NEW YORK — When a black teen-ager was killed in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn last summer after a run-in with a gang of whites, mayoral candidate David N. Dinkins made it clear what New York should expect from its top leader: “The tone and climate of the city does get set at City Hall.”
The perception that Dinkins could soothe racial tensions was probably the single biggest force behind his election as New York’s first black mayor. The last few weeks have brought a series of racial problems that have put the mayor under intense pressure to deliver on the expectations that he built.
“Though we cannot eliminate racial and ethnic friction overnight, we must take the first steps. Our beginning will, of course, be marked by small–sometimes indirect–steps. But even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” Dinkins said Monday.
But the mayor who exults in his city as a multi-ethnic “gorgeous mosaic” is feeling the cut of its sharp edges.
Each day seems to bring worse turmoil. Dinkins appears besieged, encircled by his detractors and undercut by the expectations that he himself raised. Some black leaders have gone so far as to publicly call him a traitor.
Dinkins faces two potentially explosive controversies in Brooklyn: As two juries have deliberated almost a week in the Bensonhurst slaying of Yusuf Hawkins, angry demonstrators have rallied each day outside the Brooklyn courthouse, and some of their leaders warn that violence is inevitable if the panels return anything less than a guilty verdict.
Meanwhile, blacks in Flatbush continue a four-month boycott of two Korean grocers that started with a dispute between one of the grocers and a black woman customer. While it is far from clear who was at fault in the original incident–the woman claims to have been beaten and the grocer contends that he merely pushed her to prevent her from shoplifting–it unmistakably tapped long-festering bitterness. Demonstrators have chanted such epithets as “Korean bloodsuckers” outside the stores, and have spat at customers who try to shop there.
A few blocks from the store, a group of more than a dozen blacks on Sunday beat three Vietnamese whom they apparently mistook for Korean.
Elsewhere in the city, smaller disputes add to the tension. A black City University professor is preaching black supremacy, while a white faculty member at the same school is saying that blacks are less intelligent and more prone to commit crime than whites. A group of white students at St. John’s University in Queens stands accused of raping a black woman. And Jimmy Breslin, one of the city’s most prominent columnists, has been suspended by New York Newsday after making racial comments about another staff member.
Dinkins’ low-key and cautious approach, which had initially seemed a soothing balm to the abrasion of former Mayor Edward I. Koch, now is being criticized as weakness and indecisiveness.
Roy Innis, national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, said in an interview Monday: “We’ve got to have a commitment to telling the hard truth. David Dinkins is not strong enough to do it.”
Innis accused Dinkins of “reverse racism” for failing to denounce the grocery store boycott that is “reeking with raw and naked, palpable racism.” He attributed Dinkins’ reluctance to the mayor’s association with Sonny Carson, the self-proclaimed “anti-white” leader of the boycott, who worked for the Dinkins campaign before being dismissed for anti-Semitic remarks.
Other blacks, however, have accused Dinkins of pandering to whites, particularly after the mayor made a rare foray onto prime-time live television last Friday to appeal for tolerance. “We must repress our rage,” the mayor said.
“He is a lover of white people and the system. And last night, he bashed black people,” said C. Vernon Mason, a lawyer who has been involved in a number of racial cases. “He ain’t got no African left in him. He’s got too many yarmulkes on his head.”
Mason made his comments at a rally Saturday, where he called the mayor “a traitor,” and some people in a crowd of hundreds chanted, “Judas, Judas.”
Many of Dinkins’ critics seem to suggest that as a black, he should automatically hold sway over New York’s black community–a view that does not recognize the diversity of opinion and outlook among blacks in the city.
One source in Dinkins’ Administration noted that the mayor has alienated some factions, who say they are disappointed in the number of blacks he has appointed to key posts at City Hall. Others have not forgiven Dinkins’ denunciation of the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, the black Muslim leader who once described Judaism as a “gutter” religion.
Dinkins’ Friday night address won high marks from many quarters, however. Former Mayor John V. Lindsay described it as “superb.”
Nonetheless, any hopes that it might have turned the tide were dashed less than 36 hours later, when the three Vietnamese were beaten by the group of blacks who thought they were Korean. Police on Monday arrested two people in connection with the assault, which Police Commissioner Lee Brown said was not related to the boycott.
Dinkins and several state legislators Monday held a news conference to announce state legislation aimed at crimes committed by groups, and to make a new push for a bill to stiffen penalties for crimes that are motivated by bias.
Zohran Mamdani, born in Uganda and raised in New York, is in the lead to become the city’s next mayor. His complex identity has sparked debate in the United States. From questions about race to immigrant experiences, his story is challenging the way Americans think about identity, politics, and who gets power.
WASHINGTON — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said.
The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with the Associated Press. The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20.
The photographs at issue showed a group of agents taking the knee during one of the demonstrations after the May 2020 killing of Floyd, a death that led to a national reckoning over policing and racial injustice and sparked widespread anger after millions of people saw video of the arrest. The kneeling had angered some in the FBI but was also understood as a possible deescalation tactic during a period of protests.
The FBI Agents Assn. confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.
“As Director Patel has repeatedly stated, nobody is above the law,” the agents association said. “But rather than providing these agents with fair treatment and due process, Patel chose to again violate the law by ignoring these agents’ constitutional and legal rights instead of following the requisite process.”
An FBI spokesman declined to comment Friday.
The firings come amid a broader personnel purge at the bureau as Patel works to reshape the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.
Five agents and top-level executives were known to have been summarily fired last month in a wave of ousters that current and former officials say has contributed to declining morale.
One of those, Steve Jensen, helped oversee investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Another, Brian Driscoll, served as acting FBI director in the early days of the second Trump administration and resisted Justice Department demands to supply the names of agents who investigated Jan. 6.
A third, Chris Meyer, was incorrectly rumored on social media to have participated in the investigation into President Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A fourth, Walter Giardina, participated in high-profile investigations like the one of Trump advisor Peter Navarro.
A lawsuit filed by Jensen, Driscoll and another fired FBI supervisor, Spencer Evans, alleged that Patel communicated that he understood that it was “likely illegal” to fire agents based on cases they worked but was powerless to stop it because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who investigated Trump.
Patel denied at a congressional hearing last week taking orders from the White House on whom to fire and said anyone who has been fired failed to meet the FBI’s standards.
Trump, who was twice impeached and is the only U.S. president with a felony conviction, was indicted on multiple criminal charges in two felony cases. Both cases were dismissed after he was elected, following long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
Aug. 20 (UPI) — A North Carolina man on Tuesday pleaded guilty to a federal charge for racially harassing a group of people in a Charlotte pizza shop and threatening to kill them with a loaded military-style rifle.
The U.S. Justice Department announced that Maurice Hopkins, 32, had pleaded guilty to federal civil rights violations over a June 2024 incident in which he targeted a group of eight Indians over their race, color, religion and national origin. The incident occurred during the height of the 2024 election when federal authorities warned of increased threats of violence against minority communities.
Officers arrived at the pizza shop after receiving a call about Hopkins, who was making racial remarks to the group and said he “had something for them” and was going to “get his AR” after being asked to leave, according to a police affidavit.
A witness told police that Hopkins left and returned with a white four-door vehicle. The witness saw the red tip sight on the gun and tried unsuccessfully to distract Hopkins from going into the store. Hopkins then entered the store and pointed the rifle at customers, according to the document.
During the incident, Hopkins asked the victims if they were Americans, and then proceeded to call them terrorists, demand they speak English and told them to go back to their country, according to the Justice Department release. The victims fled through the pizza shop’s back door.
Hopkins’ sentencing date has not been set. He could face a maximum of 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to one charge of interference with federally protected activities.
Around the same time of the incident, federal prosecutors indicted the leader of an Eastern European neo-Nazi group that planned to kill minorities in New York City on New Year’s Eve. The group allegedly plotted to have a recruit dressed as Santa Clause hand out poisoned candy.
Earlier that year, a group of Massachusetts eight-graders were charged criminally for their participation in a “mock slave auction” and making racist comments at Black students on Snapchat.
Reporting from CINCINNATI — Before he became the king of Atlantic City casinos, before he put his name on steaks or starred on reality television, Donald Trump served his own apprenticeship in the less glamorous family business of renting apartments.
Trump, in his autobiography, recalled learning valuable lessons from his father, Fred: Hunt for bargains. Chase out deadbeats. Spend some money on paint and polish.
Some alleged there was another part to the Trump formula: Make it tough for black people to move in.
In two court cases, built on evidence gathered from frustrated black apartment-seekers, housing activists and former employees, Fred, and, in a later case, Donald Trump faced accusations of systematic discrimination against African Americans, cases that the Trumps ultimately settled without admitting any wrongdoing.
Some would-be tenants were turned away at a complex in Cincinnati, where Donald Trump says he got his start as a property manager. And in New York, the allegations led to what was then one of the largest housing discrimination lawsuits filed by the federal government.
More than 1,000 pages of documents in the two cases in Cincinnati and New York, reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, demonstrate how accusations of racial discrimination dogged the family business from the earliest days of Donald Trump’s career. And they illustrate how young Trump, faced with an early crisis, responded aggressively to charges of bias.
Since he began his run for president more than a year ago, Trump has frequently been criticized for trading in racially tinged appeals, describing some Mexican immigrants as rapists and questioning whether a federal judge’s Mexican heritage made him incapable of being fair to Trump.
He angered some Native Americans by attacking a U.S. senator as “Pocahontas” and spurring supporters into sarcastic war whoops. Most recently, he criticized the parents of a fallen soldier, suggesting their Muslim beliefs forbade his mother from speaking in public after her husband denounced Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the country.
Hillary Clinton recently began using the discrimination cases in attacks on Trump. Introducing her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, recently in Miami, she said, “While Tim was taking on housing discrimination and homelessness, Donald Trump was denying apartments to people who were African American.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Trump once called the federal charges “outrageous lies.”
“I have always tried to see to it that buildings which we own and manage are well-run and that there is equal opportunity for anyone to rent apartments,” he wrote in a 1973 affidavit. “The fact is that our apartments have the same ratio of minority tenants as exists in the community as a whole. Our organization has never discriminated and does not now discriminate.”
Trump’s father once was one of the biggest landlords in New York, with 14,000 units in 39 buildings, mostly in Brooklyn and Queens. Folk singer Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s Brooklyn projects when Donald was a toddler, and reworked his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a protest against the complex’s exclusionary policies:
We all are crazy fools
As long as race hate rules!
No no no! Old Man Trump!
Beach Haven ain’t my home!
At a foreclosure auction in 1964, Fred Trump bought Swifton Village, a half-empty complex that was the largest in Cincinnati. Donald Trump was just a high school senior in a military academy, but assumed increasing responsibility in managing the complex through college and business school.
In his book “The Art of the Deal,” Trump described Swifton Village as his “first big deal.” He recounted, in a chapter titled “The Cincinnati Kid,” booting poor, nonpaying tenants who had “come down from the hills of Kentucky” with “seven or eight children, almost no possessions.”
His experience in Cincinnati “gave [him] a lot of confidence,” Trump said recently at an Ohio rally.
Swifton Village had a reputation as a white complex, said Carol Coaston, now 72, who began working at a Cincinnati fair housing agency, Housing Opportunities Made Equal, around the time the suit was filed. That fall, just two or three apartments out of 1,167 in the complex were rented to black families, Fred Trump’s lawyer told a judge.
“You just kind of, growing up here, knew certain areas where discrimination occurred or you didn’t feel welcome,” Coaston said.
As the Trumps worked to upgrade Swifton Village, they employed a racial quota system and turned away black applicants, according to a lawsuit filed against Fred Trump’s company in 1969, a year after the Fair Housing Act became law. Donald Trump was not named in the complaint.
According to records from the suit and in housing agency files, a young black couple named Haywood and Rennell Cash spent four and a half months trying to rent an apartment, without success. They had two young children and were desperate to find an apartment close to Haywood’s job at General Electric and leave his mother’s crowded house. Haywood Cash said an agent took his $83 deposit, but he was repeatedly told no vacancies existed and “they couldn’t predict any.” Other African Americans were given similar explanations.
Days after the Cashes’ last inquiry, a white woman and a man posing as apartment seekers were told an apartment was available immediately and given a break on income requirements. “She urged that we get over there quick with a deposit to hold it,” wrote the woman, Margaret Faye Boyar, in a statement in the housing agency’s records.
Boyar went to the complex with Haywood Cash. When she said she did not want the apartment, but was instead helping the Cashes, the property manager “jumped out of his chair,” told Boyar to “get the hell out,” and used a racial slur, according to the lawsuit. He “began screaming at me, saying that what I was doing was ‘fraud’ and that ‘neither you nor Mr. Cash can have any damn apartment,’” she wrote.
Fred Trump’s attorneys, while denying any discrimination, tried at first to have the suit moved to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, which could have delayed the Cashes’ claim by a year, according to the renters’ lawyer. But eventually, Fred Trump agreed to rent them an apartment and an appeals court dismissed the agency’s effort to expand the case into a class-action suit.
“Their vetting operation consisted of looking at what color your skin was,” said Gwenda Blair, who wrote a history of the family’s real estate empire. “It’s certainly a one-step process.”
The New York case, filed by civil rights lawyers from the Justice Department in 1973, generated front-page headlines. The complaint alleged that the Trump company used various tactics to discriminate, including falsely claiming a lack of vacancies and requiring stiffer rental terms. The case included allegations of discrimination at at least 17 Trump properties in New York and two in Norfolk, Va.
One of those people who said they were turned away was a then-31-year-old law student from Jamaica.
“I liked the setting, I liked the view, I liked the apartment,” said the woman, Henrietta Davis, now 75. “I am a person who believes that I have an equal right to do anything I want.”
She said she visited the Brooklyn complex and was told a place was available. When she called back the next day to plan her move, she was told no apartment was available after all.
“It was very obvious,” she said. Davis said the agent encouraged her to apply at another, integrated Trump building, adding that a black judge had recently rented there. Davis said she filed a complaint with a housing agency and moved on.
“Look, it’s against the law,” she said. “They were not supposed to have been discriminating, and they discriminated, and they had to face the consequences.”
The court case included allegations from whites sent by the Urban League to pose as renters, who were offered apartments while blacks were turned away, and statements from at least 10 people who worked for the company and described tactics used to discourage black applicants. One doorman reported to investigators that he was told to tell black visitors that no apartments were available; a building superintendent in Queens said he was told to attach a paper to applications from blacks with a letter “C,” for “colored.” He said he was afraid the Trumps would have him “knocked off” if he talked. Another employee said he used the code “number 9” to flag black applicants.
By that time, 1973, Donald Trump was president of Trump Management. Instead of settling the case, he hired lawyer Roy Cohn, who had been a prominent aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist hunts of the 1950s. Cohn launched an aggressive counterattack.
Trump and Cohn denounced the civil rights lawyers at a news conference, and Trump had Cohn file a counter-suit, claiming $100 million in damages to his reputation; it was dismissed. Cohn kept the government busy with procedural protests, and obtained affidavits from some witnesses — including the Queens superintendent — recanting their statements and claiming that they had been threatened. One said the government lawyers had engaged in “Gestapo tactics.”
After two years of wrangling, the complaint was resolved with a consent agreement in which Fred and Donald Trump agreed not to discriminate, to send a list of vacancies to the Urban League and to advertise that their apartments were open to all. At one point, Fred and Donald Trump haggled over the fine points of the ad requirements before a judge.
“We were not convicted. We would win this case if we fought it,” Fred Trump said.
“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the judge, according to a transcript of the hearing.
Three years after the settlement, the Justice Department reopened the case, charging that the company was using the same tactics to chase away black tenants, saying that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” was occurring frequently. Court records do not indicate how the second court action was resolved.
Blair, the author, said that the experience in fighting the New York charges helped to forge Trump’s brash, confrontational style — even when facing serious charges of racial bias.
“His whole winning formula is to always be unpredictable,” she said. “You don’t know what he’s going to say, except that he’s going to kick somebody in the shins.”
Tanfani and Bierman reported from Washington. Times staff writer Michael A. Memoli in Cincinnati contributed to this report.
Less than half of Americans believe racial minorities face substantial discrimination, in a reversal of the previous trend.
Only 40 percent of people in the United States believe that Black and Hispanic people face “quite a bit” or “a great deal” of discrimination, according to a new poll highlighting a reversal in previously held perceptions.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Thursday also found that 30 percent of those surveyed felt the same way about Asian people, and only 10 percent believed that white people were discriminated against.
“The number of people saying Asian people and Black people are experiencing a substantial amount of discrimination has dropped since an AP-NORC poll conducted in April 2021,” according to a statement on the NORC website.
The poll comes as US President Donald Trump continues to attack initiatives that promote diversity at universities and the workplace, and to pressure institutions not aligned with his political agenda in the name of combatting left-wing ideas.
In the spring of 2021, amid massive protests against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 60 percent of people polled believed that Black people face “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of discrimination in the US. That figure has now dropped to less than 50 percent.
About 74 percent of Black people say their communities continue to face substantial discrimination, while just 39 percent of white respondents said that Black people face serious discrimination.
People in the US have also become more sceptical about corporate efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, often referred to as DEI. Many large companies have started to roll back such efforts.
Between 33 percent and 41 percent said that DEI made no difference at all, and a quarter said it was likely to increase discrimination against minorities.
“Anytime they’re in a space that they’re not expected to be, like seeing a Black girl in an engineering course … they are seen as only getting there because of those factors,” Claudine Brider, a 48-year-old Black Democrat in Compton, California, told the Associated Press. “It’s all negated by someone saying, ‘You’re only here to meet a quota.’”
But the Trump administration has gone far beyond criticisms of DEI efforts, wielding a wide definition of the term to exert pressure on institutions and organisations that he sees as hostile to his political agenda. The president has threatened, for example, to withhold federal disaster aid from states that do not align with his efforts to roll back anti-discrimination measures and open probes into companies with DEI policies, which he has framed as racist against white people.
A majority of those polled also believe that undocumented immigrants face discrimination, as the Trump administration pursues a programme of mass deportations that have caused fear in immigrant communities across the country.
“Most people, 58 percent, think immigrants without legal status also face discrimination — the highest amount of any identity group,” AP-NORC states. “Four in 10 say immigrants living legally in the United States also face this level of discrimination.”
The poll also found that more than half of the public believes Muslims face substantial discrimination, and about one-third said the same for Jewish people.
England defender Jess Carter says she will take a step back from social media after experiencing “a lot of racial abuse” during Euro 2025.
In a statement on Sunday, the Lionesses also said they would now stop the anti-racism move of taking a knee before matches, saying it was “clear we and football need to find another way to tackle racism”.
“From the start of the tournament I have experienced a lot of racial abuse,” said the 27-year-old Carter.
“While I feel every fan is entitled to their opinion on performance and result I don’t agree or think it’s OK to target someone’s appearance or race.
“As a result of this I will be taking a step back from social media and leaving it to a team to deal with.”
The Football Association said it was “working with police to ensure those responsible for this hate crime are brought to justice”.
Real Madrid defender Antonio Rudiger says he was racially abused at the end of his side’s Club World Cup win against Mexican side Pachuca.
Rudiger clashed with Pachuca captain Gustavo Cabral in injury time when the Germany defender went down claiming he had been fouled by the Argentine.
Rudiger then spoke to referee Ramon Abatti Abel, who crossed his arms in front of his chest, which signals the anti-racism protocol has been activated.
It is unclear whether the alleged racial abuse was from someone in the crowd or a player.
Fifa’s three-step process for racism is stopping a match, suspending it and finally abandoning it if the problem continues.
The match ended soon after the incident – with Real winning 3-1 – and the players again arguing after the final whistle.
Real manager Xabi Alonso said: “That’s what Rudiger said, and we believe him.
“It is important to have zero tolerance in these kinds of situations. Fifa now is investigating. That’s all I can say.”
In 2021, Rudiger, then at Chelsea, says “nothing ever really changes” after anti-discrimination campaigns in football, but he will “continue to fight” against racist abuse.
Last week campaigners criticised Fifa after it appeared to drop anti-racism messaging at the Club World Cup.
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.
