SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
As widespread No Kings protests played out across the country yesterday, Los Angeles' demonstrations remained largely focused on immigration raids continuing there. For more than a week, federal law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have had a big presence in the city, targeting undocumented immigrants at their homes and at work. And as that happened, Lindsay Toczylowski and her team have been tracking down people who have been detained and have been hearing from their families. She is the cofounder, president and CEO of Immigrant Defenders Law Center and joins me now. Hi, Lindsay.
LINDSAY TOCZYLOWSKI: Thanks for having me.
DETROW: I want to start by getting your response to these indications that the Trump administration might be shifting its strategy on these raids. On Thursday, President Trump had a post telling hospitality workers and farm workers changes were coming, saying he was hearing from people in those industries that his administration's policy was, quote, "taking very good, longtime workers away from them." What do you make of that, first of all, and have you seen any signs of raids slowing down?
TOCZYLOWSKI: We continue to see raids happening. We saw them happening while people were protesting in downtown Los Angeles during the No Kings march. We saw raids happening at swap meets, at car washes, just all over the city. It continues to round up, you know, hundreds of our neighbors. Many of the people we're seeing in detention centers have been in Los Angeles for more than 20 years. So while certainly we would hope that the president would re-look at what he is doing in ripping our communities apart in Los Angeles, I don't know how much stock we can really put in that when the rhetoric was so different when we heard Secretary Noem's press conference just days earlier.
DETROW: Right. And just to clarify, then, you're saying, as of Sunday, you are seeing absolutely no signs of slowing down the pace from the past week or so?
TOCZYLOWSKI: Absolutely not.
DETROW: Can you just give us a sense of what your work has looked like this past weekend? What is your team doing when you get wind of another raid in another location?
TOCZYLOWSKI: Well, we're working with grassroots organizations to gather information from families. So we have a hotline that families can call when their loved ones are detained by ICE. As soon as we get that information, we have teams that are up at the local detention centers, places where we know the federal government is holding people after they detain them. And normally, when someone is detained by ICE, we would see them immediately go to an ICE detention center, and we would be able to look on the detainee locator and find them. But because of the volume of people that they are taking off of the streets in Los Angeles and from worksites, we are seeing that people are being held in actual office buildings that are not meant to house people long term. We've had reports of even entire families with small children being held in office buildings where they're only given potato chips and milk for a 3-year-old child - people who are spending days in those conditions.
DETROW: And people in those situations, is it harder for groups like yours to just track who is where?
TOCZYLOWSKI: Absolutely. Out of the more than 135 people as of Friday that we had identified on our list, we were still searching for locations for more than half of them. I'll be going up to the detention center later today. We have a list of people who have been taken out of our communities all week, whose families are desperate for information on them. When we go up there, we're oftentimes only able to meet with three or four people in an entire day, spending, you know, eight to 12 hours at the detention center because they are so overcrowded.
DETROW: Is there any comparison point for this moment? I mean, there was a focus on detention during the first administration. As is often pointed out, President Biden and Obama also oversaw large numbers of deportations. Have you seen any comparable period to what you are experiencing right now?
TOCZYLOWSKI: No. In my 15 years of practice, I've never seen anything quite like the volume of people being taken from a particular city like Los Angeles and - you know, and also the number of people who are just in ICE detention at this moment nationally. But it does remind me a bit of family separation and the chaos that we saw after zero tolerance, when children were being ripped from their parents at the border. We are seeing that same sort of chaos with human beings' lives that we saw during family separation happening again now.
DETROW: That was Lindsay Toczylowski, an attorney and president at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, an organization that provides legal representation for immigrants in Southern California. Thank you so much.
TOCZYLOWSKI: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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