


On June 18, masked ICE agents stopped their cars in front of the Winchell’s Donuts on North Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena.
Without identifying themselves or presenting warrants, they detained six immigrants who were simply waiting for the bus to go to work.
As a crowd gathered, as a young man was taking a picture of the license plate of one of the ICE vehicles, an agent jumped out of the car and pointed a gun at him, clearly ready to shoot him dead.
The crowd gasped. After an interminable moment, he jumped back into his car, and the ICE agents sped off.
I was horrified. But this was just one of countless examples of President Donald Trump’s deliberately cruel, anti-immigrant agenda designed to spread fear throughout Southern California and undermine our most precious constitutional right to due process.
Just days before, Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed and violently handcuffed for simply questioning Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a press conference in Los Angeles.
Then I learned about the unjust arrest of Job Garcia, a United States citizen and Ph.D. student at Claremont Graduate University in my district. Clearly, no one is safe from these raids, not even U.S. citizens.
After this raid in Pasadena, I was asked by families, sick with worry, to go to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. to check on these detainees, joined by Mayor Victor Gordo and state Sen. Sasha Pérez. It is because, as a member of Congress, I have the legal authority to inspect any facility operated by Homeland Security for these purposes at any time. But, outrageously, federal officials denied me entry.
Unfortunately, this was not the first time I was denied. On June 6, when Trump’s massive ICE raids first began, I learned that individuals swept up in L.A. were being transferred to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino, a facility I have long called to be shut down due to its appalling record of human rights abuses, repeated constitutional violations and deaths that even ICE themselves deemed avoidable.
I led a delegation, including Reps. Gil Cisneros and Derek Tran, in visiting Adelanto to look after the detainees from the raids, inspect the conditions and ensure due process was being upheld for those inside.
But when ICE officials saw us approaching, they locked the front gates with chains and padlocks, and ignored us for hours as we demanded to be let in.
But we could not give up. A week later, I led another congressional delegation to Adelanto with Reps. Linda Sánchez, Mark Takano, Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Luz Rivas. This time, we managed to secure entry, and what we saw was deeply troubling. Detainees reported going 10 days without a clean change of undergarments or towels. ICE officials refused to provide detainees with access to phones to reach their attorneys and loved ones. And we heard from those detained in the L.A. protests. They were not the “criminals” Trump claims to go after. They were people whose crime was showing up for work or their court hearing.
The Trump administration hoped to intimidate Angelenos into submission and create a distraction as Republicans force a bill through Congress that will kick 17 million people off their health care, all to give trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country. They are making immigrants the scapegoats for the country’s problems. In reality, immigrants are the foundation on which America was built. They are our friends and neighbors, and integral to our economy.
This is why we must speak out against the inhumane treatment inflicted on them, and we must support legislation to rein in ICE’s abusive tactics. Members of Congress must be allowed to exercise our right to oversight and inspection of these facilities, so that no one is forgotten and neglected in the system. Our country was founded on the principle of due process and protection from authoritarians. Now is the time to stand together to protect those principles.
Rep. Judy Chu is the member of Congress for much of Pasadena and the West San Gabriel Valley.