But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.<\/p>\n
Their propagandists aren\u2019t highlighting the story of Jaime Alan\u00eds Garc\u00eda<\/a>, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe<\/a>, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.<\/p>\n They\u2019re not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josu\u00e9 Castro Rivera<\/a> and Carlos Roberto Montoya<\/a>, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a>, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.<\/p>\n Those men are just some of the 20-plus people who have died in 2025 while caught up in ICE\u2019s machine \u2014 the deadliest year for the agency in two decades, per NPR<\/a>.<\/p>\n Publicly, the Department of Homeland Security has described those incidents as \u201ctragic\u201d while assigning blame to everything but itself. For instance, a Homeland Security official told the Associated Press that Castro Rivera\u2019s death was \u201ca direct result of every politician, activist and reporter who continue to spread propaganda and misinformation about ICE\u2019s mission and ways to avoid detention\u201d \u2014 whatever the hell that means.<\/p>\n An ICE spokesperson asked for more time to respond to my request for comment, said \u201cThank you Sir\u201d when I extended my deadline, then never got back to me. Whatever the response would\u2019ve been, Trump\u2019s deportation Leviathan looks like it\u2019s about to get deadlier.<\/p>\n As reported<\/a> by my colleagues Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga, his administration plans to get rid of more than half of ICE\u2019s field office directors due to grumblings from the White House that the deportations that have swamped large swaths of the United States all year haven\u2019t happened faster and in larger numbers. <\/p>\n Asked for comment, Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary for public affairs, described The Times\u2019 questions as \u201csensationalism\u201d and added \u201conly the media would describe standard agency personnel changes as a \u2018massive shakeup.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Agents are becoming more brazen as more of them get hired thanks to billions of dollars in new funds. In Oakland<\/a>, one fired a chemical round into the face of a Christian pastor from just feet away. In Santa Ana, another pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at activists who had been trailing him from a distance in their car. In the Chicago area, a woman claimed a group of them fired pepper balls at her car even though her two young children were inside.<\/p>\n La migra knows they can act with impunity because they have the full-throated backing of the White House. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller<\/a> crowed on Fox News recently, \u201cTo all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.\u201d <\/p>\n That\u2019s not actually true, but when have facts mattered to this presidency if it gets in the way of its apocalyptic goals?<\/p>\n Greg Bovino, El Centro Border Patrol sector chief, center, walks with federal agents near an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Ill.<\/p>\n (Erin Hooley \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n Tasked with turning up the terror dial to 11 is Gregory Bovino, a longtime Border Patrol sector chief based out of El Centro, Calif., who started the year with a raid in Kern County<\/a> so egregious that a federal judge slammed it as agents \u201cwalk[ing] up to people with brown skin and say[ing], \u2018Give me your papers.\u2019\u201d A federal judge ordered him<\/a> to check in with her every day for the foreseeable future after the Border Patrol tear-gassed a neighborhood in a Chicago suburb that was about to host its annual Halloween children\u2019s parade<\/a> (an appeals court has temporarily blocked the move).<\/p>\n Bovino now reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and is expected to pick most of the ICE field office directors from Customs and Border Protection, the arm of the federal government that the Border Patrol belongs to. It logged 180 immigrant deaths under its purview for the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which stats are publicly available and the third straight year that the number had increased. <\/p>\n To put someone like Bovino in charge of executing Trump\u2019s deportation plans is like gifting a gas refinery to an arsonist.<\/p>\n He\u2019s constantly trying to channel the conquering ethos of Wild West, complete with a strutting posse of agents \u2014 some with cowboy hats \u2014 following him everywhere, white horses trailed by American flags for photo ops and constant shout-outs to \u201cMa and Pa America\u201d when speaking to the media. When asked by a CBS News reporter recently when his self-titled \u201cMean Green Machine\u201d would end its Chicago campaign<\/a> \u2014 one that has seen armed troops march through downtown and man boats on the Chicago River like they were patrolling Baghdad \u2014 Bovino replied, \u201cWhen all the illegal aliens [self-deport] and\/or we arrest \u2018em all.\u201d<\/p>\n Such scorched-earth jibber-jabber underlines a deportation policy under which the possibility of death for those it pursues is baked into its foundation. ICE plans to hire dozens of healthcare workers<\/a> \u2014 doctors, nurses, psychiatrists \u2014 in anticipation of Trump\u2019s plans to build more detention camps, many slated for inhospitable locations like the so-called Alligator Alcatraz camp in the Florida Everglades<\/a>. That was announced to the world on social media with an AI-generated image of grinning alligators wearing MAGA caps<\/a> \u2014 as if the White House was salivating at the prospect of desperate people trying to escape only to find certain carnage.<\/p>\n In his CBS News interview, Bovino described the force his team has used in Chicago \u2014 where someone was shot and killed, a pastors got hit with pepper balls from high above and the sound of windshields broken by immigration agents looking to snatch someone from their cars is now part of the Windy City\u2019s soundtrack \u2014 as \u201cexemplary.\u201d The Border Patrol\u2019s peewee Patton added he felt his guys used \u201cthe least amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission. If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that\u2019s on them.\u201d<\/p>\n One shudders to think what Bovino thinks is excessive for la migra. With his powers now radically expanded, we\u2019re about to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump\u2019s masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30475,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[15241,283,22463,339,22466,15662,2871,15721,48,52,51,47,50,49,22465,592,22462,22464,20396,1519,2805],"class_list":["post-30474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-border-patrol","tag-car","tag-deadly-year","tag-death","tag-field-office-director","tag-gregory-bovino","tag-ice","tag-ice-agent","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-medium","tag-people","tag-pepper-ball","tag-pesky-activist","tag-raid","tag-trump","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30474\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n