patch of woods. During his visits, few of the people he spoke with in the nearby town of Monroe knew that more than 700 immigrant women were being held locally. According to ICE data, on average, in July, 97% of the women in Richwood Correctional had no criminal record. "If they are being held without charge," he asked, "why is there double-barbed wire? Why is it hidden in the forest?" Dinah Pulver contributed to this report.
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Los Angeles Times
Immigration arrest outside Oregon preschool rattles parents
BEAVERTON, Ore. — Parents at a preschool in a Portland suburb are reeling after immigration officers arrested a father in front of the school during morning drop-off hours, breaking his car window to detain him in front of children, families and staffers. 'I feel like a day care, which is where young children are taken care of, should be a safe place,' Natalie Berning said after dropping off her daughter at the Montessori in Beaverton on Friday morning. 'Not only is it traumatizing for the family, it's traumatizing for all the other children as well.' Mahdi Khanbabazadeh, a 38-year-old chiropractor and citizen of Iran, was initially pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while driving his child to the school Tuesday. After asking whether he could drop off the child first, he continued driving and called his wife to tell her what happened, according to his wife, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of privacy concerns for her and her child. His wife rushed to the school, took their child from his car and brought him inside. Khanbabazadeh stayed in the vehicle in the parking lot and asked whether he could move somewhere not on school grounds out of consideration for the children and families, his wife said. He pulled out of the lot and onto the street and began to open the car door to step out when agents broke the window and took him into custody, according to his wife. Kellie Burns, who has two children attending the preschool, said her husband was there and heard the glass shatter. 'More than anything we want to express how unnecessarily violent and inhumane this was,' she said. 'Everyone felt helpless. Everyone was scared.' ICE said it detained Khanbabazadeh because he overstayed his visa, which his wife disputes. 'Officers attempted to arrest Khanbabazadeh during a traffic stop when he requested permission to drop his child off at daycare,' ICE said in a statement. 'Officers allowed him to proceed to the daycare parking lot where he stopped cooperating, resisted arrest and refused to exit his vehicle, resulting in ICE officers making entry by breaking one of the windows to complete the arrest.' Immigration officials have dramatically ramped up arrests across the country since May. Shortly after President Trump took office in January, his administration lifted restrictions on making immigration arrests at schools, healthcare facilities and places of worship, stirring fears about going to places once considered safe spaces. After U.S. military strikes on Iran in June, officials trumpeted immigration arrests of Iranians, some of whom settled in the United States long ago. Khanbabazadeh's wife said he has always maintained lawful status. After he arrived on a valid student visa and they subsequently married, she said, they submitted all required paperwork to adjust his status and were waiting for a final decision following their green card interview months ago. Khanbabazadeh is being held at the ICE detention facility in Tacoma, Wash., she said. Guidepost Global Education, which oversees the Montessori school, called the incident 'deeply upsetting.' 'We understand that this incident raises broader questions about how law enforcement actions intersect with school environments,' Chief Executive Maris Mendes said in a statement. 'It is not lost on us how frightening and confusing this experience may have been for those involved — especially for the young children who may have witnessed it while arriving at school with their parents.' Parents said they want to support the family and teachers. 'We know it's happening across the country, of course, but no one is prepared for their preschool ... to deal with it,' Burns said. 'It's really been a nightmare.' Rush writes for the Associated Press.
