How Disaster Provides Cover for Authorities to Target Immigrants

During the early morning hours of Monday, May 4, 1992, Lucia A. and her husband went for a walk around the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Tensions around the city burned hot: The L.A. Uprising had erupted just a few days earlier, and although the situation had simmered down, the couple was technically violating a dusk-to-dawn curfew still in effect.

According to an American Civil Liberties Union report, a Los Angeles Police Department cruiser pulled alongside them and two uniformed officers hopped out. They grabbed Lucia by the hair, pinned her against a wall, and accused her of being a sex worker. When she failed to immediately produce any immigration documents, they detained her and insinuated that they would have her deported. The officers allegedly said, in Spanish, “You’re going to be visiting your country very soon and for free.”

The next day, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) representatives offered her a “voluntary departure” form, a legal agreement wherein she would essentially forfeit her immigration hearing and willingly deport herself. In exchange, she could evade the painful criminal and civil entanglements associated with so-called “riot aliens.” Probably worried about notoriously poor conditions in the detention facilities—she was pregnant—Lucia signed the papers.

Amid the Los Angeles Uprising, the LAPD, INS, and other government agencies coordinated to surveil, seize, interrogate, and deport undocumented immigrants. They carried out these efforts indiscriminately, categorizing everyday people going about their daily lives as “riot aliens.” As a result, more than a thousand Los Angeles residents were expelled from their communities. Today, as the Trump Administration prepares for more deportations, the mass removals that rippled across L.A. in 1992 remind us that local governments and immigration authorities already possess the tools to enact his agenda. In fact, they have already rehearsed that agenda to terrible effect.

Read More: As Trump Seeks Mass Deportations, Workplace Raids May Not Help Much

When, in April 1992, a Simi Valley jury acquitted four police officers of assaulting Rodney King, L.A. broke out into six days of looting and arson. Outraged that the jury had seemingly ignored damning video evidence, countless Angelenos—angry, frustrated, and desperate—stormed the streets in protest not merely against the verdict itself, but more broadly against poor, undignified social conditions. In a June 1992 piece for The Nation, writer Mike Davis described it as a series of “insurrections against an intolerable political-economic order.”

That volcanic flashpoint in 1992, now known as the L.A. Uprising, resulted in over 60 deaths and almost a billion dollars of property destruction. Thanks to depictions in popular culture, coverage from journalists, and studies by academics, the revolt has become one of the most evocative and widely discussed incidents in U.S. history. It comprised a convergence of pressing issues that had long simmered in the public consciousness, including racial injustice within the criminal legal system, widespread abusiveness by police officers purportedly sworn to “protect and serve,” and deepening animosities between Black and Asian American communities.

Yet buried beneath the popular narrative lies an underreported and little-understood facet of the saga. Under the pretense of regaining control of L.A.’s streets, law enforcement agencies deported or coerced “voluntary departures” from over a thousand so-called “riot aliens,” including Lucia A., from April to July 1992.

In some respects, these operations signaled a break from prior norms of police conduct. In 1979, the LAPD adopted Special Order 40. It stated that “officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person” and that they “shall not arrest nor book persons for violation of Title 8, Section 1325 of the United States Immigration Code (Illegal Entry).” To this day, that internal policy nominally prohibits the department from actively pursuing undocumented people.

Lucia’s case—and hundreds of others like hers—illustrates that the department was willing to bend the rule.

Between April and June 1992, the Immigration and Naturalization Service received 1,240 “riot aliens” from city and county authorities, including at least 452 from the LAPD. As part of that process, the INS posted its own agents inside the county jail system, where they interrogated and claimed custody of “all deportable aliens involved in the riots.”

By threatening people with long prison sentences and punitive bail expenses, the INS successfully intimidated most of these arrestees into signing “voluntary departure” deals. The police had, for all intents and purposes, suspended Special Order 40. In collaboration with the county sheriff, the county jail network, and the INS, the LAPD enabled a major expulsion project. By early July, they had “processed for removal” 1,105 immigrants through a combination of formal deportation and “voluntary departure” agreements akin to the one Lucia accepted.

In other respects, however, the revolt enabled a continuation of older policies. Lucia’s case echoed patterns that had, by then, become regular police procedure in L.A.

A few years before, in 1988, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates inaugurated Operation Hammer, a series of dragnet sweeps wherein officers would swarm neighborhoods with their patrol cruisers, stop and question suspicious-looking Angelenos, and arrest them by the hundreds and sometimes thousands.

Officers insisted that they were searching for gang members and drug dealers, but in reality, they cast a much wider net. Fewer than one in three arrestees were charged with any offense, and most of those were for minor infractions like jaywalking, littering, and blocking sidewalks. Borrowing from and adapting criminology’s relatively new “broken windows” theory, the department tried to stop and question as many bystanders as they could under whatever thin pretenses they could justify, then identify among that number the few serious criminals whom they had basically captured by accident. “I think people believe that the only strategy we have is to put a lot of police officers on the street and harass people and make arrests for inconsequential kinds of things. That’s part of the strategy, no question about it,” Gates admitted.

Regardless of its imprecision, Operation Hammer became a model for future law enforcement activity. During the L.A. Uprising a few years later, many reported going about their daily lives when the police swept them up for the more-or-less explicit purpose of eventually deporting them.

For example, on Sunday, May 3, seven Latino day laborers were waiting for short-term work opportunities outside of their usual spot, a Pep Boys auto shop in Pico-Union. The LAPD arrested them and immediately transferred them to INS custody, where agents interrogated them about their immigration status. Others complained of similar treatment. Angelenos were detained as they walked around at night, or as they stood at a bus stop, or as they drank fruit juice that they had just purchased from a store, then given over to immigration authorities.

Although the urban unrest in 1992 lent these sweeps a veneer of legitimacy, a closer look revealed indiscriminate methods that did nothing to distinguish looters and arsonists from bystanders, classifying them all under the umbrella category of “riot aliens.” In effect, law enforcement opportunistically leveraged the crisis to justify large-scale crackdowns against Latinx noncitizens as a whole.

Read More: What Donald Trump’s Win Means For Immigration

As part of his 2024 campaign, Trump promised to authorize mass deportations throughout the U.S. Some believe that he will target foreigner “criminals” with a conviction history—politically convenient targets akin to the “riot aliens” of 1992—as opposed to hard-working, respectable immigrants who have assimilated into their new communities.

But the President and his advisers have suggested a far more extensive scope of operations. Trump verified his intention to declare a national emergency and mobilize the military in his deportation efforts. “We will deputize [the National Guard] as immigration enforcement officers,” concurred Stephen Miller, incoming deputy chief of staff. If the project goes as planned, the administration will continue the country’s longstanding tradition of expulsion. It will in several ways mirror the L.A. of 1992, especially in its deeply xenophobic climate and the use of state and local government bodies typically unassociated with immigration enforcement.

Over the spring and early summer of 1992, the government conducted more than a thousand deportations and “voluntary departures” with relatively limited public outrage. At the time, other urgent issues were on Angelenos’ minds: Reports of lootings and arsons in the news, an armed military presence in the streets, and fervent public debates about policing and racism. Nevertheless, the eerie story—a thousand people disappeared from Los Angeles with little fanfare—may lend us insight into the deportation machine and its operations, and into what the next major campaign may look like.

V.N. Trinh is a postdoctoral scholar and incoming assistant professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. His manuscript-in-progress covers Los Angeles’ diverse, multi-racial left as it navigated, resisted, and reckoned with the ascendance of law-and-order policing.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.