Immigrants without legal status in the U.S. numbered about 8.2 million two years ago. Pew Research says Nevada has the highest rate of those immigrants per household, at about 9 percent.
So, as President Donald Trump pledged to conduct the largest deportation effort in U.S. history, Nevadans took note.
That might be why 7 to 8,000 people demonstrated on Saturday, June 14th, in the so-called “No Kings” protest in downtown Las Vegas.
Originally conceived as a rally against the consolidation of executive power in the U.S. government, the event evolved as masked ICE agents swept up immigrants in L.A., in fields, factories, and restaurants.
No Kings Day also became an anti-ICE protest — and among the largest demonstrations Las Vegas has ever seen.
Protesters carried signs expressing frustration with ICE — and how the sweeps seem to be conducted in a vindictive way.
Las Vegas police were there in large numbers. Sheriff Kevin McMahill, with State of Nevada host Joe Schoenmann, said the numbers were to discourage violence from demonstrators.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he said, “I had my officers stand out there, take rocks, frozen water bottles, batteries, for way too long, way too many of them got hurt.”
He also said the department’s Internal Affairs investigators are looking into an incident from a June 11th protest where more than a dozen officers took down a man and woman who were filming them. The department apologized to the woman, who has hired an attorney.
Metro also recently entered an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Before the department didn’t have a 287-G agreement. Now, he said, ICE will be given 48 hours to pick up undocumented people arrested, then processed at the Clark County Detention Center.
As part of that agreement, police will also be training IRS agents to do things like pulling over drivers suspected of DUI.
The sheriff also said there was a chance that if he didn’t sign the agreement, some $30 million in federal funding to Metro might not have been granted.
“And it’s been very clear by the president that they want to up from 2,000 people being deported a day to 3,000,” he added. “So it shouldn’t be a secret to anybody in this community or across this great nation that this ICE operation is going to continue.”
As it does, Arriba Las Vegas Workers Center is a place many immigrants with and without legal status will turn for help. Bliss Requa-Trautz, executive director, said the President’s deportation quota increase will definitely be felt here, especially economically.
Broadacres Swap Meet, 2930 Las Vegas Blvd North, is a Friday-to-Sunday marketplace of small booths with a high concentration of Hispanic and Latino shops and customers. After raids at a swap meet in Los Angeles, Requa-Trautz said, Broadacres is already offering refunds to vendors who don’t want to open their rented space “for fear that there will be large-scale ICE action.”
UNLV professor Michael Kagan is director of the university’s Immigration Clinic, which provides deportation defense free of charge. At the clinic and across the country, he’s seeing immigration enforcement is becoming more indiscriminate.
“That means they're not looking as much for people who have a known record or known removal order,” he added. “They’re just looking for who they can find to fill the trucks. We are not seeing the professionalism that I think we've come to expect from law enforcement in the United States, that I've usually found from Metro.”
Throughout history, he added, deportation efforts in this country predictably become “very racialized.”
His recommendation for people who are stopped is to only give a name. In Nevada, that’s all people have to do when stopped by law enforcement.
A question like “where were you born?” might sound innocent, he added. “But it might be enough to deport someone.”
A fairly large percent of residents of Latino and Hispanic heritage live in Las Vegas and North las Vegas, so many businesses cater to them. As president of the Las Vegas Latin Chamber of Commerce, Peter Guzman said the deportation push is hurting some of those businesses.
“What we're seeing is less people showing up at restaurants, because … they're a little bit really nervous to go to a restaurant,” he said.
“So some of my members that own restaurants, and that's a lot of them, are a little bit nervous because they're seeing less and less patronage at their at their establishments. So, I think when it starts hurting people's wallets, that's when you're really going to see the protests.”
He noted that Hispanics and millions of others elected Donald Trump, who promised more deportations.
“But he’s going beyond that now and that’s a problem."
Guests: Kevin McMahill, Sheriff, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; Peter Guzman, President, Latin Chamber of Commerce; Bliss Requa-Trautz, Executive Director, Arriba Las Vegas Worker Center; Michael Kagan, Director, UNLV Immigration Clinic
