“I try to stay calm, to show my children that I’m OK,” she said in an interview with LAist and the California Newsroom in the family’s home in Lancaster on Friday. “I try to pretend that everything is OK, even if, inside, it isn’t.” During the conversation, the gregarious woman sometimes broke into tears.
Two days before the ICE raids that sparked the current protests, Nancy and her husband, Randal Isaías Bonilla Mejía, arrived at the downtown Los Angeles field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Nancy (this article refers to the couple by their first names for clarity) said they were hoping for a routine check-in with the agency monitoring their presence in the United States while they apply for asylum. Instead, her husband was detained under threat of deportation back to Honduras, the country the couple fled in 2021. He was taken into custody despite a court order barring his deportation until the family’s asylum claim is adjudicated.
His was just one of a record number of ICE arrests on June 3 and 4, with more than 2,000 people detained each day at federal offices and in workplace raids all over the country, according to CBS News. Nancy, who is nine weeks pregnant and has experienced complications with the pregnancy, said she waited at the office for more than 12 hours with Randal and their two young children. It wasn’t until late in the day they learned ICE officials planned to detain the entire family, despite her showing them health records from a recent hospital visit. Nancy said she and the children were released after ICE officials were told that their daughter, a toddler, had been born in the United States and is a U.S. citizen.
An overnight curfew was declared for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday in response to looting and vandalism that broke out during ICE protests, officials said.
The curfew is in place from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. and extends east to west from the 5 Freeway to the 110 Freeway; and from north to south from the 10 Freeway to where the 110 and 5 freeways merge. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said she made the decision to impose a curfew after 23 businesses were looted Monday night and other properties were vandalized.
“I think that if you drive through downtown L.A., the graffiti is everywhere and has caused significant damages to businesses and a number of properties,” she said. Bass also stressed that the area under curfew is a small fraction of the city, 1 square mile in a city that’s more than 500 square miles.
