Rep. Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles thinks the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cleared out a migrant detention center ahead of his visit. The politician says ICE must have cleaned up the facility in question because they knew they were “breaking the law” amid activists’ calls of inhumane conditions.
“It was straight out of ‘The Twilight Zone,’” Gomez told Jen Psaki on MSNBC’s Wednesday segment of “The Briefing.” “We heard stories that it was overcrowded, that people were there, kept for days, and we were finally let in. I kind of already had an idea that it would look like it’s in the basement.”
Gomez went on to describe the center, sharing that there were nine different jail cells and a large area where migrants are processed. However, he explained that only a couple people were there.
“One person was talking to the Mexican consulate who happened to be there, and the other person was just in the cell with their head down on a table or on the table or something. He was just kind of sitting there,” Gomez shared.
He then questioned why the center was empty despite the slew of ICE raids taking place throughout the city of Los Angeles. Nearly 2,800 undocumented migrants have been arrested over the past five weeks since early June, per the New York Times.
“They’ve been running raids, even over the weekend, and all of a sudden there’s no one there? That’s just completely bizarre,” Gomez said, adding that he had an inkling the facility would be cleared out once they’d given ICE a heads up about their visit.
“That’s what we knew would happen if we gave them notice,” Gomez said. “We actually finally got in after almost 14 days, two weeks of giving them a notice and having an appointment. So it was completely staged, completely cleared out. Nobody was being held there, and you hardly saw anybody on duty because there was also nobody there. And then I heard from different families that some of their loved ones were actually shipped to Santa Ana because they knew that the members of Congress were coming in.”
Gomez said that as far as next steps, he heard that some folks are being transported back to a downtown detention facility, where he plans to visit — this time without notice.
“What I’m going to do is try to show up according to the law that allows me to drop in without any notice to see what’s truly is going on there,” Gomez explained.
“Additionally, we’re trying to track down families and find out how long their loved ones were held,” he said, mentioning that ICE has told him and his team that people are only supposed to be detained for 72 hours.
“That same day, I talked to a family and a daughter of a loved one who got arrested and held there, she said that her father was arrested on a Monday and wasn’t released until Saturday or Sunday of that week. So they keep lying over and over and over again because they know that they’re breaking the law.”
