Was the Louisiana ICE raid related to a pending tax vote?
Regarding the ICE raid, Caddo Commissioner Victor Thomas said, 'This information is a distraction from what we're really doing, and what it really is a distraction is against the further development of Caddo Parish.'
The truck stop is in Caddo Commissioner Chris Kracman's district. While some commissioners support the tax, saying it will help spur more economic development in the Hosston area, Kracman does not.
Proposed tax in Caddo Parish sparks controversy
He said, 'I'm standing by what I ran on, and making taxes higher is definitely not one of those things.'
Some at a recent Hosston Council meeting questioned the timing of the illegals' detention while the Caddo Commission is debating the tax and voting on it soon.
Jimmy Silvo, the developer and owner of the truck stop, says they were targeted. He said he spoke to ICE, and they told him they were tipped off by someone calling and reporting the truck stop.
Attorney: Trump's mass deportation to costs billions
Kracman said he knew nothing of the raid and only found out after his constituents asked him about it.
If the tax passes, the developer has already drawn up a master plan for the area around the truck stop and plans to expand.
He said, 'I got guys calling about an RV park and repair shop and things like that.'
The proposed tax will be an additional 2% on top of the state's taxes on merchandise in the truck stop only, excluding gas.
The Caddo Parish Commission is expected to vote on the truck stop tax on Thursday, March 20th.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
Even With Tons of Cash, ICE Faces Obstacles in Hiring New Agents
The new recruitment page on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's website shows a drawing of a white-bearded Uncle Sam pointing to the viewer. 'America has been invaded by criminals and predators,' the page reads. 'We need YOU to get them out.' The pitch emphasizes that a college degree isn't needed, and says recruits could be offered up to a $50,000 signing bonus and $60,000 in student loan repayment. The offers are part of a supercharged recruitment campaign that will take years to meet its goal. Republicans in Congress just allocated $30 billion to ICE to hire 10,000 new officers so it can ramp up deportations. But the Administration's interest in boosting ICE's headcount from 20,000 to 30,000 is bumping up against multiple challenges, including finding applicants who are both qualified and willing to live in parts of the country where ICE is intent on deploying more agents. 'You're talking three years before you see a significant increase of ICE agents on the street, which is the end of the administration,' predicts John Sandweg, who was the acting director of ICE during the Obama administration. To spread the word, ICE is attending job fairs, college campuses and law enforcement recruiting events. Last week, Dean Cain, the 59-year-old actor who played Superman on TV in the 1990s, put his fame behind the recruitment effort, posting a video on X that he had signed up with ICE as an honorary officer. 'I felt it was important to join with our first responders to help secure the safety of all Americans, not just talk about it. So I joined up.' ICE's stepped-up recruitment effort comes as deportation and arrests are not keeping pace with the Administration's goals of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day and deporting 1 million people in Trump's first year in office. In the first week of its new recruitment campaign, the Department of Homeland Security said it received more than 80,000 applications. There are signs that most of those applicants were not what the agency was looking for. Within days, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that ICE was waiving its age limits for agents, accepting applicants as young as 18 and older than 40. Previously, people applying to ICE could not be younger than 21, and no older than 37 or 40, depending on the position. Trump's top White House advisor on the border, Tom Homan, told reporters on Aug. 6 that ICE wasn't having trouble recruiting, and he defended the decision to eliminate the age limits. 'There are a lot of roles at ICE for people who are over 40,' Homan said. 'Just because someone comes in and they're 55—maybe they can't carry a badge and a gun, they can certainly do administrative duty, they can do targeting on the intelligence team.' At the end of July, ICE sent an email to thousands of retired federal law enforcement agents under the subject line, 'return to mission.' The email promised that retired federal officers could continue to receive their pension payments even as they started taking a new paycheck from ICE. 'ICE is in vital need of reinforcement and your laterally applicable skillset will be pivotal in accomplishing our goals,' the email reads. 'By returning to federal service with ICE, you are providing an honorable, indispensable service to our nation.' Sandweg says it's a 'pretty creative solution' to lure back retired law enforcement officers because they won't need as much training on firearm use and other aspects of the job. But there aren't enough retired agents to fill the thousands of positions they're looking to fill, he says. And for new hires, it takes time to train new deportation officers on how to properly carry a gun and conduct arrests. Such training for ICE agents takes place at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) in Glynco, Georgia. That's created a bottleneck because there are only so many instructors and space to train new officers. 'The administration wants boots on the ground as quickly as possible to ramp up arrests and ramp up deportations, but you can't just bring them in off the street,' Sandweg says. 'You've got to hire, background check, once they're on board and cleared for a security clearance, you've got to get them down to FLETC.' To address the bottleneck, DHS is working to create smaller training centers in cities around the country, Secretary Noem said on Aug. 8 during a press conference in Lombard, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. 'We may do a training right here closer to home so they aren't away from their families for so long,' Noem told reporters. ICE's aggressive recruitment efforts are already alarming sheriffs around the country who are concerned that the agency's lucrative offers will peel away local officers already working on the street. But the agency's recruiting challenge goes beyond training. Geography is also an obstacle. Under the Trump Administration, ICE aims to find and arrest more immigrants to deport in cities run by Democrats like New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. It's those same communities where it's harder for ICE to poach law enforcement in the area because local police already pay better, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. Moreover, many of ICE's harsh actions in the past few months—showing up at court houses and workplaces to arrest people, often while masked—has further chipped away at the public perception of ICE nationally, but especially in those cities. 'People do not just get attracted to jobs just for the money,' says Chishti. 'There are other factors that come into play—location, people's perception of the status of the job, people's perception of how they are perceived in the job. All those are a bit of a problem for ICE today.'
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
ICE's new 'Speedway Slammer' detention center gets America all wrong
The IndyCar racing series – which shares corporate ownership with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway – acted swiftly to extricate itself from a conversation it hadn't wished to enter. Department of Homeland Security officials recently began promoting a deal with Indiana to use 1,000 state prison beds for federal immigration detention – calling it the 'Speedway Slammer.' (The facility itself is 70 miles north of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, near Bunker Hill.) Social media posts from government accounts hyping the deal included an AI-generated image of an ICE-branded IndyCar on track at a version of the speedway that featured a hulking prison in the background instead of the iconic pagoda. The IndyCar racing series – which shares corporate ownership with the speedway – acted swiftly to extricate itself from a conversation it hadn't wished to enter about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, asking DHS to stop using its intellectual property in the post generated by artificial intelligence. DHS officials insisted no such violation occurred but quietly deleted the image – only to post another one Aug. 8 with a fleet of slightly modified ICE-liveried racecars. Many IndyCar fans remain upset about the incident, with many blaming the series for not criticizing the Trump administration's immigration policy more forcefully – and even calling for boycotts. There's more to a sport than its ownership. The series' response hardly scratched the surface of why using IndyCar and the speedway for literal government propaganda – promoting immigration detention – felt to so many of us like a violation of a racing series and a set of traditions that we dearly love. Opinion: Trump keeps brutalizing immigrants because he's failing at everything else Why DHS is using state facilities – and what it means First of all, let's talk about why DHS is doing this to begin with. Using state facilities to detain immigrants helps muddy the waters about who's actually responsible. In Florida, where a facility called "Alligator Alcatraz" is ostensibly operated by a state department that doesn't have a written agreement with the feds, detainees have been served maggot-infested food and had to clean out toilets with their bare hands. But it's also happening because the government simply needs the space. ICE agents have been ordered to meet astronomically high arrest quotas, according to internal agency emails viewed by the Guardian. They can only be met by sweeping people up first and checking their immigration status later. Frequent reports of U.S. citizens getting arrested and detained have raised real concern that ICE is resorting to industrial-scale racial profiling to make its numbers. Court cases show government lawyers have argued that agents should target people based on factors like speaking Spanish, looking Mexican or working in gardening. The message being sent is that some people are presumed unwelcome, particularly Latinos. Communities around the United States have heard it loud and clear: Community parades, ethnic restaurants and Spanish-language church services have shuttered or been canceled out of fear of ICE. And the message is reinforced by the government's jokey, sneering tone on social media, posting 'soothing' videos of clanking chains alongside recruitment pitches to join ICE and 'defend your culture.' Opinion: Want to destroy the lives of innocent people who've done nothing wrong? Join ICE! That's the culture war DHS dragged IndyCar into – casually appropriating the racing series and the speedway as if it owned Americana, as if anyone who loves American traditions would share its vision of who counts as 'real America.' DHS couldn't be more wrong. What Pato O'Ward and IndyCar really stand for Take Pato O'Ward, my very favorite racing driver, whose IndyCar No. 5 showed up in AI-mangled form on the original (deleted) image DHS posted. O'Ward races under the Mexican flag but has roots in Texas as well. He's not politically outspoken and mostly demurred when asked about the 'Speedway Slammer' image, but he did say, 'I don't think it made a lot of people proud, to say the least.' The word choice was striking; O'Ward's pride in representing his community – and its pride in him – is one of the great joys of IndyCar in 2025. The same people who are being scared out of public life by ICE in other regards are some of the most visible fans at every IndyCar race. Of course they're welcome. Of course everyone is welcome. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. First-time Indianapolis 500 attendees, or newcomers to the racing series from the driver's seat to the broadcast booth, are consistently bowled over by just how welcoming IndyCar is. What makes the last Sunday in May the best day of the year is the combination of traditional ritual and an unpretentious, open vibe. You don't have to be a Hoosier to choke up at 'Back Home Again in Indiana,' any more than you have to be a gearhead to hold your breath at the greatest spectacle in racing. When I evangelize for the 500 to my coastal friends, I always tell them it's the Midwest at its best. It's America at its best. ICE doesn't own the rights to IndyCar, and it doesn't own the rights to America. The rest of us get a say in the meaning of the things we love. Dara Lind is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and a former immigration reporter. This column originally appeared in the IndyStar. You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
ICE processing center is all but empty when California Congress members arrive to inspect
For two months, several Democratic members of Congress have been unable to enter a downtown L.A. processing center run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prompting widespread complaints and a federal lawsuit. On Monday, the Congress members got their first look at the basement facility known as B-18. But Reps. Brad Sherman, Judy Chu and Jimmy Gomez said that they were left with more questions than answers — and accused the government of sanitizing the center. 'They wanted to show us nothing,' said Gomez, whose district includes parts of downtown L.A. 'It was nothing, it was like no one was there. It was deliberate so members of Congress cannot conduct oversight.'' Scores of migrants, as well as some U.S. citizens, have been taken from Home Depot parking lots, car washes, and other locations by masked and heavily armed agents and brought to B-18 since early June. Some detainees have complained of overcrowding and being held for multiple days. The facility can hold up to 335 migrants, but there were just two people in one of the holding rooms on Monday, the members said at a news conference in downtown L.A. after their visit. The group's previously scheduled visit was canceled by ICE. Monday's visit took days of planning and advance notice, according to the politicians. They described a sparse scene inside B-18, with nine holding rooms, each with two toilets. Chu, whose district includes Monterey Park, described the floors as concrete and said that there were no beds. She said ICE detainees are supposed to be held at the facility for only 72 hours, but she has heard stories of people kept there for 12 days. Some detainees have reported receiving one meal a day, she said. On Monday, she visited the food pantry at B-18, which Chu described as 'scanty.' 'I am deeply disturbed by what I saw and what I heard,' Chu said. Chu also said she has been told that detainees have no soap or toothbrushes. A representative for the Department of Homeland Security didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the politicians' complaints. 'It's alarming that it's taken so long for congressional members to gain access to this site,' said Sergio Perez, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, a nonprofit that seeks to protect the rights of immigrants. Perez was able to visit Narciso Barranco, a Mexican national whose three sons are U.S. Marines, in June. Perez said he saw Barranco after he'd been held at the facility for three days. Perez said that Barranco, who was punched and pepper-sprayed during his arrest, did not receive medical attention. The Department of Homeland Security shared video of his arrest on social media and said Barranco attacked an agent with his gardening tool. Barranco told Perez that each of the rooms held 30 to 70 people at the time and that some had to sleep standing up, Perez said. Food was scarce and they didn't have access to showers. The ICE facility was designed as a processing center, not a detention facility, Perez said. Sherman, who represents parts of the San Fernando Valley and Pacific Palisades, said that one of the two detainees at B-18 on Monday rested with his head on a table. Sherman said he 'illegally' took a picture during his visit and that he shouted out to several people being brought into the facility for processing, asking them if they were U.S. citizens or green card holders. No one replied, he said. Sherman, Chu, Gomez and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who joined the group after their visit, criticized the ongoing immigration enforcement, and in particular the use of masked, roving agents. A federal judge last month temporarily barred the government from mass sweeps in Los Angeles and cities in seven other counties without first establishing reasonable suspicion that the targets are in the U.S. illegally. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which sued the federal government over the sweeps, described a 'dungeon-like' area and accused the administration of failing to 'provide basic necessities like food, water, adequate hygiene facilities, and medical care.' Detainees were allegedly subjected to overcrowding and did not have adequate sleeping accommodations. 'Under such conditions, some of those arrested are pressured into accepting voluntary departure,' the lawsuit stated. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin has said that claims of poor conditions at ICE detention centers are 'false' and that the agency 'has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens.' On Monday, Chu said that she asked ICE representatives during the tour why people were jumping out of vans with masks, and no identification. She said the representatives replied, 'That's not us, and we go in if there's probable cause, if there's a warrant out there.' Gomez, who has been repeatedly turned away from entering the B-18 facility since the crackdown started earlier this year, is part of a group of Democratic House members suing the federal government over the lack of access. The lawsuit, filed last month in federal district court in Washington, said the individuals attempted to visit a detention facility, either by showing up in person or by giving Homeland Security Department officials advance notice, and were unlawfully blocked from entering. ICE recently published new guidelines for members of Congress and their staff, requesting at least 72 hours' notice from lawmakers and requiring at least 24 hours' notice from staff before an oversight visit. Times staff writer Andrea Castillo contributed to this report.
