Immigrant rights activists vow to disrupt ICE raids in California

A band of largely left-leaning organizations has vowed to disrupt immigration enforcement operations in Southern California, as fear grows that officials will execute large-scale raids.

Leaked documents provided to The Times last week showed law enforcement planned to carry out operations before the end of February focusing on people that do not have legal status in the country or already have pending orders of removal.

“If it’s an apartment, a church, or building whatever it may be, we will call people to surround the place and stop them,” said Ron Gochez, spokesperson for the Union del Barrio, a political group that has built a coalition of 60 organizations “united on the issue of defending migrants and immigrants.”

The group calling itself “the Community Self Defense Coalition” announced its intentions at a press conference in front of federal immigration offices Wednesday evening in downtown L.A. and said it will bring bullhorns to enforcement actions and patrol neighborhoods.

“We are putting them on alert,” he said. “They are not the only ones working right now. We are working our community for self-defense.”

The Trump administration has touted a hard line on immigration, vowing mass deportations, opening Guantanamo Bay to detainees, and adding military along the southern border. But it has not yet mounted any big operations in California, home to the country’s largest immigrant population.

Advocates have been ratcheting up their efforts to counter potential sweeps. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have not commented on the documents, but Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tweeted on X the FBI is “so corrupt” in relation to the leak.

Immigration officials say they continue to carry out operations daily in California, largely focused on criminals, but have not released arrest or detention figures for the state since Trump took office.

The last statistics released show ICE averaged more than 900 daily arrests in the U.S. during the last week of January, according to its post on X. During President Biden’s final year in office, the arrest number was about 350 a week. The Department of Homeland Security also posted that in the first week, it deported 7,300 people, a pace that if it continued would be 350,000 a year, more than the Biden administration but below the peak numbers for the Obama administration.

Since the end of January, the agency has not published any data and it is unclear how many of those individuals had criminal convictions.

Union del Barrio and other members of the organization said they are not waiting for raids to take place to get ready. The groups including the National Lawyers Guild-LA, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and the Assn. of La Raza Educators, Los Angeles are planning a rally on Monday at La Placita downtown.

Some members of the group have been patrolling streets in immigrant communities across Southern California for federal agents, following them and recording them. When they are found, the group uses a bullhorn to announce their presence to the community and distributes flyers showing their unmarked cars to alert neighbors.

“We’re doing community patrols before school and after school around the neighborhood,” said Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a member of the Assn. of La Raza Educators. “We’re working with students and parents to create phone trees to not just know your rights, but to defend your rights. The community self-defense is the point here.”

She said she’s propelled in part by the youth she is teaching.

“Students have been coming to us, asking us for help, because they are afraid that they’re going to come home and their parents will not be there,” she said.

A separate coalition of more than two dozen immigrant rights, labor and religious groups, the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network (LARRN), has created a hotline to report ICE activity and connect people with legal aid. The group says AI-generated content and outdated reports can easily spread misinformation, and they are attempting to verify the flood of social media sightings and rumors coming in.

“We know many people in our community are on edge and we understand many people post content on their social media pages with good intentions in mind,” said Pedro Trujillo, the organizing director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which is part of the network.

The ramped-up efforts have frustrated President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who has complained that sanctuary cities and know-your-rights campaigns have made it more difficult for agents to target criminal immigrants. And he has warned that anyone officials find in the country illegally can be arrested.

Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego, said “a well-targeted enforcement strategy” such as raids on specific work sites could be more difficult for nonprofits and advocates to disrupt than “an indiscriminate deportation campaign.” But so far, the Trump administration hasn’t ramped up what can often be time-consuming enforcement operations.

“That hesitance may reflect concern that work site raids can have significant negative impacts on local economies and communities, many of which are located in “red” states,” he said.

And he’s skeptical about the counterattacks.

“I doubt that the activities of groups like Union del Barrio would have a major impact on Trump’s overall mass deportation campaign, which at least initially will go after undocumented migrants whose whereabouts are already known to the government, because of immigration violations, or migrants with temporary protected status whose presence is also known to the authorities,” he said.

But Gochez and other advocates said Homan’s frustration is a sign their tactics are working, and point to raids in Aurora, Colo., where agents targeted 100 Tren De Aragua gang members, but fell far from their initial goal in a raid earlier this month.