As ICE Arrests Hit California, Families Broken Up, Working People Detained

A church-going agricultural worker. An Echo Park man taking his son to school. A 16-year-old kid searching for work to support his family in Mexico.

Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge of some of the first Californians targeted in his high-profile immigration crackdown. It’s very different from the descriptions of hardened criminals President Donald Trump has touted. People CalMatters interviewed about the raids across California suggested those swept up in them are dedicated family members and employees, their lives deeply woven into their communities. None appeared to pose the risks to national security or public safety Trump promised he’d target during his campaign.

The state has only begun to grapple with the resulting fear and need for reliable information. Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation allocating $25 million to provide immigrants with legal services to fight immigration proceedings against them.

A spokesman for ICE said officers do not target noncitizens indiscriminately. “ICE’s enforcement resources are based on intelligence-driven leads,” said Richard Beam, a spokesman for ICE’s Los Angeles office.

Some people detained during the statewide crackdown said that’s not what it feels like on the ground.

“It was just a regular morning,” said Loreal Duran from Echo Park in Los Angeles, describing her family’s before-school rush to get the kids out the door and loaded into the car.

But on the morning in question, Jan. 23, as her husband fastened their two young children into their seats, an immigration officer walked up, asking Loreal to show identification. “As he got closer to the car, he saw my husband, and basically, he just went around to the other side to grab my husband out of the car and take him away.”

Giovanni Duran, 42, came to California from El Salvador without federal authorization when he was 2 years old, brought by his family. He worked as a busser in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles, Loreal said. Duran is now being held in the Adelanto detention facility, run by a private company under contract to ICE, awaiting deportation to a country he doesn’t know.

“I haven’t talked to him in almost two days,” said Loreal last week. She’s had to get counseling for her 7-year-old son after he saw his dad taken away by officers.

“He was telling his classmates, ‘Oh, daddy got arrested for not wearing his seatbelt,’” Duran recounted. Later, the second grader asked his mom, “Did daddy get arrested because he’s Brown? I replied back to him, I go: ‘Yea, he kinda did.’”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported on social media 8,276 arrests nationwide between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31. The agency would not break out those numbers for California or different cities.

Casting a wide net

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported less than half of the approximately 8,200 people arrested from Jan. 20 through Feb. 2, so far have criminal convictions, according to government data they obtained.

In California, the apparently broad crackdown has immigrant advocates working around the clock. There have been several high-profile protests — one that shuttered a freeway in Los Angeles and another that prompted police to fire off tear gas at people in National City. Social media channels have been flooded by reported sightings of immigration officers and phones have been ringing nonstop.

“You can sense that kind of panic and also hunger; hunger for correct, reliable information as to what they should do in times of a raid or in times of an encounter with an immigration agent,” said Ian M. Seruelo, an immigration attorney in San Diego.

Two days after President Donald Trump visited wildfire-scarred Los Angeles, promising to work with California on needed federal assistance for recovery, his administration announced, with few details, immigration enforcement operations in the city carried out by federal agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department, “and other federal law enforcement partners.” Video released with the announcement showed officers in camouflaged uniforms and bullet-proof vests approaching apartment buildings and standing around armored vehicles and mobile command centers.

Trump authorized law enforcement agents from across the federal government to participate in immigration enforcement activities. He also lifted longtime guidelines restricting ICE from operating at “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches or hospitals.

ICE messaging about its enforcement actions has emphasized the apprehension of criminals. Last week, Enforcement and Removal Operations Los Angeles, a part of the agency, said officers arrested a 47-year-old noncitizen who was convicted of DUI. “This noncitizen had previously been arrested for driving without a license and evading a peace officer,” officials said on social media. They also said they arrested an “unlawfully present Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member. This noncitizen is currently in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”

Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants, said for the Trump administration to deport millions of people as the president promised, it will have to target people who have not had contact with the criminal system.

“Based on recent data, we know that fewer than 1 in 10 undocumented immigrants has a criminal record,” said Gupta.

More than one in three people in Los Angeles County (PDF) are immigrants, according to a report last year from the University of Southern California. Tens of thousands of county residents had to evacuate following a series of wildfires that began in early January.

“It is unconscionable to have or plan for immigration enforcement activities in a natural disaster,” said Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.

In the name of public safety

California Republicans appear to be on board with Trump’s actions so far. They urged Newsom to veto two bills signed into law last week. One was the $25 million for immigrant legal defense and the other allocated another $25 million for Attorney General Rob Bonta to pursue litigation against the Trump administration.

“We have a public safety problem in California, and a big component of that is international gangs and cartels. Human trafficking has exploded, and it knows no bounds,” said Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, a Republican from Santa Clarita, during a floor debate on the legislation.

During his campaign, Trump and his advisors repeatedly invoked hardened criminals and threats to national security when promising mass detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

That’s what Estefany Peña, 30, from Lincoln, California, believed when she supported Trump for reelection.

“I thought they were going to be targeting criminals. No one mentioned during the campaigning of Donald Trump that residents … legal residents … were going to have to go through this,” she said. Her husband, who came to the country legally in 1999 and has a green card, went to an immigration office in San Francisco for a check-in in late January and still hasn’t come home, she said.

“Everything just came crumbling down,” she said of when immigration officers wouldn’t let her husband leave.

The husband, Joel Jacuinde, 40, is the breadwinner for his family, working at a rice dryer company east of San Francisco. Peña said he also volunteers for his church and provides the primary source of transportation for the family, regularly taking their 11-year-old son for treatment for his asthma. Both children are covered for health care under Jacuinde’s Medi-Cal account, she said.

“My kids are very close to their dad, so it’s taken a terrible toll on them,” she said.

Jacuinde doesn’t show up in a database of people being detained by ICE. Peña said he was told he was not free to leave the immigration office and that agents were holding him to pressure him to sign a voluntary removal form. The family has contacted dozens of attorneys but hasn’t been able to secure legal representation, she said.

In Tijuana, outside a federal shelter set up to assist recently deported Mexicans, a 16-year-old told CalMatters he had been detained trying to reach Stockton to find work. “They grabbed me,” he said, and within hours, he was back in Mexico.

Leaving the same Tijuana shelter, Mario Guerra, 39, a construction worker from Bakersfield, said he ran from about seven or eight ICE agents on Jan. 31. Though he grew up in Bakersfield, he said he was in the U.S. without federal authorization. Guerra said the agents caught him, detained him, and sent him back to Mexico after two days in detention.

Guerra said the officers handcuffed his feet and hands and left him in a transportation van for hours from Bakersfield to San Ysidro with no restroom breaks and nothing to drink.

“We were, basically, telling them that we needed to use the restroom, but they didn’t answer at all,” he said.

“The kids are the ones who are going to suffer the most,” he added about his children who are still in Bakersfield.

Vilma Ordóñez, 34, said she and her husband and children went out to eat in East Los Angeles on Jan. 26. As they got out of the car in front of the restaurant, two agents wearing bulletproof vests approached “and told my husband that he looked like someone they were looking for,” Ordóñez described.

Her stomach dropped as she remembered advice she’d read online, telling her husband, who is in the U.S. without legal status, “Let’s not say anything; let’s just look for an attorney.” The agents kept insisting the couple show them their IDs, she said.

“He had to take out his ID,” she said. “He showed it to them, and they said, ‘Oh, we knew you were not the right person.’”

“They knew he was not the right person, but yet they still insisted on asking him for his ID?” she asked in Spanish.

It’s possible the agents were looking for indications on Ordóñez’s husband’s ID that he was not an authorized immigrant. In 2013, California passed the Safe and Responsible Drivers Act, granting undocumented residents the ability to obtain driver’s licenses. More than a million undocumented Californians got the special licenses, which look slightly different than regular state licenses. Some advocates worried at the time the licenses could be misused by immigration authorities to identify people who are undocumented. ICE did not respond to a request for comment about whether it is identifying immigrants without legal status by their AB60 driver’s licenses.

Ordóñez said the agents let them go, so they went into the restaurant with their children and had dinner. But when they returned to the parking lot, four agents were standing around their car.

“They told him he had signed a voluntary return in 1996 and had not left the country, and so they were going to detain him and take him,” she said, adding that he’s currently being held in a California detention facility. Ordóñez said her husband never signed the voluntary return form.

“The father has a very important role in the family, and right now, our children are traumatized. More than anything, our kids are suffering,” said Ordóñez. “My husband has always paid his taxes every single year since he entered, and he’s always worked and taken care of his family.”

Attention: If someone close to you has recently been detained by immigration agents, and you want to share your story, please reach out to CalMatters via wendy@calmatters.org.

Atención: Si tienes un ser querido que recientemente ha sido detenido por agentes de migración y quieres compartir tu historia, por favor comunícate con CalMatters: wendy@calmatters.org.