DHS Targets Los Angeles County Classrooms: The Schools, the Students, and the Specter of Deportation

 

By Santa Clarita Star Staff

04/16/2025 at 9:00 PM

 

On April 7, 2025, DHS agents attempted to enter two Los Angeles elementary schools to access children, a chilling move under Trump’s immigration crackdown that sent fear through Los Angeles County's immigrant communities. As a Maryland father languishes in El Salvador’s brutal prison despite a Supreme Court order, the erosion of due process and constitutional protections threatens the fabric of American democracy. Trump’s immigration crackdown is reshaping life—and fear—in Los Angeles County.

 

 

LOS ANGELES (AP) — On January 20, 2025, one of the first executive orders signed by the newly reinaugurated President Donald Trump quietly rescinded a 14-year-old policy that had designated schools, churches, and hospitals as "sensitive locations" exempt from immigration enforcement. The bureaucratic language masked the seismic shift it represented: the erasure of a rare consensus that had endured through three administrations, Republican and Democratic alike.

 

Then came the morning of April 7, when agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) arrived at LAUSD’s Lillian Street Elementary and Russell Elementary School demanding access to students they claimed were undocumented minors. They wore plain clothes, refused to identify themselves properly, and carried no judicial warrant—just an assertion of authority that, until recently, would have been unthinkable in an American classroom. School administrators, following district protocol, turned them away. But the message was sent: no space was truly safe anymore.

 

The New Deportation Machinery
What's unfolding in Los Angeles represents more than just another escalation in America's endless immigration wars. It reveals a fundamental reimagining of enforcement that deliberately blurs the lines between border policy and community life.

 

In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration unleashed a relic of America’s founding era to fuel its immigration crackdown: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law forged in the shadow of war with France, now repurposed to deport hundreds of alleged gang members—mostly Venezuelans—to El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). This old statute, dusted off from constitutional obscurity, empowers the president to detain and expel noncitizens deemed threats during wartime, with no judicial oversight. But the administration’s weaponization of this act, replacing due process with flimsy accusations and severing families from their loved ones, is not just dubious—it’s a direct assault on the Constitution’s core protections.

 

The Alien Enemies Act’s revival is dubious because it subverts justice under the guise of security. Since March 2025, 271 individuals, including 238 Venezuelans and Salvadorans like Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, have been deported to CECOT, accused of ties to gangs like Tren de Aragua or MS-13. Yet, as CBS News reported, 75% of these deportees had no criminal records, and families, like Garcia’s, denied gang affiliations, pointing to tattoos—often cultural or innocuous—as the sole “evidence.” This reliance on superficial markers, without hearings or appeals, reduces justice to a bureaucratic whim, casting doubt on the act’s legitimacy in a nation built on fairness. Garcia, a Maryland resident with legal protections, was deported on March 15 due to an “administrative error,” his fate sealed in a prison where torture and starvation are routine, per Human Rights Watch. Such cases reveal a system where accusation equals conviction, eroding trust in governance.

This approach violates the Constitution in profound ways. The Fifth Amendment guarantees due process to all persons, not just citizens, requiring notice, a hearing, and evidence before deprivation of liberty. The Alien Enemies Act, invoked without a declared war, bypasses these safeguards, as seen when Garcia was deported despite a 2019 court order barring his removal. The Supreme Court’s April 10, 2025, ruling demanding his return underscored this violation, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor warning that such unchecked power could extend to citizens, creating a “Kafkaesque” nightmare where anyone could be “taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons.” The Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause is also at stake, as the act disproportionately targets Latinos, fueling accusations of racial bias. By outsourcing detainees to CECOT—where 350 deaths and systemic torture have been documented since 2022—the administration risks violating the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, as conditions there far exceed U.S. standards.

 

From Due Process to No Process: The Garcia Case and the Erosion of Rights
On April 14, 2025, the Oval Office served as the stage for a revealing diplomatic encounter. President Donald Trump welcomed El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, the authoritarian leader whose brutal prison system had become an extension of America's immigration enforcement apparatus. The meeting, conducted with the pageantry of a state visit, represented a striking normalization of Bukele's controversial human rights record. The agenda was clear: reinforce a $6 million deal to detain U.S. deportees in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a fortress of concrete and despair. But as cameras rolled, Bukele delivered a bombshell, refusing to release Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father mistakenly deported to CECOT despite a Supreme Court order demanding his return. “The question is preposterous,” Bukele scoffed, branding Garcia a “terrorist.” Trump, grinning, said nothing, his silence endorsing a defiance of the judiciary that shocked legal scholars. Yet, Trump mused about a darker ambition: sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to El Salvador’s gulag. In Santa Clarita, where immigrant families already fear ICE’s reach, this whisper of exile raises a chilling question: can a president legally banish his own people?

Garcia’s ordeal began on March 12, 2025, when ICE agents stopped him in Baltimore, his five-year-old son watching from the backseat. A Salvadoran with a 2019 court order barring his deportation to El Salvador due to gang threats, Garcia had lived legally in Maryland since 2011, married to a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and raising three children. Despite his clean record and annual ICE check-ins, he was deported on March 15, labeled an MS-13 gang member based on an uncorroborated “reliable source.” Sent to CECOT—a 40,000-capacity prison where inmates endure torture, starvation, and windowless cells—the Justice Department later admitted an “administrative error.” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, on April 4, called the deportation “wholly lawless,” ordering Garcia’s return by April 7. The Trump administration appealed, claiming courts couldn’t dictate foreign policy. On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order, requiring the administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s release and treat his case as if he hadn’t been deported.

 

Trump’s team, led by Stephen Miller and Attorney General Pam Bondi, defied the ruling. At the Bukele meeting, Miller claimed Garcia’s 2019 protection was void because MS-13 was now a “foreign terrorist organization,” a designation lacking evidence in Garcia’s case. Bondi argued the U.S. would only provide a plane if Bukele agreed to release him, a narrow reading of “facilitate” that flouted the Court’s intent. “It’s up to El Salvador,” she said, despite the U.S. paying $20,000 per deportee annually. Xinis, exasperated, demanded daily updates on Garcia’s status, only to receive vague responses citing “state secrets” and “diplomatic sensitivities.” On April 11, she snapped, “I’m not asking for state secrets. Where is he?” Vásquez Sura, unable to contact her husband, rallied supporters, declaring, “We will not stop fighting for Kilmar.”

 

The defiance escalated with Trump’s overheard remark, first reported by The New York Times on April 14, 2025, during the Bukele meeting. As aides discussed CECOT’s capacity, Trump was caught saying, “I’m looking at sending our violent criminals there—American citizens, the really bad ones.” He elaborated to reporters, “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem… I’m talking about really bad people.” Attorney General Bondi, he added, was studying the legality. The proposal echoed in a February 2025 exchange where Trump told Bukele, “I’m all for it,” stunned constitutional scholars.

 

Legally, sending U.S. citizens to a foreign prison is a non-starter. The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship rights, and the Fifth Amendment ensures due process, prohibiting exile without consent. The Supreme Court’s 1957 ruling in Trop v. Dulles declared denationalization for crimes “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment, a precedent reaffirmed in 1980’s Vance v. Terrazas, requiring voluntary renunciation of citizenship. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a concurring opinion on Garcia’s case, warned that the administration’s logic—claiming no obligation to remedy unlawful deportations—could extend to citizens, allowing them to be “taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons” without redress. Extradition treaties, the only legal mechanism for sending citizens abroad, require specific charges and host-country jurisdiction, not blanket transfers to CECOT’s inhumane conditions, which violate U.S. prohibitions on cruel punishment.

 

Trump’s proposal, though likely unfeasible, amplifies his immigration strategy: project power, defy constraints, and test legal boundaries. His administration’s refusal to act on Garcia’s case—despite paying El Salvador $6 million for 261 deportees—undercuts claims of powerlessness. Bukele’s refusal, backed by Trump’s grin, signals a partnership prioritizing spectacle over justice. 

 

The Resistance
Across Los Angeles, new networks of protection are emerging. On April 5, 2025, a sea of handmade signs bobbed above the intersection of McBean Parkway and Valencia Boulevard in Santa Clarita. "WE THE PEOPLE SAY HANDS OFF," read one. "STOP THE BILLIONAIRE COUP!," declared another. More than 2,000 protesters—students, teachers, immigrant families, and retirees—had joined the nationwide "Hands Off!" demonstrations, their local march winding from Valencia Town Center to City Hall in a rare show of collective defiance.

The Santa Clarita protest was no isolated event. It formed part of a constellation of over 1,400 rallies across all 50 states and internationally—a grassroots rebuke of the administration's expanding reach into classrooms, workplaces, and communities. What began as opposition to immigration raids had coalesced into something broader: a movement against what protesters called the "new authoritarianism," linking ICE's school visits to Elon Musk's controversial Department of Government Efficiency cuts and Trump's broader centralization of power.

 

The American Crucible
What we're witnessing transcends immigration policy. It's a stress test for foundational American questions: Can due process vanish with a presidential signature? Do constitutional protections stop at the schoolhouse door?

The answers may determine the fate of LA's immigrant communities and the character of American democracy itself. In Los Angeles, the test is underway—and the nation is watching.