U.S. citizens, asylum seekers and more: The real people affected by Trump's latest immigration raids

With workplace raids and “roving patrols,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has dramatically ramped up its efforts to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants in recent weeks throughout major cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle.

The Trump administration claims its agents are targeting “the worst of the worst — including gang members, murderers and rapists” who have “reigned terror” on American communities. The Department of Homeland Security frequently puts out press releases publicizing the capture of these “heinous criminals.”

But on-the-ground reporting has revealed that ICE is also sweeping up otherwise law-abiding immigrants — and even some U.S. citizens — as it strives to meet the administration’s new quota of 3,000 arrests per day, up from 1,000 previously, and kick-start what President Trump has described as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Not all such reports are true. A wave of panic swept across West Los Angeles on June 13 after unverified online posts and parent emails claimed ICE agents had detained nannies at local parks and separated them from children. California Gov. Gavin Newsom then echoed the rumor on social media — shortly before it was debunked by local authorities.

Yet the basic idea — that ICE is casting a much wider net than before — has been substantiated.

According to the Wall Street Journal, top White House aide Stephen Miller — the architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — held a testy meeting last month at ICE headquarters, where he demanded that officers do “what they needed to do” to make more arrests, including rounding up noncriminals in public places.

Miller told agents they “didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice,” the Journal reported. “Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.”

All told, less than 10% of people booked into ICE custody since last October have been convicted of “serious violent or sexual crimes,” according to CNN. A majority do not have any prior criminal convictions at all.

Here are some of their stories.

The U.S. citizens

When Jason Brian Gavidia, 29, walked up to the shared car lot in Montebello, Calif., that houses his auto body shop shortly after 4:30 p.m. on June 12, he found armed Border Patrol agents inside the gates, forcing his friend and coworker Javier Ramirez, 32, to the ground. (The encounter was recorded by a security camera.) Gavidia tried to turn and walk away — but an agent followed him, twisted his arm, pressed him against a black metal fence and asked him to name the hospital he was born in.

“I was born here,” Gavidia shouted. “I’m an American, bro!”

Gavidia was telling the truth. He was born in East Los Angeles, a few miles away. He attended James A. Garfield High School. His parents came to the U.S. without papers, from Colombia and El Salvador, but they eventually attained citizenship through President Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program, according to the New York Times. Until then, Gavidia said, he’d never had a brush with law enforcement.

After checking Gavidia’s Real ID, the agents eventually relented.

But Ramirez — who is also a U.S. citizen — wasn’t so fortunate. According to Gavidia, his friend had blood dripping from his forehead and was “begging for an ambulance” as the Border Patrol struggled to handcuff him.

“I take one step and then the guy wraps the chamber of his AR-15 and he’s staring us down,” Gavidia told the New York Times.

Ramirez wound up spending more than 24 hours in a federal detention facility; he’s now been charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer. According to the Los Angeles Times, “authorities allege that Ramirez was trying to conceal himself and then ran toward the exit and refused to answer questions about his identity and citizenship. They also allege he pushed and bit an agent.”

None of those behaviors were captured on camera, and Ramirez’s lawyer, Tomas De Jesus, disputes the allegations. Ramirez “was not attempting to flee, he did not assault anyone and he raised his hands when confronted by” immigration agents, De Jesus told the Los Angeles Times. “He is the victim, not the aggressor."

The Supreme Court has long held that law enforcement officers cannot detain people based on generalizations about their race, ethnicity or employment; even a warrant to search for documents at a work site isn’t sufficient.

“There’s constitutional violations being done left and right,” Ramirez’s lawyer claimed to the New York Times. “They did not show any warrant. They did not provide any reason to why they were there. It seemed to me that they were just like, ‘Hey, you look brown, you look Mexican enough that maybe you’re undocumented.’”

The asylum seekers

Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez, 21, and Joswar “Randy” Slater Rodriguez Torres, 28, both came to Spokane, Wash., from Venezuela.

And they “did all of it legally,” according to former Spokane County commissioner Shelly O’Quinn, a Republican.

The two men met in Colombia and walked north, sleeping on the side of the road; they were threatened with machetes and robbed at gunpoint along the way. Once in Mexico, “they got jobs … [and] they went to the border every day and applied to get into the U.S.,” O’Quinn told the Spokane Spokesman-Review. “They finally were accepted … in the humanitarian parole program.”

Between October 2022 and January 2023 — as migrants fleeing humanitarian crises surged to the southern border — then-President Joe Biden created a sponsorship system designed to discourage illegal crossings by providing a legal way to enter the U.S. instead.

Under an existing immigration law known as humanitarian parole, migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua would be eligible to live and work here legally for two years if U.S. residents agreed to financially sponsor them.

Hundreds of thousands of these migrants were eventually granted parole — including Alvarez Perez, who was sponsored by former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, and Rodriguez Torres, who was set to be sponsored by O’Quinn.

But then, in October 2024, the Biden administration announced that it would not be extending parolees’ legal status and urged them to try to obtain that status through other immigration programs (such as asylum) if they wished to stay. Both Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres applied. Their hearing was scheduled for October.

Unfortunately, on March 25, the Trump administration went a step further, saying it was going to revoke parolees’ work permits and deportation protections starting in late April — at which point they would have to self-deport or face arrest and removal. A federal judge briefly blocked the order, but the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, and it finally went into effect on May 30.

Less than two weeks later, Alvarez Perez and Rodriguez Torres received a notice to check in with ICE. Stuckart took them to the appointment, but he was refused entry. Seven minutes later, an ICE official came out and said both men were being sent to a detention center in Tacoma.

No one has heard from them since.

“Spokane is their home, and they’ve been productive citizens in Spokane,” O’Quinn told KXLY. “These are two young men who came into the U.S. legally ... and they have done everything we ask those who immigrate into the U.S. to do.”

The ‘dismissals’

Late last month, an unnamed family of three — including a small child — attended an early-morning immigration hearing at a federal facility in downtown Denver. During the hearing, Judge Tyler Wood dismissed the removal case against them, according to Emily Brock, an attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.

Usually, a dismissal is good news for migrants; it tends to mean the U.S. government is no longer pursuing deportation.

But as soon as the Denver family left the courtroom, dismissal order in hand, they were detained by several plainclothes federal agents.

“They didn’t identify themselves, they just pulled out their badges and said, ‘You are coming with us,’” Brock told the Denver Post. “If I could paint a picture of the look on their faces… I don’t know. I’ve been doing this for a while, but that was really shocking. And that child just clung to his father’s neck. He was terrified.”

Brock asked if she could talk to the family about their rights, but the agents refused.

Far from being an isolated incident, this actually appears to be a new Trump administration strategy: dismiss and detain. According to data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the U.S. government currently has nearly 4 million pending immigration cases. The vast majority of them involve “regular” removal proceedings, during which the immigrants in question stay in the U.S., go about their lives and come to court when summoned.

But three U.S. immigration officials recently told the Associated Press that government attorneys were instead ordered on May 19 to start dismissing cases, “knowing full well that federal agents would then have a free hand to arrest those same individuals as soon as they stepped out of the courtroom” and detain them for “expedited” removal.

Rekha Sharma-Crawford, an immigration lawyer and board member with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called it a “bait and switch” during a recent call with reporters.

“The troubling thing here is that people are doing the right thing and going to court. They hear what they think is great news, that their case is dismissed,” Sharma-Crawford said. “But instead, they are subject to a bait and switch and a plainclothes ICE agent will then arrest them. They are detained and then they are pressured to sign documents that basically sign away all of their rights, and they are subject to expedited removal and don’t have a chance for a full and fair hearing.”

Reporters have witnessed similar dismiss-and-detain incidents outside courthouses in Seattle, Phoenix, San Antonio, New York City and elsewhere.

“We are setting people up,” Brock said of the government’s new strategy. “We’re giving people a set of rules they’re told to follow, and then halfway through the game, we’re changing the rules with no notice. And it includes a loss of liberty. … That is an intentional incitement of fear in the community, and it is not what I believe this country stands for.”

The ‘domino effect’

An L.A. taquero who is only leaving the house to work — then “turning to Uber Delivery for necessities like groceries and medicine” on his off-hours. A man from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala with U.S.-born children who sells strawberries by the side of the road and has been working to finalize his immigration status — but who now worries that “there aren’t many ways left to be here legally.” The class president whose parents “couldn’t be here today” — at her high-school graduation — “because you’re afraid.”

Even if residents like these aren’t swept up in a raid, their fear is having a powerful impact on the communities they live in.

“They don’t realise the domino effect this is going to have," Raquel Pérez told the BBC after watching masked Border Patrol agents attempt to enter a vegetable- and herb-packing facility across the street from her family’s Mexican restaurant in Oxnard, Calif.

“No one came in today,” added her mother, Paula Pérez, estimating that at least half their regulars are undocumented. “We’re all on edge.”

A nearby business that buys and sells wooden pallets had already closed, the Pérezes noted, as did a local car mechanic.

“If the strawberries or vegetables aren’t picked, that means there’s gonna be nothing coming into the packing houses,” Raquel explained. “Which means there’s not gonna be no trucks to take the stuff.”

Last week, Trump directed ICE officials to suspend worksite enforcement operations targeting farms, hotels and restaurants, amid growing concerns among industry leaders that his aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration was spooking their foreign-born workers.

“We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have, maybe not,” Trump said at the time. “We can’t do that to our farmers. And leisure too. Hotels. We’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”

The president then reversed that guidance on Monday.