Los Angeles (KAAB TV) – ICE – U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement – was created in 2003 through a merger of departments of the former U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
ICE now has more than 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel in more than 400 offices in the United States and around the world and an annual budget of approximately $8 billion.
According to its website, ICE carries out enforcement and removal operations both within and outside the U.S.
It says its work is “critical to the enforcement of immigration law against those who present a danger to our national security, are a threat to public safety, or who otherwise undermine the integrity of our immigration system.”
ICE’s operations target public safety threats “such as convicted criminal undocumented aliens and gang members, as well as individuals who have otherwise violated…immigration laws, including those who illegally re-entered the country after being removed.”
Police have declared all of downtown Los Angeles to be an unlawful assembly area and ordered protesters to go home, after Sunday saw a third day of violence hit demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
National Guard troops were deployed by Trump at the weekend to help quell the protests, a move California Governor Gavin Newsom called unlawful.
They guarded federal government buildings on Sunday.
The unrest in Los Angeles has become a major flashpoint in Trump’s signature effort to clamp down on illegal immigration.
The U.S. president has pledged to deport record numbers of people who are in the country illegally and to lock down the U.S.-Mexico border, setting the border enforcement agency ICE a daily goal of arresting at least 3,000 migrants.
California state and local officials, mainly Democrats, accuse Trump of inflaming initially small-scale protests by mounting a federal response. He calls the protesters insurrectionists.
Los Angeles police said some protesters had thrown concrete projectiles, bottles and other items at police. Police declared several rallies to be unlawful assemblies and later extended that to include the whole downtown area.
Police said they had arrested 10 people on Sunday and 29 the previous night, adding arrests were continuing.
We’ll bring you the latest developments on Monday as we get them.