This article includes images of law enforcement violence and medical emergencies.

SInce June 6, federal agents have embarked on a militarized rampage and terror campaign across the greater Los Angeles area.

Pursuing the Trump administration’s daily quota of 3,000 arrests, federal agents have ripped through predominantly Latino cities and neighborhoods. In “roving patrols,” as the government has described them in court filings, agents without warrants have abducted day laborers, street vendors, car wash workers, and others swept up in the government’s dragnet.

Despite the Trump administration’s pledge to target “violent criminals,” the vast majority of those detained do not have criminal records. That has not stopped the government from deploying violence against those in its path.

Throughout the first month of its focused operation in and around Los Angeles, federal agents regularly used force against unarmed individuals, many of them U.S. citizens.

The Intercept analyzed more than a dozen immigration operations since June 6 involving federal agents from a hodgepodge of agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By reviewing footage and interviewing people who the authorities detained and those who witnessed raids, The Intercept identified several violent patterns.

Agents have aimed firearms and sprayed chemical irritants at onlookers and protesters. They have launched tear gas and flash bang grenades into crowds. They have beaten the people they detain, struck them with batons, and restrained them face down in a prone position, pressing them into the pavement and restricting their abilities to breathe.

Agents often deployed these violent tactics against the targets of immigration raids — people they presumed to be undocumented immigrants. In the majority of cases reviewed for this story, federal agents used force against U.S. citizens who were attempting to document raids or intervene by putting their bodies between the agents and their neighbors.

Legal experts said video evidence shows the government response is disproportionate and a violation of constitutional rights, particularly in cases where bystanders were filming or yelling at agents without intervening.

“There’s a pattern of reacting violently and excessively against people that aren’t interfering or otherwise causing harm to law enforcement,” said attorney Matthew Borden.

“If I say, ‘I don’t like the fact that you’re in my community and you’re kidnapping people or breaking apart families,’ I got a right to say that, and the government can’t suppress that right,” said Borden, who is representing journalists, legal observers, and protesters injured by federal agents in Paramount and across Southern California, in a lawsuit. “Once you do, it’s like Tiananmen Square.”

The Trump administration defends its practices in the Los Angeles area, claiming that federal agents are under attack and that videos analyzed by The Intercept fail to capture key moments. Federal prosecutors are also filing criminal charges against a growing number of protesters who have confronted agents. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said those who attempt to slow ICE operations would be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Violent Arrests

Adrian Martinez sat in his car during his lunch break at Walmart. It was June 17, and videos of ICE raids snatching immigrants off the street flooded his social media feeds. On his way to the bank to get some cash for lunch, Martinez saw a janitor from his work sprinting across the parking lot.

The janitor looked terrified. Behind him was a masked man carrying an AR-15-style assault rifle.

The armed man caught up to the janitor, grabbed him, and started “manhandling him like very aggressively for no reason,” Martinez told The Intercept.

Martinez drove up to the altercation. By the time he hopped out of the car, more armed agents had emerged from trucks, including some wearing CBP uniforms. He remembered agents cocking their rifles, which Martinez interpreted as an attempt to intimidate him and the growing group of bystanders who had gathered in the parking lot, filming, yelling, and honking their horns.

“They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”

“What is he doing? He’s a fucking hard worker,” Martinez yelled at agents, according to video recorded by a bystander. Security footage from a nearby business shows Martinez slowly pulling a cart containing a trash can and cleaning supplies, which the janitor had abandoned, in front of a government vehicle. Moments later, an agent approached Martinez, knocked down the trash can, and pushed him to the asphalt.

The bystander video captures a second moment when three armed agents slammed Martinez to the ground. During that scuffle, another agent knocked the bystander’s phone out of his hands. The bystander, Oscar Preciado, said the agent also tried to detain him, but he was able to escape.

According to Preciado, as well as security and bystander video, federal agents initiated physical contact with Martinez.

Video: Oscar Preciado

PICO RIVERA, June 17

LA County

Walmart employee Adrian Martinez, 20, was taken into custody by federal agents after standing up for a janitorial worker targeted in an immigration raid. Martinez suffered a knee contusion, bruises, and scrapes.

Outcome of raid: Two people detained, including Martinez, a U.S. citizen.

During the arrest, the group of agents wrestled Martinez to the ground, twisting his arm and grabbing him by the neck. At one point, an agent drove his hand into Martinez’s neck to force him into a CBP truck.

“I was just confused,” Martinez said. “They don’t give me no explanation, they just started attacking me — for sticking up for a poor man, just using my words.”

He was dragged into custody at around 9 a.m., with his car still running in the parking lot. Martinez, who was born in Huntington Park, insisted to agents that he was a U.S. citizen as they brought him to the basement of a federal building in downtown LA along with detained immigrants.

Martinez’s attorneys and relatives didn’t know where he was for more than 12 hours. His mother said officials at a federal detention facility initially turned her away, saying her son wasn’t there.

“If they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”

“So many things were going through my head, like, is he OK? What did they do to him?” Martinez’s mother, Myra Martinez, told The Intercept. “Like, if they’re doing that to him in broad daylight, what are they going to do behind closed doors?”

Martinez was released after four days in detention on $5,000 bond. While detained, he did not receive medical care for his injuries. He was later diagnosed with a knee contusion and placed in a leg brace. He had bruises and scrapes across his body.

Newly appointed U.S. Attorney in the Central District of California Bill Essayli initially accused Martinez in a statement of “punching a Border Patrol agent in the face.” In a statement to The Intercept, a DHS spokesperson said one agent was also punched in the arm. But in court filings, prosecutors seemed to walk back those allegations. Martinez was charged with the lesser felony of “conspiracy to impede” a federal officer, but not of assault.

Attorneys for Martinez with the Miller Law Group called the charge “trumped up” and said it was used “to justify the federal agents’ violent treatment of Adrian.”

“He did nothing to justify being grabbed by the throat by heavily-armed and masked agents and thrown into a Border Patrol vehicle,” the attorneys said.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, helped Martinez’s attorneys and relatives locate him. Salas acknowledged that community members have responded to the raids with impassioned resistance, but she said their pushback has been justified. It has often been federal agents who initiate violence, she pointed out, roughing up their targets — at times tackling people to the ground or shattering car windows to yank them out.

CHIRLA helped file a July 2 class-action lawsuit against DHS on behalf of individuals detained by immigration authorities. The lawsuit challenges the legality of southern California’s recent immigration sweeps, which, according to the complaint, “look less like lawful arrests and more like brazen, midday kidnappings.”

The complaint lists numerous examples of people being “chased and pushed to the ground, sometimes even beaten, and then taken away” after they try to avoid agents. Such violence, Salas said, is what community members are fighting.

“They’re using their bodies, their words to try to stop something, and that’s what they have,” Salas said of protesters objecting to the raids. “They don’t have the guns — let’s keep in mind who actually has the ability to deny a person their liberty or their life.”

On Juneteenth, two days after Martinez’s arrest, federal agents fanned out across LA for an especially aggressive day of raids targeting department store........

© The Intercept