Federal officials arrested approximately 70 illegal immigrants while investigating unlawful marijuana operations in Thermal, California, on Wednesday.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Los Angeles Field Division said 70 to 75 “undocumented migrants” were taken into custody and one American citizen was arrested for impeding law enforcement, KESQ reported.
The outlet said there was reportedly a large presence of federal officials in the eastern Coachella Valley area when the investigation took place. Meanwhile, CBS News reported 500 personnel with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Guard were included in the task force.
The DEA shared video footage of investigators at the scene, noting the operation was authorized by federal search warrants signed by a federal magistrate judge. At one point in the clip an agent yells, “Police search warrant! If you’re in here make yourself known!” before entering a trailer:
The DEA also posted video footage from what appears to be the inside of one of the huge marijuana operations:
In another post, the agency highlighted the fact that two people were found inside a padlocked trailer at one site. Photos show several individuals, whose hands were zip tied, sitting next to each other:
NewsNation reported there were three massive illegal marijuana grow operations involved in the raid. One of the sites was over 250 acres. The outlet noted officials said they were uncontrolled and being operated outside the law even though marijuana is legal in California.
“Crime follows crime, so in order to get these criminal grows productive they have to reach out to undocumented workers in order to get it done. So, we are anticipating there being some undocumented workers on-scene and we have plenty of resources here available to interview them, find out their story, find out how they got here, see how they were trafficked. And then pass those leads on,” DEA Deputy Special Agent in Charge Anthony Chrysanthis told the outlet.
Following the recent violent leftist rioting in response to illegal immigration sweeps by ICE in Los Angeles, “Alex Marlow Show” host and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said illegals were subject to “slave labor” that had largely been ignored.
“And until Donald Trump came along that this is something that we’ve just entirely tolerated, we’ve been completely comfortable with this,” Marlow continued, adding it was “beneath us as a country” and a “sign of a broken immigration system.”
Despite the Los Angeles protests, federal authorities arrested illegals with criminal backgrounds including murder, pedophilia, and drug trafficking, Breitbart News reported on Friday.
On Tuesday this outlet reported, “President Donald Trump’s popular enforcement of migration law has been accompanied by a two percent gain in wages for blue-collar Americans, according to economic evidence touted by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.”
“The reduced inflow of migrants, for example, helped pressure a huge meatpacking firm to sign a wage-raising deal in March for 26,000 workers,” the article read, adding, “the extra wages will spur economic growth via consumption. The income will also help young married couples to begin growing their families, setting the stage for future growth without migration.”
