Latest news with #racialprofiling
The Independent
2 days ago
- The Independent
Moment police break black driver's window and punch him in face for not having headlights on
This is the moment a black driver in Florida had his window broken and was punched in the face after police pulled him over for not having his headlights on in the daytime. The incident - shared by William McNeil Jr in a now-viral video - took place at 4.17pm on Feb 19 this year. After being pulled over by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, the 22-year-old can be seen speaking to officers who tell him he was stopped for driving without headlights in 'inclement weather.' McNeil asks to speak to a supervisor before his window is broken and he is punched at least twice in the face before being dragged to the floor out of sight. The sheriff's office has launched an investigation. McNeil spent two days in jail after being charged with resisting an officer without violence and driving on a suspended license.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE Barbie Has Epic Meltdown Over Reporter's Question
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem strictly denied allegations of ICE's racial profiling Friday during a press briefing in Nashville, Tennessee. While taking questions, a member of the press confronted the DHS leader. 'ICE operations are taking place predominately in Latino communities...' the reporter said before Noem interrupted. 'I wouldn't say that's true, I would say that the media has highlighted operations like that, but we have operations ongoing throughout the country every single day in communities everywhere, so I would not say that anyone could show that they're highlighted in Hispanic communities,' Noem said. When the same unidentified reporter told Noem that Latino audiences are 'fearful,' due to recent ICE raids targeting people 'based on their skin color,' Noem chalked up the allegations to another one of the media's false narratives. 'That is absolutely false and don't you dare ever say that again,' she snapped. Noem's fury comes as a contradiction to White House border czar Tom Homan's statements that 'physical appearances' serve as a valid approach for detention. 'People need to understand, ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them,' he said on Fox & Friends. The department head clarified that every single ICE raid is based on investigations that have 'reasonable suspicion.' As Noem denied allegations, four posters displaying arrested men graced the backdrop of the press conference listing their crimes along with their ethnicities: 'Salvadoran,' 'Venezuelan,' 'Guatemalan,' and 'Iraqi'. During the press conference, Noem shared that since the Trump administration took office, over 300,000 'criminals and illegal aliens' have been arrested. 'I'm so proud of this office and the agents that work here,' Noem said. '...We're going against the worst of the worst every single day, get the murderers, the rapists, the child pedophiles and pornographers off the of our streets and out of this country.' Noem also spoke about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who was deported by mistake, calling him 'a monster' that needs to stand trial. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
14-07-2025
- Yahoo
The messy aftermath of an immigration sweep in Pacoima
The 54-year-old woman was splayed on the sidewalk with her shirt half-raised, unconscious. Nearby, federal immigration agents stood guard as people screamed at them. Arturo Hermosillo, a U.S. citizen, was in his work van, recording it all when an agent ordered him to back up to make room for an ambulance that was en route for the woman. As he was reversing, he said, another agent started banging on his window and side view mirror, pushing it in. He couldn't see behind him and felt a bump. Hermosillo opened his door to tell the agents he couldn't move. But not long after, they dragged him out of his van. 'I told them I didn't do anything illegal,' he said. Hermosillo was arrested and sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. The woman, who later said she had fainted while an agent bear-hugged her to the point she struggled to breathe, underwent heart surgery at a Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. A doctor told her she had suffered a heart attack. The immigration sweep on June 19, just outside a Lowe's Home Improvement store, is one of many that have taken place in Southern California and encapsulates the chaotic methods employed to detain people over the last month. A federal judge on Friday ruled that there was sufficient evidence that agents were using racial profiling to target people and ordered a halt to the indiscriminate sweeps, saying they violated the 4th Amendment. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in an email response to The Times that a person 'rammed his vehicle into a law enforcement vehicle' during the June 19 operation. 'CBP Agents were also assaulted during the operation and verbally harassed ... despite this, CBP arrested 30 illegal aliens in Hollywood and 9 illegal aliens in San Fernando and Pacoima," she wrote. The Times sought clarification as to which operation involved the ramming of the federal vehicle, but neither McLaughlin nor the agency responded to the follow-up question. Eyewitness videos, as well as interviews with Hermosillo and the 54-year-old woman, tell a different story and underscore the public's outrage and criticism of the immigration sweeps. Matilde, who declined to give her last name because of her immigration status, said she was selling tamales by the entrance of the parking lot shared by Lowe's and other businesses when the 54-year-old got word that federal immigration agents were in the area. Matilde got nervous and began taking down her stand. She was about to put her umbrella away when a white car with tinted windows pulled up. 'I saw two agents get out,' she said in a phone interview. 'I didn't run.' She said the agent that ran to her never identified himself, provided a warrant or requested documentation of her immigration status. Instead, she said, he grabbed her from behind. 'I could feel his vest against my ear,' said Matilde, who is about 5 feet tall. 'I told him I couldn't breathe.' A second agent showed up to grab her hands to handcuff her. She said as they tried to do that one of the agents unintentionally lifted her shirt, exposing her bra. She reached to pull her shirt down and the agents used more force as if she were resisting. What happened next is something Matilde can't fully recall. 'I don't know if I fainted or if they threw me down,' she said. But she woke up on the ground and started to plea with agents. 'I told them: I can't breathe, I can't breathe and that my chest hurts,' she said. 'But they didn't listen. They ignored me.' She said she looked up at the tree where she had a framed picture of the Virgin Mary and began to pray: 'Virgin Mary, please help me, don't abandon me. I don't want to die.' She said a third agent came and told her he was a paramedic, asking her if she had any medical conditions. She told him she suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes and that her chest was hurting. He took her pulse before the agents dialed 911. She said the agents left her on the ground. Videos taken by people at the scene and shared on social media show Matilde on the ground, unconscious and surrounded by agents. In another video, firefighters are caring for her while a small crowd shame the agents for hurting the woman, especially those agents who appear to be Latinos. 'You have Latino blood,' one woman yelled at the agents in Spanish. 'Does it feel good doing this?' another woman screamed out. As paramedics arrived to transport Matilde to the hospital, three federal agents were trying to drag Hermosillo out of his van. A video shows an agent pulling on Hermosillo's leg to drag him out. A second agent tries to do the same before trying to snatch Hermosillo's arm but loses his grip and falls down. A third agent with a vest that reads "medic" joins in shortly after. "Dude, let him go!" a woman screams in the background. "Oh my God, why [do] you guys act like animals?" the woman recording the video says. "What has he done?" a man screams out at agents trying to keep people back. The video shows the three agents struggling to pull Hermosillo out. Once he's out of the van, he is shoeless on one foot and is pushed down to the hot ground so they can handcuff him. "What's your name?" the woman recording yells out to Hermosillo, who responds with his name. "Tell us where you're from so we can get you out of jail. Where are you from? What's your address? We want to call your family," people call out. In another video, Hermosillo is seen being placed in the back of a white van, screaming: "Fight back, fight back." "We're going to fight for you!" a woman shouts back to him. Once in custody, he said agents accused him of obstruction and took him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. There, he said, the agents mocked him. 'They were saying things like I was never going to get out and that I better lawyer up,' he said. When one agent told him he didn't understand why the public was making a big deal of the immigration sweeps, he got angry. "It's because you guys are Nazis," Hermosillo said he told the agent. He said they continued to tell him he would be in prison for nearly a decade. Hermosillo told the agents he was fine with that. "I was like, they're not going to break me," he said. "I'm going to continue my education in here; I'm going to continue organizing in here." He said that after some time, Homeland Security agents showed up to speak to him. 'They told me, 'You were never arrested. You're just being detained, but you can't leave L.A. County for six months to a year,' and that they were going to proceed with the offense but that they were letting me go.' He said he signed release documents. 'They let me out in the street with no shoe, no phone,' he said. 'I had nothing with me because it was in the vehicle.' Hermosillo said he recorded the incident but declined to provide it to The Times as part of his defense against the federal government. "You know the difference between them and us," he said. "It's that our struggle comes from love, and all they have is hate. "My struggle is for the love of my people." Once Matilde was placed on a gurney and moved into an ambulance, she was taken three miles to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. There, she said, doctors treated her partially blocked arteries in the heart, telling her she had suffered a minor heart attack. "The doctor said I was lucky they weren't too clogged up or else they would have needed to do open heart surgery," she said. She stayed in the hospital for five days and was prescribed heart medication as well as medication for anxiety, which she developed after the June 19 incident. 'At night I can't sleep because I have nightmares," she said. The anxiety creeps up on her. Sometimes, she said, she can feel the agent's breath when he held her tightly. She said she has bruises on her legs, arms and belly and has been unable to do much, even cook. It's not the America Matilde envisioned when she came to the U.S. 29 years ago. She and her husband came for work and a steady income. They wanted to send money back home so her husband's parents, who were bouncing from one relative's home to another, could have their own place. They also wanted to raise a family, but in a country that provided better opportunities. She said her 28-year-old daughter is a nurse assistant, and her 15-year-old son wants to go to college to become a structural engineer. "We both suffered from our sacrifice," she said. "But we wanted a better future for our kids. "We wanted things just to be better." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Yahoo
13-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge orders Trump administration to stop racial profiling in California immigration raids
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop immigration agents in southern California from "indiscriminately" arresting people based on racial profiling, saying that it had likely broken the law by dispatching "roving patrols" of agents to carry out sweeping arrests. The decision was a win for a group of immigration advocates and five people arrested by immigration agents that sued the Department of Homeland Security over what it called a "common, systematic pattern" of people with brown skin forcibly detained and questioned in the Los Angeles area. In a complaint filed July 2, the group said the area had come "under siege" by masked immigration agents "flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places." They alleged agents picked out targets to forcefully detain and question solely because they had brown skin, spoke Spanish or English with an accent, and worked as day laborers, farm workers, or other jobs. Those arrested were denied access to lawyers and held in "dungeon-like" facilities where some were "pressured" into accepting deportation, the lawsuit alleged. Judge Maame Frimpong of the Central District of California wrote in her order that the group would likely succeed in proving that "the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers." Stopping the indiscriminate arrests was a "fairly moderate request," she wrote. Her order granted an emergency request, and the lawsuit is going. Mohammad Tajsar, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the group that brought the lawsuit, said, "It does not take a federal judge to recognize that marauding bands of masked, rifle-toting goons have been violating ordinary people's rights throughout Southern California." "We are hopeful that today's ruling will be a step toward accountability for the federal government's flagrant lawlessness." Frimpong "is undermining the will of the American people," DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to USA TODAY. "America's brave men and women are removing murderers, MS-13 gang members, pedophiles, rapists." Allegations that agents are making arrests based on skin color are "disgusting and categorically FALSE," McLaughlin said. "DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence.' More: Mentally ill, detained and alone. Trump budget cuts force immigrants to fight in solitude The Trump administration ramped up immigration raids across California starting in June, widening its focus from those with criminal records to a broader sweep for anyone in the country illegally. The crackdown sparked ongoing protests, which Trump dispatched National Guard troops and Marines to quell. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Judge orders Trump to stop indiscriminate ICE raids in California
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal judge halts indiscriminate immigration stops in Los Angeles and beyond
In a searing ruling against the Trump administration, a federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests that advocates say have terrorized Angelenos, forced people into hiding and damaged the local economy. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, a Biden appointee, was widely hailed by immigrant rights groups and California Democrats, who have been in a pitched battle with the administration over recent sweeps through Southern California immigrant neighborhoods. If adhered to, the ruling would stop immigration agents from roving around Home Depots and car washes, stopping brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking day laborers and others to arrest on immigration charges, as they have been for the past month. "Justice prevailed today," Gov. Gavin Newsom posted about the ruling on X Friday evening. "The court's decision puts a temporary stop to federal immigration officials violating people's rights and racial profiling," he wrote. "California stands with the law and the Constitution — and I call on the Trump Administration to do the same." The orders cover Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. The White House said Friday evening it would challenge the ruling. 'No federal judge has the authority to dictate immigration policy — that authority rests with Congress and the President," said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman. "Enforcement operations require careful planning and execution; skills far beyond the purview or jurisdiction of any judge. We expect this gross overstep of judicial authority to be corrected on appeal.' In her ruling, Frimpong said she found a sufficient amount of evidence that agents were using race, language, a person's vocation or the location they are at, such a carwash, Home Depot, swap meet or row of street vendors, to form "reasonable suspicion" — the legal standard needed to detain someone. Frimpong said the reliance on those factors, either alone or in combination does not meet the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. "What the federal government would have this Court believe in the face of a mountain of evidence presented in this case is that none of this is actually happening,' she said. Frimpong ordered federal agents not to use those factors to establish reasonable suspicion to detain people. And that all those in custody at a downtown detention facility known as B-18 must be given 24-hour access to lawyers and a confidential phone line. U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who has brought charges against protesters at the raids, blasted the ruling on X. "We strongly disagree with the allegations in the lawsuit and maintain that our agents have never detained individuals without proper legal justification," he wrote. "Our federal agents will continue to enforce the law and abide by the U.S. Constitution." The ruling came at a particularly fraught moment as details of the largest work-site enforcement raid since the crackdown began to emerge. Agents arrested around 200 suspected undocumented immigrants at two cannabis operations on Thursday, and prompted a tense standoff between authorities and hundreds of protesters in Ventura County. A man who fell 30 feet from a greenhouse roof during the raid was gravely injured and the FBI is investigating whether shots were fired at federal agents during the protest. Although the order is temporary, the coalition will seek a preliminary injunction that would make it more permanent. The judge has not yet ruled on a request by Los Angeles city, county and seven other municipalities to join the lawsuit. "Los Angeles has been under assault by the Trump Administration as masked men grab people off the street, chase working people through parking lots and march through children's summer camps," Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement Friday evening. "We went to court against the administration because we will never accept these outrageous and un-American acts as normal.' ACLU, Public Counsel, other groups and private attorneys filed the lawsuit on behalf of several immigrant rights groups, three immigrants picked up at a bus stop and two U.S. citizens, one whom was held despite showing agents his identification . "I think it's the most important decision in the history of the country about limitations on what immigration authorities can do when they carry out operations," said Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer with Public Counsel. "It means that they can't racially profile, they can't treat car wash workers and nannies as illegally in the country just because of who they are. It means that those whom they sweep into detention have to have access to attorneys right away. And it means that the Constitution is not a dirty word. It's brought the rule of law back to Los Angeles." The plaintiffs argued in their complaint that immigration agents cornered brown-skinned people in Home Depot parking lots, at carwashes and at bus stops across Southern California in a show of force without establishing reasonable suspicion that they had violated immigration laws. They allege agents didn't identify themselves, as required under federal law, and made unlawful warrantless arrests. Once someone was in custody, the complaint argues, their constitutional rights were further violated by being held in "deplorable" conditions at B-18 without access to a lawyer, or regular food and water. Frimpong firmly agreed with the plaintiffs, saying they were likely to succeed in trial. Since June 6, immigration agents have arrested nearly 2,800 undocumented individuals, according to data released by DHS on Tuesday. A Times analysis of arrest data from June 1 to 10 found that 69% of those arrested during that period had no criminal conviction and 58% had never been charged with a crime. The sweeps have paralyzed parts of the city where high numbers of immigrants work. Earlier in the day, before the order was issued, Tom Homan, Trump's chief advisor on border policy, responded to the tentative ruling, telling Fox News "If the judge makes a decision against what the officers are trained, against what the law is based upon," he said that it would "shut down operations." He echoed government attorneys who argued that agents, in deciding whether to stop a person, can consider location, vocation, clothing, whether they run, and other factors. "ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them," he said. "They just need the totality of the circumstances." He said agents receive training on the 4th Amendment every six months. Justice Department attorney Sean Skedzielewski, in an hours-long hearing Thursday afternoon, said he would seek a $30-million bond, should the order be granted in order to train agents to comply with it. Frimpong wrote in her decision she would reject the government's request, since the restraining order doesn't require training, only "compliance with existing law." During the hearing, Frimpong took issue with Skedzielewski's lack of specific evidence to refute accusations of indiscriminate targeting. When he argued that 'these are sophisticated operations' and seemed to say that arrests stemmed from particular people who were being targeted, she questioned how that could be true. In other cases where local and federal law enforcement are targeting people for crimes, the judge pointed out, there are reports after an arrest 'as to why they arrested this person, how they happened to be where they were and what they did.' 'There doesn't seem to be anything like that here, which makes it difficult for the court to accept your description of what is happening, because there is no proof that that is what is happening as opposed to what the plaintiffs are saying is happening,' Frimpong said. Skedzielewski argued the lack of evidence is why the court should not grant a temporary restraining order. The government, he argued, had only 'a couple days' to try to identify individuals mentioned in the court filings. 'We just haven't had a chance to identify in many cases who the people stopped even were, let alone — over a holiday weekend — get ahold of the agents,' he said. Frimpong didn't seem moved and questioned the government's reliance on two high-ranking officials who have played a key role in the raids in Southern California: Kyle Harvick, a Border Patrol agent in charge of El Centro, and Andre Quinones, deputy field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Their declarations, she said, were 'very general' and 'did not really engage with the pretty high volume of evidence that the plaintiffs have put in the record of the things we have all seen and heard on the news.' 'If there's any one of these people and there was a report about 'this is how we identified this tow yard, parking lot and so on,' that would have been helpful,' Frimpong said. 'It's hard for the court to believe that in the time that you had, you couldn't have done that.' Skedzielewski said the evidence is replete with instances of stops, but 'it is not replete with any evidence that those stops or that the agents in any way failed to follow the law.' He said agents' actions were 'above board.' Mohammad Tajsar, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, told the judge that agents cannot solely use a person's workplace, their location or the particular work they're doing as reasons to stop people. Tajsar added that it was because of the government's 'misunderstanding of the law' that they'd made so many stops of U.S. citizens, including Brian Gavidia, a named plaintiff who was detained by Border Patrol agents outside of a tow yard in Montebello. Tajsar said Gavidia, who was present in the courtroom during the hearing, was stopped 'for no other reason than the fact that he's Latino and was working at a tow yard' in a predominantly Latino area. 'Because of this fundamental misunderstanding of the law from the government, we have seen so many unconstitutional and unlawful arrests,' Tajsar said. Tajsar also pushed back on the government attorneys saying they didn't have enough time, stating that 'they had time and they have all the evidence.' In the court filing of the county and cities trying to join the suit, including Pasadena, Montebello, Monterey Park, Santa Monica, Culver City, Pico Rivera and West Hollywood, they countered that the raids haven't actually been about immigration enforcement, but are instead politically driven 'to make an example' of the region for 'implementing policies that President Donald J. Trump dislikes.' They cited Trump's post on his social media platform where he calls on immigration officials to do 'all in their power' to achieve 'the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History' by expanding efforts to detain and deport people in Los Angeles and other cities that are 'the core of Democrat power.' Late Friday evening, Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica native widely viewed as the architect of the sweeping immigration crackdown, responded to the order on X. "A communist judge in LA has ordered ICE to report directly to her and radical left NGOs — not the president," he wrote. "This is another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people." Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
