ICE Los Angeles Special Response Team in 2011 Arizona operation. Photo by Paul Caffrey, ICE, at US Defense Dept.
Official employment numbers for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Los Angeles area are not available, but the agency is estimated to field about 1,000 agents, only about a tenth of the size of the LAPD. These are divided into two divisions, roughly splitting an equal number of agents between them. Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) focuses almost exclusively on the identification, detention, and removal of unauthorized immigrants, who may or may not have been charged with criminal offenses. The other division, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is the criminal investigative branch, targeting immigration issues that are criminal (a foreign national present in the U.S. without authorization is generally not considered a criminal act by itself), but also all of the "Customs" portion of the agency's title. HSI investigates transnational narcotics and dangerous substance trafficking and international criminal enterprise money laundering. It investigates commercial import and export fraud, illegal export of sensitive and controlled technology, international intellectual property violations and art smuggling. It investigates weapons and munitions smuggling, child pornography trafficking (especially transnational), and transnational gang activity. It investigates immigration document and marriage fraud and human trafficking. Most of these investigations target organized criminal groups and transnational organized crime. ERO officers, for their part, typically do not engage in criminal investigations. They are more like street cops. HSI agents are the detectives.
Any particular HSI investigation typically consumes most of the time and energies of one or more HSI agents, with complex cases lasting for about a year or more. It takes time to document enough evidence acceptable to the limited number of federal prosecutors demanding that cases for prosecution be as "air-tight" as possible. This brings us to the dilemna for local ICE offices, operating under frantic demands from the current administration in Washington D.C. to ramp-up arrest numbers. When local ICE agents face intense pressure to produce unreasonably high numbers of immigrant arrests, this not only results in lots of mistakes, the agency becomes more consumed with having to corral, arrest and process low-priority, non-criminal and non-threatening immigrants. That goes for both ERO and HSI agents. That's time lost towards the hard and tedious work needed to pursue and dismantle truly dangerous organized criminal groups. Every hour expended by ICE agents on day workers, garment workers, fruit stand vendors, and elementary school children, is another hour gifted to organized criminals to continue their dirty work. Organized crooks know well how to operate in the shadows and avoid detection. They are not likely the ones being netted in desperate ICE round-ups. Rather, it's children, moms, swap meet visitors, low-wage workers and, occasionally, flabbergasted U.S. citizens.
Photo by American Red Cross, in the collection of the Library of Congress.
A 1920 Los Angeles Tuberculosis Association health camp for Los Angeles girls in San Gabriel Canyon, north of Azusa. Much of the camp funding came from the Junior Red Cross. Notice the diversity, not common for that time.
California is the world's fourth largest economy. Los Angeles County, contributing a quarter of that, by itself ranks as the 20th largest economy in the world.
