In recent days, mass protests in Los Angeles have dominated the headlines. Images of demonstrators facing off with National Guard members and flaming cars have filled the news.

The primary cause of this unrest has been less visible, but no less disorderly or disruptive. Behind the tensions in LA lies a radical escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

To accelerate deportations, top White House adviser Stephen Miller instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in late May to dispense with norms and legal niceties that had previously constrained its activities, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Since then, the agency has deprioritized the removal of immigrants implicated in crimes, opting instead to target undocumented workers at random. It has stopped drafting lists of immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and started arresting day laborers at businesses like Home Depot and 7-Eleven en masse, ensnaring some US citizens in the process. One such raid ignited the LA protests.

Under Joe Biden, ICE had generally refrained from raiding schools, churches, and hospitals. Now it is reportedly arresting new mothers in maternity wards and then denying them their right to legal counsel.

Most alarmingly, some ICE agents have allegedly embraced violent and unconstitutional tactics, according to the Journal’s report. A union organizer for Washington farmworkers was driving his wife to her job at a tulip farm, when ICE agents stopped him, smashed in his car windows, and pulled him from the vehicle, all without showing badges or identification. A Russian man with a pending asylum case was reporting for his scheduled check-in at an ICE office, when a team of agents arrested him and then allegedly beat him.

And ICE has not merely been targeting........

© Vox