After a Pandemic Pause, ICE Resumes Deportation Arrests

LOS ANGELES — For Alicia Flores Gonzalez, Aug. 4 began like any other day. She dropped her little girl at day care and drove to work at a winery in the Sonoma Valley. But as she was parking her white Toyota Tacoma, she found herself surrounded by several armed men. “What happened? What did I do?” Ms. Flores recalled asking them.

“Hands up! Turn around,” ordered one of the men, who shackled her and escorted her to a van.

Six agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement in three unmarked vehicles had been deployed to arrest her. Within 24 hours, the 43-year-old single mother of four U.S.-born children had been deported to Mexico. She had lived without legal permission in the United States for 27 years.

Ms. Flores was seized during a new nationwide enforcement operation announced this month, the first large-scale arrests and deportations in the interior of the country since the coronavirus pandemic halted field operations for several months. Since mid-July, immigration agents have taken more than 2,000 people into custody from their homes, workplaces and other sites, including a post office, often after staking them out for days.

In Los Angeles, agents made 300 arrests. More than a thousand others were rounded up in New York, Atlanta and Phoenix, as well as in cities in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, Utah and Wyoming.