Matilde suffered a heart attack after she was held by immigration agents at a Lowes parking lot and can no longer go to the store without breaking down. Narciso Barranco, a gardener accused of threatening heavily armed agents with a weed whacker, still wakes up with headaches after he was beaten during his arrest. Jaime Alanís Garcia died after falling 30 feet from a rafter as agents stormed his workplace.
The aggressive tactics led by Border Patrol agents hundreds of miles from their posts have left communities jarred, people injured and businesses gutted.
“I can’t erase the masked faces from my mind,” said Matilde, a 54-year-old mother who is still gripped with fear about the raid in Pacoima. In a bystander video posted on social media, she appears to faint after agents grabbed her from behind. A doctor told Matilde, who asked that her full name not be used, that she had a heart attack.
Civil rights activists, city leaders, immigrants and their advocates were hopeful that the indiscriminate sweeps targeting Latinos were over in July after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, ruling that Border Patrol agents’ profiling tactics violated the 4th Amendment. They were even more heartened when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the government’s argument that their tactics were lawful and upheld the restraining order.
But this week, Customs and Border Protection struck in Los Angeles again, raiding a car wash and a Home Depot, grabbing anyone who ran from them.
“We are not leaving,” said Border Patrol Sector Chief Greg Bovino, who has been leading the operations in California.
The temporary restraining orders prohibits agents from stopping someone solely based on their race, language, job or location.
Mayor Karen Bass said it appears as if the Wednesday raid at a Home Depot in Westlake — dubbed “Operation Trojan Horse” — violated the order, but city attorneys are still trying to determine the facts.
The legal wrangling will continue over the ways agents decide who to target and the level of use of force they use for non-criminal enforcement. The government on Thursday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the judge’s order.
Now other parts of the country are watching the events in California, expecting federal agents to target their immigrant communities, particularly in states with no judicial orders blocking them.
“We saw the videos, the images coming out of Los Angeles. We definitely thought we would be next,” said Rey Wences, with Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which runs a hotline that monitors raids. “We’re just waiting for the shoe to drop.”
The Times reviewed dozens of witness and surveillance videos, pored through criminal complaints and interviewed lawyers, advocates, bystanders and experts to understand how on-the-ground operations have unfolded this summer and where the points of contention are.
Are ‘roving patrols’ simply racial profiling?
Border Patrol agents were driving down West Olympic Boulevard in Montebello — a largely Latino community — when surveillance footage captured their white SUV make a U-turn and pull into the driveway of a tow yard at 4:32 p.m on June 12.
As Homeland Security Investigations special agent Nicholas DeSimone later wrote in a federal criminal complaint, the operation was not preplanned but rather part of a “roving patrol”— a controversial tactic that lawsuits link to racial profiling and was widely used in the Los Angeles area after the raids started in June.
“Roving patrols,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, involves agents on foot or in a vehicle simply looking for people who might be undocumented, a practice traditionally focused on the border region.
Within minutes, agents had arrested two people at the tow yard. They also cornered a U.S. citizen, Brian Gavidia, who is now part of a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of these stops.
Video of the stop taken by his friend went viral and raised red flags early in the crackdown that agents were indiscriminately targeting people because of the way they looked.
“I’m an American, bro,” Gavidia can be heard saying to the agent, as his friend narrates. “These guys, literally based off of skin color!”
The purpose of a roving patrol is for border agents to deter or respond to illegal activity, according to the agency. These tactics are a departure from agents targeting specific immigrants based on information they have on the person, such as serious criminal histories or removal orders. And while agents have been carrying out roving patrols for more than a decade, they are controversial and untested at such a large scale in the interior of the country.
Mohammad Tajsar, senior attorney, speaks during a press conference at Bubble Bath Car Wash following weeks of immigration raids across Southern California.
(William Liang / For The Times)
In July, the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel, other groups and private attorneys filed a lawsuit in L.A. challenging the constitutionality of the roving patrols and requesting the temporary restraining order. During a hearing, Mohammad Tajsar, an ACLU attorney, told U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong that plaintiffs had documented an “overwhelming record” showing the government “has a policy and practice of conducting so called roving patrols throughout this district to stop individuals without ever making a particularized, individualized assessment of reasonable suspicion that the person is in the United States in violation of U.S. immigration law.”
“This practice is officially sanctioned,” Tajsar said during the hearing.
ACLU lawyers had already sued over indiscriminate sweeps in February, after Bovino oversaw roving patrols in Kern County the month before. They argued the agency had a history of detaining people during these patrols without establishing reasonable suspicion of their immigration violation, and of threatening physical harm against those who refuse to comply.
“Border Patrol’s interior sweeps demonstrate a pattern of noncompliance with the statutory and constitutional limits on its authority,” attorneys argued in that case. Specifically, they alleged the agency was relying on race or ethnicity to justify stops, using physical abuse if a person refused to voluntary questioning and detaining people who declined to talk.
Past lawsuits show that Border Patrol agents determined on the fly who to stop, based on the slightest behaviors, from people slowing abruptly, speeding up, avoiding eye contact or not sitting upright.
But the agency’s own data show that roving patrols don’t often yield many people that are breaking the law.
In Border Patrol’s El Centro sector, where Bovino is stationed, from Oct. 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024, agents conducted 1,114 roving patrol stops, according to a 2024 DHS report. Of roving patrol stops, only 160 were categorized as “Apprehensions Deportable.”
Is running away reasonable suspicion to detain someone?
On June 17, Vivaldo Montes Herrera was pushing a trash can across the parking lot of the plaza he’s cleaned for years when he spotted a marked Border Patrol truck, out on a roving patrol, coming straight toward him.
Handout photo of Montes Herrera with his daughter.
(Claudia Mejia)
Surveillance footage captured Montes Herrera pushing the trash can away and starting to run. Even before the Border Patrol truck stopped, an agent opened the door and dashed after the custodial worker.
To the agents, the fact that Montes Herrera ran helped create reasonable suspicion that he was in the country illegally. As Border Patrol captioned an Instagram video last month: “When they run, we chase.”
Across the country, people now wrestle with the question of what do when confronted by immigration agents: Do I run?
Even people who are in the country legally have tried to make a break for it. In one case, despite having legal status, Domingo Rueda Hernandez ran behind bags of soil during a raid that unfolded outside of a Home Depot in Hollywood.
In another instance captured on video, a U.S. citizen is splayed out on a sidewalk in El Monte as two men with vests that read “Border Patrol” kneel over him.
“What the hell, man,” the man told the agents in perfect English. “I’m not doing nothing wrong.”
“Then why were you running?” an agent asks.
Government and civil rights lawyers both agree that somebody running from an agent, in some cases, can be grounds for reasonable suspicion. But it doesn’t determine whether an arrest can actually be made.
In her ruling, Judge Frimpong did not order the agents to stop the practice but expressed misgivings about it, noting that the government hadn’t explained “why fleeing upon seeing unidentified masked men with guns exiting from tinted cars without license plates raises suspicion.”
Adrian Martinez, 20, with his mom Myra Villarreal, left, describes how his neck was bruised and his leg was injured after he was thrown on the ground by Border Patrol as he was returning from a break as a Walmart employee and trying to protect a co-worker.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
In El Monte, when Montes Herrera was being detained, Adrian Martinez, a worker at a Walmart in the plaza, tried to intervene and was arrested alongside him. Martinez said he heard agents laughing at Montes Herrera and calling him “dumb for running.”
“We wouldn’t have chased him if he wouldn’t have ran,” Martinez recalled the agents saying.
“They make it seem like, ‘Oh, we’re not going toward them unless they run,’ but they do the most to get them to run,” Martinez said.
“If I was that man,” he added, “I would have ran too.”
Can questions from masked, armed agents be “consensual”?
“Eres ciudadano Americano,” the Border Patrol agent, identified only as J.C., asked a man in the Montebello tow yard. “Are you an American citizen?”
The response is not captured on the footage, but the man is placed in handcuffs soon after.
“Can I ask you a question?” an immigration agent asked a man at the Santa Fe Springs swap meet. “Where were you born?”
“Tustin, Santa Ana. Why are you asking?” the guy taking the video responds.
Immigration agents said arrests in June and July often stemmed from “consensual encounters.”
“The individuals were free to walk away and terminate the encounter, decline to answer questions and refuse to provide requested identification documents,” Kyle Harvick, who heads patrol for the El Centro Sector, said in a court declaration defending the practice used across the Southern California raids.
“While some of the individuals encountered freely answered questions about their names and place of birth and provided identification documents, others refused to answer questions and/or walked away from the encounters without any further interaction.”
Civil rights and immigration lawyers say that armed, masked men forcefully barking questions to vendors or people in a Home Depot parking lot is anything but a consensual interaction.
“If they are showing up in places with that display of force and authority and surrounding the people they’re trying to talk to, that’s no longer a consensual encounter,” said Eva Bitran, a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California.
Masked and armed agents surrounded Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and his co-workers as they waited at a bus stop in Pasadena on June 18. Vasquez Perdomo, who is a plaintiff in the L.A. civil rights lawsuit against the Trump administration, attempted to leave but was quickly handcuffed and put into a vehicle.
“At the time he was handcuffed, agents did not have reasonable suspicion of a violation of immigration law,” the lawsuit states. It was only after Vasquez Perdomo was taken to a nearby CVS parking lot that agents checked his identification.
In another case, a man who had fled immigration agents at a Downey car wash seemingly avoided arrest by not talking. Video captured the man, in jeans and a blue work shirt, on the ground near his overturned bike as masked men in plain clothes or vests that read “police” surrounded him.
“You don’t have to tell them anything,” Melyssa Rivas, a Downey resident, told the man repeatedly as an agent walked up and put a hand on his back. Urged by the crowd not to speak, the man kept quiet.
“Have a good day,” the agent told the man, before walking away.
Rivas and several others were recording the interaction, which she believes put pressure on the agents who were seeking to make an arrest.
Without reasonable suspicion, agents cannot legally detain someone according to federal regulations that dictate immigration enforcement. The suspicion must be based on “articulable facts.” If an agent can establish enough of those facts to determine there is reasonable suspicion to stop someone, they can.
Trump administration lawyers say they consider a “totality of the circumstances” to make that determination, including the occupation of those stopped and the location they were picked up.
Exterior of Bubble Bath Hand Car Wash following weeks of immigration raids across Southern California.
(William Liang/For The Times)
Are car washes or Home Depots fair targets?
The masked, armed men pulled up to Beverly Car Wash in Montebello in white trucks with Texas plates. At least six agents, most wearing Border Patrol vests, made beelines to the brown-skinned men toweling down cars.
“What’s your migration status?” an agent in camouflage asked a worker named Hector.
Another agent cornered Edgar “Gordito,” asking him the same, scoffing at his claim he was there as a Mexican tourist.
One scared worker jumped over a nearby fence. An unmarked car followed her down the alley. Having fallen hard, she quickly gave herself up. During the raid, which lasted only two minutes, agents arrested three people.
In his declaration, Harvick said certain businesses, including car washes, “have been selected for encounters because past experiences have demonstrated that illegal aliens utilize and seek work at these locations.”
At least 58 car washes have been hit, some of them more than once, according to the Clean Carwash Worker Center, which has been tracking the raids. After the Beverly Car Wash reopened weeks after the first raid, immigration agents hit it a second time. They arrested another two people who had just started working there.
Although Harvick does not specifically reference Home Depot, so many have been hit that they have become a symbol of the raids.
During a hearing last month, Frimpong called some of the locations that agents had hit “general” and “not necessarily associated with not having status.”
“As they said, bus stop, car wash, tow yard — maybe they’re correlated with people who are low-income or have low income-occupations, maybe they’re correlated with race or ethnicity, but they don’t seem to be correlated with status,” Frimpong said.
