The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the immigration operation this Wednesday ‘Catahoula Crunch’ in New Orleans (Louisiana), which follows the increasing deployment of federal forces in cities governed by Democratsin order to detain migrants from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador.
The DHS said in a statement that the operation in the largest city in the southern state of Louisiana was will focus on detaining migrants with criminal records, by showing images of nationals from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jordan and Vietnam who were allegedly freed by the “sanctuary policies.”
“Sanctuary policies endanger American communities by releasing criminal aliens and forcing DHS agents to risk their lives to remove illegal criminal aliens who should never have been released back onto the streets,” said DHS Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
The deployment of federal agents has shaken a state with about 223,000 immigrantsof which almost one in five are from Honduras and nearly an eighth are from Mexico, according to data from the American Immigration Council.
Latin restaurants and businesses They have announced on their social networks closures due to fear that workers or clients will be detained in raids, while activists have questioned whether agents are targeting migrants with criminal records.
Sign indicating that access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not allowed this Wednesday at a taqueria in New Orleans.
Reuters
“I am deeply angry that friends, partners and everyone in New Orleans will see up close how this cruelty and chaos is imposed on people who deserve dignity and, in many cases, simply a process to adjust their status. There is a better way,” Todd Schulte, president of the FWD organization, commented on X.
Additionally, Trump announced on Tuesday the next shipment of the National Guard to New Orleans months after a request from the governor of Louisiana, Republican Jeff Landry, to deploy the military to “fight crime.”
“Governor Landry, a great guy, a great governor, he has asked for help for New Orleans and we are going to go there in a couple of weeks,” the president warned during a cabinet meeting at the White House.
Offensive against ‘sanctuary cities’
DHS operations against illegal immigration, ordered by Trump, have been deployed primarily in Democratic-led cities since June 2025, focused on raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deployments of National Guard troops to carry out mass deportations.
The first sirens sounded in Los Angeles at the beginning of June 2025long before the residents understood that their city had become the laboratory of a new immigration offensive directed from the White House.
DHS and ICE patrols began entering Latino neighborhoods at dawn, blocking entire streets while helicopters flew over apartment blocks in Boyle Heights and the south-central part of the city, to the hunting for undocumented people in raids that extended to factories, warehouses and bus stops.
The protests did not take long to arrive, with thousands of people filling the city center and denouncing that the operations were not responding to a security emergency, but to a political strategy to punish one of the largest democratic seats in the country.
In Washingtonthe scenery became even more symbolic. National Guard soldiers, under the direct control of the Republican, began to patrol avenues presided over by the buildings that embody American democracy, while immigration agents extended their controls to subway stations and service areas.
He message was double: a show of force in the face of an alleged wave of crime attributed to immigrants and a warning to Democratic leaders of what could happen if they challenged the federal immigration agenda.
Civil rights organizations denounced that The military presence and raids had created a climate of fear that affected both undocumented immigrants and citizens of racial minorities, reviving debates about the limits of the law and the partisan use of federal forces.
Memphis It was added in September to that map of cities chosen by Trump to show how far he was willing to go in his crusade against what he described as an “internal enemy.”
Although local statistics showed a recent reduction in crime rates, the city was presented by Washington as an uncontrolled focus of violencethus justifying the sending of thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of federal agents to accompany ICE raids in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.
The mayor, Democrat Paul Young, criticized that the operation had been decided without dialogue with local authorities, while community groups documented nighttime raids on housing blocks and mass arrests that fueled the feeling of occupation rather than security.
In Chicagoanother Democratic bastion and sanctuary city, the script was repeated with its own nuances.
First came the intensive DHS raids, directed at immigrant neighborhoods and accompanied by a presidential speech that blamed the city for being a refuge for foreign criminals and for allowing protests against federal immigration policy.
Then, the explicit threat to deploy the National Guard, which ended up running into judicial resources and the frontal opposition of the governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson, convinced that the real goal was not to reduce crime but bend the political arm of a city that had become a symbol of resistance.
On November 15, the Operation Charlotte Network in the city of the same name, the most populated in North Carolina, with more than 370 arrests in one week. Democratic Gov. Josh Stein criticized the racial profiling of the arrests.
A more political than police strategy
Each operation, televised and amplified on networks, seemed designed both for the field and for the media campaign, reinforcing the image of an open “war” between the White House and the Democratic governments.
The pattern became even more evident when the White House began talking openly about the “heart of democratic power” by announcing new operations in large cities and urban corridors governed by this party.
Messages from the president on his Truth Social network promised to divert resources from allied states and concentrate them on cities he considered hostile, while accusing Democrats without evidence of using immigrants without legal status to manipulate elections.
As the months passed, the map of DHS raids and troop deployments drew a political strategy rather than a police one: Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis, Chicago and other Democratic cities became the scene of a strategy that combined immigration control, a show of force and electoral calculation, leaving hundreds of thousands of families living under the constant shadow of the next raid.