conducts

Sept. 15 (UPI) — The Russian military put on a show of force Monday in a training exercise intended to prepare for a future war with Western countries.

The exercises included about 7,000 troops in locations in Belarus, a neighboring country aligned with the Kremlin, as well as in Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave, which is sandwiched between NATO-members Poland and Lithuania, according to reports from western media invited to witness the event.

The Zapad military drills are meant to simulate an attack by Western countries. Zapad, which means “West” in Russian, are normally routine drills and were last held in 2021, just before Russia invaded Ukraine.

The most recent drills took place amid heightened worries the conflict will spill into neighboring countries and comes weeks after Polish forces and their NATO allies shot down a large number of drones that had entered the country’s airspace.

The drills included a mock battle at the Borisovsky Training Ground in central Belarus, where Russian and Belarusian aircrafts, tanks and artillery opened fire on imagined Western forces, reported ABC News. Two Su-34 jets dropped large bombs and tanks fired across a field as Russian and Belarusian forces simulated retaking a village, the news outlet reported.

Western media were invited to observe the event as part of a recent thaw in relations with Belarus, which included the release of 52 political prisoners, some from western Europe.

Two unnamed U.S. military officials made a surprise visit to observe the drills, reported the Guardian.

“The best viewing seats will be provided for you,” the Belarusian defence minister, Viktor Khrenin, told them.

Belarusian Minister of Defense Viktor Khrenin said in a Telegram post that the exercise was held farther away from it western border and they were trying to reduce tensions with eastern Europe.

However, Poland responded by deploying up to 40,000 troops along its border with Belarus and NATO has stepped up jet patrols against more Russian drone incursions, reported the Guardian.

Brian Gavidia had stepped out from working on a car at a tow yard in a Los Angeles suburb Thursday, when armed, masked men — wearing vests with “Border Patrol” on them — pushed him up against a metal gate and demanded to know where he was born.

“I’m American, bro!” 29-year-old Gavidia pleaded, in video taken by a friend.

“What hospital were you born?” the agent barked.

“I don’t know, dawg!” he said. “East L.A., bro! I can show you: I have my f—ing Real ID.”

His friend, whom Gavidia did not name, narrated the video: “These guys, literally based off of skin color! My homie was born here!” The friend said Gavidia was being questioned “just because of the way he looks.”

In a statement Saturday, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said U.S. citizens were arrested “because they ASSAULTED U.S. Border Patrol Agents.” (McLaughlin’s statement emphasized the word “assaulted” in all-capital and boldfaced letters.)

When told by a reporter that Gavidia had not been arrested, McLaughlin clarified that Gavidia had been questioned by Border Patrol agents but there “is no arrest record.” She said a friend of Gavidia’s was arrested for assault of an officer.

As immigration operations have unfolded across Southern California in the last week, lawyers and advocates say people are being targeted because of their skin color. The encounter with Gavidia and others they are tracking have raised legal questions about enforcement efforts that have swept up hundreds of immigrants and shot fear into the deeply intertwined communities they call home.

Agents picking up street vendors without warrants. American citizens being grilled. Home Depot lots swept. Car washes raided. The wide-scale arrests and detainments — often in the region’s largely Latino neighborhoods — contain hallmarks of racial profiling and other due process violations.

“We are seeing ICE come into our communities to do indiscriminate mass arrests of immigrants or people who appear to them to be immigrant, largely based on racial profiling,” said Eva Bitran, a lawyer at ACLU of Southern California.

When asked about the accusations of racial profiling, the White House deflected.

Calling the questions “shameful regurgitations of Democrat propaganda by activists — not journalists,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson chided The Times reporters Saturday for not reporting the “real story — the American victims of illegal alien crime and radical Democrat rioters willing to do anything to keep dangerous illegal aliens in American communities.”

She did not answer the question.

McLaughlin said in a statement, “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE.”

She said the suggestion fans the flames and puts agents in peril.

“DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted, and officers do their due diligence,” she said. “We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement is trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.

“We will follow the President’s direction and continue to work to get the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens off of America’s streets,” she said.

Customs and Border Protection officers are stationed at the federal building in Los Angeles on Friday.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The unprecedented show of force by federal agents follows orders from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration plan and a Santa Monica native, to execute 3,000 arrests a day. In May, Miller reportedly directed top ICE officials to go beyond target lists and have agents make arrests at Home Depot or 7-Eleven convenience stores.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not answer specific questions about the encounter with Gavidia and said that immigration enforcement has been “targeted.” The agency did not explain what is meant by targeted enforcement.

But a federal criminal complaint against Javier Ramirez, another of Gavidia’s friends, said Border Patrol agents were conducting a “roving patrol” in Montebello around 4:30 p.m. when they “engaged a subject in a consensual encounter” in a parking lot on West Olympic Boulevard. The complaint noted that the parking lot is fenced and gated, but that, at the time of the interaction, the gate to the parking lot was open.

The enforcement was part of a roving patrol in what John B. Mennell, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, said was a “lawful immigration enforcement operation” in which agents also arrested “without incident” an immigrant without legal status.

Gavidia said he and Ramirez both rent space at the tow yard to fix cars.

On video captured by a security camera at the scene, the agents pull up at the open gate in a white SUV and three agents exit the car. At least one covers his face with a mask as they walk into the property and begin looking around. Shortly after, an agent can be seen with one man in handcuffs calmly standing against the fence, while Ramirez can be heard shouting and being wrestled to the ground.

Gavidia walks up on the scene from the sidewalk outside the business where agents are parked. Seeing the commotion, he turns around. An agent outside the business follows him and then another does.

Gavidia, whom Mennell identified as a third person, was detained “for investigation for interference (in an enforcement operation) and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants.”

“Video didn’t show the full story,” he said in a statement.

But it is unclear from the video exactly what that interference is. And Gavidia denies interfering with any operations.

CBP, the agency that has played a prominent role in the recent sweeps, is also under a federal injunction in Central California after a judge found it had engaged in “a pattern and practice” of violating people’s constitutional rights in raids earlier this year.

U.S. Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino, who oversaw raids that included picking people up at Home Depot and stopping them on the highway, has emerged as a key figure in L.A. He stood alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday at a news conference where Sen. Alex Padilla — the state’s first Latino U.S. senator — was handcuffed, forced to the ground and briefly held after interrupting Noem with a question.

“A lot of bad people, a lot of bad things are in our country now,” Bovino said. “That’s why we’re here right now, is to remove those bad people and bad things, whether illegal aliens, drugs or otherwise, we’re here. We’re not going away.”

Bovino said hundreds of Border Patrol agents have fanned out and are on the ground in L.A. carrying out enforcement.

A federal judge for the Eastern District of California ordered Bovino’s agency to halt illegal stops and warrantless arrests in the district after agents detained and arrested dozens of farmworkers and laborers — including a U.S. citizen — in the Central Valley shortly before President Trump took office.

The lawsuit, brought by the United Farm Workers and Central Valley residents, accused the agency of brazenly racial profiling people in a days-long enforcement. It roiled the largely agricultural area, after video circulated of agents slashing the tires of a gardener who was a citizen on his way to work, and it raised fears that those tactics could become the new norm there.

The effort was “proof of concept,” David Kim, assistant chief patrol agent under Bovino, told the San Diego investigative outfit Inewsource in March. “Testing our capabilities, and very successful. We know we can push beyond that limit now as far as distance goes.”

Bovino said at the news conference that his agents were “not going anywhere soon.”

“You’ll see us in Los Angeles. You’ll continue to see us in Los Angeles,” he said.

Bitran, who is working on the case in the Central Valley, said Miller’s orders have “set loose” agents “with a mandate to capture as many people as possible,” and that “leads to them detaining people in a way that violates the Constitution.”

In Montebello, a 78% Latino suburb that shares a border with East Los Angeles, Border Patrol agents took Gavidia’s identification. Although they eventually let him go, Ramirez, also American and a single father of two, wasn’t so lucky.

Tomas De Jesus, Ramirez’s cousin and his attorney, said authorities are accusing him of “resisting arrest, assaulting people” after agents barged into a private business, “without a warrant, without a probable cause.”

“What is the reasonable suspicion for him to be accosted?” De Jesus questioned. “What is the probable cause for them to be entering into a private business area? … At this moment, it seems to me like they have a blanket authority almost to do anything.”

Ramirez has been charged in a federal criminal complaint with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer. 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.

Montebello Mayor Salvador Melendez said he’d watched the video and called the situation “extremely frustrating.”

“It just seems like there’s no due process,” he said. “They’re going for a specific look, which is a look of our Latino community, our immigrant community. They’re asking questions after. … This is not the country that we all know it to be, where folks have individual rights and protections.”

A third individual was detained on the street for investigation for interference and released after being confirmed to be a U.S. citizen with no outstanding warrants.

Even before the video was looping on social media feeds, Angelica Salas — who heads one of the most well-established immigration advocacy groups in Los Angeles — said she was getting reports of “indiscriminate” arrests and American citizens being questioned and detained.

“We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”

The Supreme Court has long held that law enforcement officers cannot detain people based on generalizations that would cast a wide net of suspicion on large segments of the law-abiding population.

“Some of the accounts I have heard suggest that they’re just stopping a whole bunch of people, and then questioning them all to find out which ones might be unlawfully present,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA Law School.

An agent can ask a person about “anything,” he said. But if the person declines to speak, the agent cannot detain them unless they have reasonable suspicion that the individual is unlawfully here.

“The 4th Amendment as well as governing immigration regulations do not permit immigration agents to detain somebody against their will, even for a very brief time, absent reasonable suspicion,” he said.

Just being brown doesn’t qualify. And being a street vendor or farmworker does not, either. A warrant to search for documents at a work site also is not enough to detain someone there.

“The agents appear to be flagrantly violating these immigration laws,” he said, “all over Southern California.”

Gavidia said the agents who questioned him in Montebello never returned his Real ID.

“I’m legal,” he said. “I speak perfect English. I also speak perfect Spanish. I’m bilingual, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be picked out, like, ‘This guys seems Latino; this guy seems a little bit dirty.’

“It was the worst experience I ever felt,” Gavidia said, his voice shaking with anger as he spoke from the business Friday. “I felt honestly like I was going to die.”

On Saturday, Gavidia joined De Jesus in downtown L.A. for his first-ever protest.

Now, he said, it felt personal.

China’s drills near the Scarborough Shoal came as South Korea announced finding new Chinese buoys in the Yellow Sea.

China’s navy has conducted “combat readiness patrols” near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, while South Korean officials separately announced the discovery of more Chinese buoys in contested waters in the Yellow Sea.

The Southern Theatre Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted the drills in the “territorial waters and airspace of China’s Huangyan Island and surrounding areas”, state-run news outlet Xinhua reported on Saturday, using China’s name for the Scarborough Shoal.

The report said the PLA had been conducting drills in the area throughout May to “further strengthen the control of relevant sea and air areas, resolutely defend national sovereignty and security, and resolutely maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea”.

The Scarborough Shoal is a rocky islet claimed by The Philippines, located 220km (119 miles) west of Luzon, the nearest landmass. Beijing blockaded and seized the territory, a traditional fishing ground, from Manila in 2012.

The Chinese navy regularly carries out provocative military drills in the area as part of its claims of sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea, despite a 2016 international tribunal ruling that Beijing’s claims had no legal basis under international law.

In late April, Manila accused Beijing of carrying out “dangerous manoeuvres and obstruction” after a Chinese naval ship damaged a Philippine coastguard ship with a water cannon near the shoal.

Tension in the Yellow Sea

Also on Saturday, South Korean officials announced they had recorded three new Chinese buoys installed near overlapping waters with South Korea, bringing the total number of such devices installed by China in the Yellow Sea to 13.

“[We] are closely monitoring activities within the provisional maritime zone [PMZ], including China’s unauthorised installation of structures, and will closely [cooperate] with relevant agencies to protect our maritime sovereignty,” a Ministry of Defence official said, according to South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency.

Two of the Chinese buoys – first detected in May 2023, but only announced this week – have been installed near the zone, according to Yonhap.

The third buoy is located inside the maritime zone, a contested area where the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) claims of South Korea and China overlap, Yonhap added.

China asserts its maritime boundary is based on a 1962 agreement signed with North Korea which cuts into waters South Korea considers part of its economic zone.

The Yellow Sea PMZ allows joint management of marine resources and prohibits activities beyond navigation and fishing.

However, tensions have grown between Beijing and Seoul as China has repeatedly erected installations in the waters, including 10 three-metre-wide and six-metre-tall observation buoys since 2018 and a fixed steel structure in 2022.

Last week, China declared three no-sail zones within the zone, in a move “believed to be for military training purposes”, according to the Korea Joongang Daily newspaper.

The no-sail declarations caused concern in Seoul over a potential uptick in Chinese military activity in the area.