Los Angeles.- Immigration agents chose a car wash to carry out a raid in Los Angeles, after performing a Google search for the businesses closest to where they were deployed, as part of the first major immigration operation promoted by President Donald Trump’s administration.
The details of how the raids that took place in June of last year in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were organized are part of the new evidence presented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to a federal court in California, as part of a lawsuit seeking to halt the operations.
The documents revealed that immigration agents used racial profiling through ‘mobile patrols,’ which chose locations at random.
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“In such operations, the defendants (immigration authorities) do not allege that the agents have a specific ‘objective’ for police action… Rather, the agents patrol the communities in search of ‘possible’ suspects,” asserts the motion to which EFE had access.
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The target of a raid selected at random
The document contains the testimony of a Border Patrol agent who described how agents chose the location for a raid conducted on June 18, 2025, at a car wash in Whittier, a city in Los Angeles County, via Google, according to the Los Angeles Times.
According to the agent, the team searched for nearby car washes in the search engine and the business was selected because “it was one of the places that appeared on the list as the closest location.”
From the laundry room, the agents took one of the detainees who is leading the lawsuit, a U.S. citizen of Latino origin who was held while they verified his legal status.
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The new evidence includes body camera recordings in which officers are heard using racist slurs to refer to people of Latino appearance and low-income or working-class backgrounds, which, according to the plaintiffs, reveal that the operations ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration have served as a pretext for race-based arrests.
The new evidence is part of a request for a preliminary injunction to be issued in the operations that have multiplied in recent weeks in Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
