Elon Musk on Wednesday suggested that President Donald Trump’s criticism of subsidies received by his companies was wrong, as he continued to mock supporters of the president’s signature spending bill, a day after the president said he’ll look into potentially deporting the Tesla CEO and threatened probes into his companies amid a reignited feud between the two.
In an effort to fulfill the Trump administration’s daily immigration arrest “quotas,” federal agents and deputized local law enforcement are racially profiling and snatching people off the streets without due process. These arrests, carried out by armed and masked agents, are sowing terror and confusion in communities across the United States. Stephano Medina, a lawyer with the California Center for Movement Legal Services, shares how ICE regularly denies that it has taken people into custody, leading to family members scrambling for information about their loved ones. “It’s arrest now, ask questions later,” adds Dominique Boubion, an attorney representing Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen who was taken by ICE last month in what Velez has since described as a “kidnapping.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.
We go now to Los Angeles, where armed, masked federal agents have spent the last month carrying out arrests across the city. Families, immigrant advocates say they’re struggling to find their loved ones when they are disappeared. In one case, the family of a community activist and mother, Yuriana Juliana — they call her “Juli” — Pelaez Calderon, said she was taken at gunpoint on June 25th by two men in unmarked cars who pulled over as she went to work at night, which is uncommon. She used a borrowed phone to call her family to say she was taken to a warehouse where women are held alongside men. She compared the men who took her to bounty hunters and has not had proper food or access to her medication.
This is Stephano Medina, managing attorney with the L.A. office of California Center for Movement Legal Services.
STEPHANO MEDINA: So, DHS is out now saying that this is a hoax and that this is all made up, because they don’t have any record of Juli in their system, which I don’t doubt she’s not in their system. But Juli, in that phone call that she made to her family from a borrowed phone, told us that she was taken directly from where she was picked up in South Central Los Angeles to San Isidro, where she was presented to an ICE official and pressured to sign a voluntary self-deportation agreement.
AMY GOODMAN: Medina says Juli’s family filed a missing persons report with the L.A. Police Department as they continued their search for her.
Meanwhile, the family of Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen, described her arrest by ICE last month as a “kidnapping.” Andrea had just been dropped off at work by her mom and her sister, when the pair witnessed masked federal agents grabbing her and taking Andrea in an unmarked car during an immigration raid. One video shows a masked agent lifting Andrea off the ground and carrying her away. Andrea’s sister, Estrella Rosas, spoke with CBS News Los Angeles.
ESTRELLA ROSAS: They didn’t have vests that said ICE or anything. Their cars didn’t have license plates. … Just because of the color of our skin, they think that we’re criminals. My sister was there, so they were like, “Oh, she looks Hispanic, so let’s take her, too.”
AMY GOODMAN: Ultimately, Andrea Velez was released, but was charged with assaulting a federal officer during her arrest. She spoke at a news conference last week.
ANDREA VELEZ: They didn’t identify themselves. I can’t go through it, but yeah, it was — I was just going to work. It was just a day of work, and, like, everything happened so fast. So, yeah, and they didn’t identify themselves, so I was kind of scared.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in Los Angeles by Dominique Boubion. She is an attorney helping to represent Andrea Velez.
This is just such an astounding story. Dominique, can you explain what happened, as we watch her being carried with their arms under her chest, as she — walking forward? Where was she taken? Where was she held? How did you find out when she was disappeared and her family panicked?
DOMINIQUE BOUBION: Yes, of course. So, we were contacted by the family later that day, in the afternoon, because they had seen — the mother had seen her daughter being taken by ICE agents and hadn’t — but didn’t know they were ICE, had no idea who they were, and so they were terrified and looking for help just to locate her. And the video that you mentioned where she’s being lifted and carried up, that’s actually when she went to the police officers at LAPD asking for help, telling them, “These men are taking me.” So, I’ll back up and explain what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. If you can explain that point? We’re watching her being carried. Who is carrying her? And I do see police. I see the police cars, the LAPD. Who is carrying her?
DOMINIQUE BOUBION: So, that is an ICE agent. We now know it’s an ICE agent. And she was being carried away from the LAPD officers that she went over to for help, because she didn’t know who the men were or where she was being taken. She had no idea.
That morning, just minutes before, her mother had dropped her off at work on 9th and Main, downtown L.A. And as she exited the vehicle, she walked three, four steps onto the sidewalk, and suddenly there was a swarm of vehicles surrounding her. So, as she’s kind of getting her bearings what’s going on, she sees vendors over to her right, and she assumes, “OK, this must be — maybe it’s a raid. I don’t know.” She sees men approaching them. But she looks to her left, and she sees an ICE agent about 10 feet away, running full speed at her, and becomes terrified. She’s 4’11”. This is a man who, in her estimation, is over six feet. He’s masked. And he does not stop. So she becomes — she gets scared, and her reaction is to cover and block herself to protect herself, and she’s thrown to the ground.
The ICE agent continues on for about another 10, 15 seconds to get their target, and then returns and tells her she’s under arrest for what she describes as interfering. She gets put into a vehicle, a van, an unmarked van, and she’s in handcuffs. And while she’s waiting, she sees the officer, so she walks over to the officer and asks if he would help her. She doesn’t know who these men are. And that’s when you see the ICE agent pick her up and take her back to the unmarked van.
AMY GOODMAN: Why was she picked up, Dominique?
DOMINIQUE BOUBION: She — physically picked up, or why was she arrested?
AMY GOODMAN: Arrested.
DOMINIQUE BOUBION: So, what she is being charged with is assault on a peace officer. So, the version of the story that the federal agent is putting forth is that Andrea Velez purposefully walked into his path in order to protect whoever their target was, and knocked that ICE agent off balance and hit him in the head. It’s a complete fabrication, didn’t happen. And it, I believe, is more of a, number one, racial profiling. They were speaking to her in Spanish, even though she was demonstrating that she was — could speak fluent English and that she was a U.S. citizen. And I think it was a matter of “Let’s see if she is a U.S. citizen. And if she is, then we’ll slap on these charges.” It’s an issue of — it’s arrest now, ask questions later.
AMY GOODMAN: So, straight-up racial profiling?
DOMINIQUE BOUBION: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Andrea Velez has — she’s a darker-skinned Latino. And 100%, I believe that this was racial profiling.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. We’ll continue to follow this case, Dominique Boubion, one of the attorneys helping to represent Andrea Velez, a U.S. citizen arrested by ICE. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/2/ice_abductions_masked_men_andrea_velez
Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian lived in the United States for 47 years, married a U.S. citizen and raised their daughter. She was gardening in the yard of her New Orleans home when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers handcuffed and took her away, her family said.
Kashanian arrived in 1978 on a student visa and applied for asylum, fearing retaliation for her father’s support of the U.S.-backed shah. She lost her bid, but she was allowied to remain with her husband and child if she checked in regularly with immigration officials, her husband and daughter said. She complied, once checking in from South Carolina during Hurricane Katrina. She is now being held at an immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, while her family tries to get information.
Other Iranians are also getting arrested by immigration authorities after decades in the United States. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security won’t say how many people they’ve arrested, but U.S. military strikes on Iran have fueled fears that there is more to come.
“Some level of vigilance, of course, makes sense, but what it seems like ICE has done is basically give out an order to round up as many Iranians as you can, whether or not they’re linked to any threat and then arrest them and deport them, which is very concerning,” said Ryan Costello, policy director of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group.
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But over four decades, Kashanian, 64, built a life in Louisiana. The couple met when she was bartending as a student in the late 1980s. They married and had a daughter. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, filmed Persian cooking tutorials on YouTube and was a grandmother figure to the children next door.
The fear of deportation always hung over the family, Milne said, but he said his wife did everything that was being asked of her.
“She’s meeting her obligations,” Milne said. “She’s retirement age. She’s not a threat. Who picks up a grandmother?”
While Iranians have been crossing the border illegally for years, especially since 2021, they have faced little risk of being deported to their home countries due to severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. That seems to no longer be the case.
A group of armed federal immigration agents in Huntington Park, California, blasted their way into a family’s home Friday morning while searching for a man they accused of charging into a law enforcement vehicle, according to several media outlets.
“I just heard the loudest blast of my life,” resident Jenny Ramirez told NBC Los Angeles. “I told them, “You didn’t have to do this. You scared my son, my baby and myself.’”
Ring camera footage obtained by the outlet shows a group of armed Customs and Border Protection agents placing an explosive device near Ramirez’s home before a fiery explosion breached the front of the residence. The agents then entered one by one with weapons drawn.
“If they would’ve knocked on my door I would have opened the door, but they blew up the window and door first,” Ramirez told ABC7. “There didn’t have to be that violence to enter my house.”
Ramirez told NBC Los Angeles she heard the explosion —which blew off her door and shattered the windows — a little after 6 a.m. Friday.
She said she and her two children, ages 1 and 6, were the only people inside the house at the time, which she shares with her boyfriend, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez.
“Where they broke the window, my baby was there, and before I got him out of there was when it exploded,” Ramirez told ABC7. “My ears went blank, I imagine how they felt. They were shaking.”
Ramirez said authorities did not give her any warning that they wanted to enter the home, adding that they deployed a drone into her house after setting off the explosive device.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/border-patrol-blast-american-family-home_n_686039dae4b0a28ae2087aab
President Donald Trump went on several tirades about former friends and political opponents alike on Tuesday, July 1, even threatening to jail a rising political star and a former Biden Cabinet member.
After touring a new detention facility for detainees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida, Trump sat down with reporters at “Alligator Alcatraz” to answer a few questions.
Asked about New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — who had just officially earned the Democratic nomination on Tuesday — the president said, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.”
Mamdani, 33, was born in Uganda and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2018. He defeated former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a major election upset as a self-described Democratic Socialist, which also earned Trump’s ire.
“We don’t need a communist in this country,” he said. “But if we have one, I’m going to be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation… We’re going to look at everything.”
Trump was also asked about Mamdani’s campaign promises to “stop masked ICE agents from deporting our neighbors.”
His response? “Well then, we’ll have to arrest him.”
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https://people.com/trump-threatens-arrest-2-political-opponents-in-same-press-conference-11764784
In a video circulating on social media, a group of masked U.S. Border Patrol agents is seen striking and subduing a man in Santa Ana before forcing him into the back of an unmarked car on Saturday.
The incident sparked protests in the following hours, and an online fundraiser was started through GoFundMe, where family members identified the victim as Tustin resident Narciso Barranco, a father to three sons who are all U.S. Marines.
According to one of his sons, 25-year-old Alejandro Barranco, Narciso was picked up by alleged federal immigration officers while he was working as a landscaper at the IHOP on Edinger Avenue and Ritchey Street.
“I think part of it is racial profiling,” Alejandro told KTLA’s Sara Welch. “They probably assumed because he was working the landscaping he had no documentation.”
The video shared by the Instagram account @SantaAnaProblems shows a group of Border Patrol agents wearing face coverings and tactical vests surrounding Narciso, holding him down while one agent repeatedly strikes him on his right arm and near his head.
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Congressman Lou Correa, who represents Santa Ana, called the case another example of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown striking fear in Southern California’s Latino community.
“We cannot have federal agents inciting violence in our streets and attacking innocent parents,” Rep. Correa (D-Orange County) said in a statement to KTLA 5 News. “Clearly, we need immigration reform—especially for people like Mr. Barranca who have lived in this country for 25-30 years and raised his sons to put their lives on the line to defend the United States.”
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/santa-ana-landscaper-detained
For more than 150 years, people who were born within U.S. territory automatically received citizenship – regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship – stating that children born in the U.S. to parents who are not in the country legally, or who are not permanent residents, cannot receive citizenship – threatens to upend this precedent.
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the case on May 14, 2025.
This comes after federal judges in three cases that took place in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington banned Trump’s order from going into effect, determining that the president cannot change or limit the Constitution by executive order.
