Residents are silently disappearing in immigration sweeps throughout Orange County as National Guardsmen are stationed in front of federal buildings in Downtown Santa Ana – a majority Latino city.
Where do residents go when they’re caught up in the federal immigration sweeps?
Are they criminals, day laborers or people who’ve overstayed their visas?
How do families and others find out the fate of those detained?
[Read: Immigration Sweeps Hit a Santa Ana Neighborhood on Father’s Day]
These are some of the rapidly mounting questions from a rising bipartisan contingent of local elected officials as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have been conducting sweeps throughout Southern California over the past week and a half.
Our newsroom has continually reached out to Department of Homeland Security officials since June 9 to get information with no response on the current sweeps.
On Thursday, we got a limited response.
“The Trump Administration is enforcing immigration laws – something the previous administration failed to do. Those who violate these laws will be processed, detained, and removed as required, read an emailed response from the DHS media staff.
In the emailed response, Department of Homeland Security officials said they know exactly who they’re after.
“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted. We do our due diligence. We know who we are targeting ahead of time,” read the emailed statement. “ If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement officers are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.”
We haven’t been alone in our curiosity.
“Funny you should ask,” said Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner in texted response to my questions on Tuesday.
“Just this afternoon I lobbed those questions — who has been picked up, how many, and what offenses? — to the sheriff,” said Wagner, a leading OC Republican.
Later in the afternoon, he shared the Sheriff’s response,
“Details on specific ICE operations and arrests were not shared with OCSD and details outside of official DOJ/DHS/ICE statements are primarily based on rumor and hearsay,” was what the supervisor heard back.
“Admittedly not an answer because ICE won’t say,” Wagner said, adding that it’s “silence from ICE, which I don’t appreciate.”
I also asked OC District Attorney officials to see if they got any kind of notifications of criminals swept off local streets or any information on citizens being arrested by federal officials.
DA officials also said they don’t get any such information.
“I had asked because it’s a fair question,” Wagner said. “We need to know to evaluate the policy, and if everything is legit and defensible, explain and defend. Silence encourages speculation.”
Congressman Lou Correa, one of Orange County’s highest ranking Democrats who sits on an ICE oversight committee, said he’s beginning to suspect that the lack of information is on purpose.
Silence spurs terror.
The silence is particularly frightening for many Latinos – given the tradition of disappeared political opponents across Latin America during militarized regimes in the 1970s and 1980s, a pattern that has continued in recent years.
“The taking of people off the streets by masked and unidentified individuals, holding them incommunicado, not allowing them to have legal representation or contact with their families, are all authoritarian tactics,” said Orange County Supervisor Vicente Sarmiento in response to my questions.
Correa told me he’s considering federal legislation mandating more local reporting about federal sweeps in American neighborhoods.
In South Orange County, a similar trend has been called out by Congressman Mike Levin, who has been trying to get information about a Laguna Niguel couple deported earlier this year after an immigration court check in.
“I’ve reached out to DHS to demand information about the number of individuals without a criminal record who have been deported, including my own Laguna Niguel constituents Gladys and Nelson Gonzalez. Weeks have passed and DHS has not provided any information,” Levin said in a Wednesday statement.
Those looking for information on neighbors or family members deported can check on individual status here.
There are some general stats kept by ICE, but there’s virtually no reliable public information on local immigration enforcement operations in Orange County or data about who is being detained, much less where they are being transferred in real time.
I found a similar pattern when I spent a year investigating deportation efforts back in 2007 for the Orange County Register.
It’s difficult to get a sense of who’s going through the immigration system in real time.
That gap drew notice this past week by several Santa Ana city council members.
At Tuesday’s city council meeting, Councilwoman Jessie Lopez asked city leaders publicly to develop some sort of way to better inform families in real time.
Councilman Ben Vazquez asked city officials to submit Freedom of Information requests to ICE for a listing of detainees from Santa Ana.
And in a Wednesday morning interview, City Councilman Jonathan Hernandez said he’ll be asking city officials to set up their own website detailing who’s been swept off Santa Ana streets.
While home from Congress in recent weeks, Correa said he’s started off each day by checking in on ICE detainees in downtown Santa Ana – noting at a news conference last week that many of the detainees looked like construction workers, not criminals.
“It’s absolutely concerning and appalling,” Correa said. “We’re trying to get information on these individuals who’ve been picked up.”
One recent Sunday, Correa relayed that a neighborhood dad got picked up, a farm worker, who was terrified of going to work in the fields so was dumpster diving for cans, where he got picked up by ICE.
When he went to the ICE holding facility in Santa Ana, asking to see the father, he was told he was already transferred.
“When you think about due process, right to a lawyer, phone call – when you have detainees moving around in this method, it is hard to exercise their rights,” Correa said.
Correa told me he thought it was ironic that recent moves by the City of Santa Ana to not allow leasing of facilities to ICE may have made it tougher to see family members because it encourages quick transfers to places like holding centers in Adelanto or out of state.
[Read: Santa Ana Backs Away From ICE Contract Expansion]
I noticed a recent report in the Victorville Daily Press noting that the ICE Adelanto facility went from being virtually empty in February to holding nearly 1,200 recently.
Correa sees needless cruelty in the system.
The congressman said he wants some type of way for people to check on their family members caught up in the immigration sweeps.
“What’s wrong with providing them information?”
With such little information, Correa also worries about the neighborhood impacts given that many of these federal agents aren’t identified and behind masks, spurring confusion about who’s doing raids.
“It’s a powder keg.”