Demonstrators in Arizona took to the streets to protest against President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan on Sunday, and police say officers were assaulted amid the demonstration.
Glendale Police confirmed to Fox News Digital that there was a large group of people who gathered in protest of federal immigration policies.
A police spokesperson said a police vehicle was stolen by one protester but no arrest has been made.
The demonstrator “jumped into one of our patrol vehicles and drove it a short distance before it was quickly recovered,” the spokesperson said, adding that the suspect was unknown at that time.
LA FREEWAY BLOCKED BY ANTI-DEPORTATION PROTESTERS IN RESPONSE TO CRACKDOWN ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Traffic was still shut down in all directions in the area of the protest as of early Monday morning. Glendale and Phoenix Police were on the scene monitoring the situation, which Glendale Police said had begun “to fizzle out due to the excellent work conducted by Glendale and Phoenix Police Officers on scene.”
Officers deployed chemical agents to disperse the “unruly and defiant crowd,” the Glendale Police spokesperson said.
Several officers were assaulted, police vehicles were damaged and surrounding businesses and personal property were damaged, the spokesperson said.
Investigators will be looking into possible crimes at the protest and will work towards identifying suspects.
Anti-deportation protests were held over the weekend in multiple other cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta.
This comes amid the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts — with officials admitting that higher deportation numbers is the goal rather than the removal of violent migrants in the country illegally.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were directed by Trump officials to aggressively increase the number of people they arrest from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500 because the president had been disappointed with the deportation numbers, The Washington Post reported last week.
The president also reversed a directive under the Biden administration that had told immigration officials not to make arrests in sensitive areas like schools and churches.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that the administration is seeking the removal of all immigrants in the country illegally — not just those who committed criminal offenses — and falsely alleged that all migrants accused of being in the U.S. illegally are “criminals.”
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“I know the last administration didn’t see it that way, so it’s a big culture shift in our nation to view someone who breaks our immigration laws as a criminal, but that’s exactly what they are,” she said at a press briefing, declining to say if all the migrants in the U.S. illegally had criminal records.
People who cross the border illegally have committed a crime, but simply being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Someone could be in the country illegally without breaking laws to enter, such as overstaying a Visa.
Trump said in his inauguration speech last month that his administration would quickly deport “millions and millions” of migrants with criminal records, although the number of migrants with criminal records who are in the country without authorization is significantly less than those millions, according to Axios.
Studies also show that both legal and illegal migrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.
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