On Monday, a congressional hearing is being held near Union Station in downtown Los Angeles about the impact of the ICE raids in Los Angeles.
Several local council members, local members of Congress, and members of Congress from Arizona are taking part in the hearing.
Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez said that the first few weeks “felt like a city under attack.”
“Grocery stores were empty, business corridors were deserted. At MacArthur Park, little kids at a summer camp had to hide because agents stormed in on horseback with military grade weapons,” she recalled. “One man in our district, a legal resident with no criminal record, and I wanna emphasize that no criminal record - because they are using that as an excuse to get our people - he was grabbed at a Home Depot in my district. He told agents over and over again, ‘I have papers,’ and the response was to ‘shut up.’ They beat him, threw him to the ground and twisted his recently operated shoulder, and detained him for 3 weeks with no due process. “
Hortensia Ramirez is among those who testified. She said she witnessed numerous violent and illegal arrests.
“We've seen everything from people being hospitalised because they're hurt so badly by ICE agents,” she said. “Even women have been bruised. Their whole body is bruised. Why that has to be done has to be done that way, I don't understand. It's bad enough that what they're doing is inhumane. I hope that they're at some point they're held accountable for what they've done. What they're doing is just horrible.”
KNX News’ Jon Baird spoke with Art Del Cueto, Border Security Advisor for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organisation that “evaluates policies, seeking out solutions that help reduce the negative impact of uncontrolled immigration.” Del Cuerto said that while he believes complaints should be investigated, sometimes things boil over.
“If you have a problem and you want to report an abuse, by all means,” he said. “But I think when you start having these demonstrations, you start doing these protests, it adds more fuel to the fire, and then you get people that are coming out of the woodwork to complain about issues that are non-issues.”
Del Cuerto said people should be apprehended and detained when they break the law for the security of the country.
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