President Trump ramped up his mass deportation crackdown on Saturday as he focused ICE’s efforts on Los Angeles.
Illegal migrants in the sanctuary city were reportedly rounded up in a sweep of early morning raids, a day after Trump visited the area to survey wildfire devastation.
Arrested migrants were held at ICE detention centers in California, which were expected to fill up so quickly due to Trump’s raids that federal agents have been scouting for more detention spaces, the New York Post reported.
Sources told the outlet that ICE agents are expected to continue sweeping Los Angeles seven days a week, but have avoided areas of the city that were destroyed by recent wildfires.
On Friday, ICE announced in its daily update that it had arrested 593 criminals and lodged 449 detainer requests, which require law enforcement to hold illegal migrants until ICE can pick them up.
The agency posted on X late Saturday that it arrested 286 illegal migrants and lodged 421 detainers. It is not yet clear how many people of these arrests were from that day’s raids in Los Angeles.
The raids in Los Angeles come as Trump has forged ahead with his pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation effort in US history in his first week back in power, arresting well over 2,000 people since his inauguration on Monday.
On Friday, a senior official in the Trump administration revealed exclusive deportation and detainment data with DailyMail.com, including chilling details of dangerous criminals that were previously walking the streets freely.
Almost 5,000 Homeland Security and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers have been deployed by the Trump administration to carry out raids, particularly targeting sanctuary cities where dangerous criminals were previously unable to be tracked by ICE under weak Biden-era immigration policies.
Among the worst of the worst to be picked up by ICE on Friday included Cesar Augusto Polanco, 59, a Dominican Republican national who was living free in Boston despite a criminal conviction for second-degree murder.
Like many others in the unmasked deportation list, Mendoza-Garcia was initially arrested during the Biden administration in October 2023, but was merely handed a notice to appear and released into society – and lived free for over a year until he was taken into custody this week.
In New York, where buses and flights of migrants under Biden’s administration topped over 10,000 people at their peak, a number of raids led to arrests of known gang members and criminals.
Jose Tito Reyes, 54, a citizen of El Salvador, was picked up on Friday by ICE and was found to have a previous conviction for forcible touching, receiving a sentence of 90 days imprisonment and 3 years’ probation.
ICE in New Orleans snared Juan Miseal Canales-Garcia, another El Salvador citizen who had a previous conviction of robbery and kidnapping.
Mexican national Edgar Rivas-Rodriguez was also detained in Chicago, as he was walking the streets despite past convictions for possession of methamphetamine and leaving the scene of an accident-causing injury.
Just like Mendoza-Garcia, a wave of suspected members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang have been arrested this week – with the gang known to have gained a foothold in the United States in recent years.
This terrifying development made headlines last year as Tren de Aragua gangsters took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado.
The terrifying slate of arrested illegal immigrants are just some of the known murderers, rapists and pedophiles who were taken into custody in Trump’s first week back – also including a Haiti gang leader with 17 past convictions who was seen erupting into a wild rant as he was hauled into a cop car on Wednesday.
It comes as Mexican authorities blocked a US military plane from deporting illegal migrants on Thursday.
The flight was one of three that were set to take off on Thursday, alongside two Guatemala-bound Air Force C-17s carrying over 150 people, as part of what Trump has described as the largest mass deportation effort in US history.
Trump’s hardline Border Czar Tom Homan said on Thursday that of the 1,300 migrants that had been arrested at the time, ‘over 1,000 of them were criminals.’
He slammed sanctuary city policies for having allowed migrants with long rap sheets remain in US cities as they declined to alert ICE of their whereabouts during the Biden-era.
‘I don’t care if Republican or Democrat, Independent, why not let law enforcement go into a county jail, taxpayer county jail, to arrest the guy that you locked in a jail cell so obviously, the public safety threat that will solve a lot of this problem,’ he said.
‘And I hope the sanctuary cities come around.’
