Deportations are about to get more dangerous

Border Patrol's Gregory Bovino is set to usher in new levels of terror

- GUSTAVO ARELLANO COLUMNIST

U.S. AGENTS block off the street during an immigration enforcement operation in Oxnard on Wednesday.

Like a teenager armed with their first smartphone, President Trump's masked immigration enforcers love nothing more than to mug for friendly cameras.

They gladly invite pseudo-filmmakers —some federal government workers, others conservative influencers or pro-Trump reporters — to embed during raids so they can capture every tamale lady that agents slam onto the sidewalk, every protester they pelt with pepper balls, every tear gas canister used to clear away pesky activists. From that mayhem come slickly produced videos that buttress the Trump administration's claim that everyone involved in the push to boot illegal immigrants from the U.S. is a hero worthy of cinematic love.

But not everything that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and its sister agencies do shows up in their approved rivers of reels.

Their propagandists aren't highlighting the story of Jaime Alanís García, a Mexican farmworker who fell 30 feet to his death in Camarillo this summer while trying to escape one of the largest immigration raids in Southern California in decades.

They're not making videos about 39-year-old Ismael Ayala-Uribe, an Orange County resident who moved to this country from Mexico as a 4-year-old and died in a Victorville hospital in September after spending weeks in ICE custody complaining about his health.

They're not addressing how ICE raids led to the deaths of Josué Castro Rivera and Carlos Roberto Montoya, Central American nationals run over and killed by highway traffic in Virginia and Monrovia while fleeing in terror. Or what happened to Silverio Villegas González, shot dead in his car as he tried to speed away from two ICE agents in suburban Chicago.