News

Trump administration officials overseeing the immigration crackdown launched this week in New Orleans are aiming to make 5,000 arrests, a target that some city leaders who oppose the operation say is unrealistic and would require detainining more than just violent offenders.

It’s an ambitious goal that would surpass the number of arrests during a two-month enforcement blitz this fall around Chicago, a region with a much bigger immigrant population than New Orleans. Records tracking the first weeks of the Chicago operation also showed most arrestees didn’t have a violent criminal record.

In Los Angeles — the first major battleground in President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration plan — roughly 5,000 people were arrested over the summer in an area where about a third of LA County’s roughly 10 million residents are foreign-born.

Federal agents in marked and unmarked vehicles began spreading out across New Orleans and its suburbs Wednesday, making arrests in home improvement store parking lots and patrolling neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.

Alejandra Vasquez, who runs a social media page in New Orleans that reports the whereabouts of federal agents, said she has received a flood of messages, photos and video since the operations began.

“My heart is so broken,” Vasquez said. “They came here to take criminals and they are taking our working people. They are not here doing what they are supposed to do. They are taking families.”

Several hundred agents from Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are participating in the two-month operation dubbed “Catahoula Crunch.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is from Louisiana, is among the state’s Republicans supporting the crackdown. “Democrats’ sanctuary city policies have failed — making our American communities dangerous. The people of our GREAT city deserve better, and help is now on the ground,” Johnson posted on social media.