Immigration agents arrived on the Central Coast on Tuesday, swarming farms in two cities and arresting a total of 40 people, according to reports from immigrant advocacy organizations.
At a Santa Maria news conference on Thursday, Hazel Davalos, co-executive director of CAUSE, the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, called the arrests the “first occurrence of major workplace raids here on the Central Coast.”
The operations came in the wake of immigration enforcement activities in Los Angeles over the weekend that spawned protests and the deployment of military troops in response.
Congressman Salud Carbajal, who represents the entirety of Santa Barbara County and portions of San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties, held a separate news conference on Thursday.
“Let us be clear, these raids on the Central Coast and the militarized response in L.A. are not about public safety,” he said. “They are about stoking fear and political theater.”
As ICE has appeared to be making its way north from Los Angeles through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties this week, local leaders expect immigration agents to pass through San Luis Obispo County next.
When asked by a Tribune reporter why ICE hasn’t yet carried out similar operations in San Luis Obispo County, Carbajal said he wasn’t sure because “we don’t get much information.”
“We haven’t been able to get information to and responses to the questions that we raise in recent weeks and in recent days,” he said.
In total, 35 people were arrested in Oxnard and five in Santa Maria on Tuesday, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) refused to confirm those numbers to The Tribune.
Last month, the Trump administration directed ICE to arrest at least 3,000 people per day, Reuters reported — and community leaders noticed an escalation in federal immigration activity on the Central Coast this past week.
“Family separation is not a distant crisis. It’s happening here in Santa Maria, in Oxnard, Ventura and across this nation,” The Fund for Santa Barbara associate director Patricia Solorio said at the news conference in Santa Maria on Thursday. “Children are waking up afraid their parents won’t come home. We are seeing Border Patrol running people down in the fields. It’s horrifying.”
The Santa Maria news conference, held in front of the Joseph Centeno Administrative Building, took on the feel of a rally as community members showed up with signs in support of immigrant rights and against ICE.
The spike in arrests sent shockwaves of fear throughout the community, and people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work, the doctor and even their children’s graduations, CAUSE associate organizing director Daniel Segura said.
On Thursday morning, Segura noticed a smaller-than-usual crowd at the Pioneer Valley High School graduation — likely because families were avoiding ICE, he said.
He called for Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature to provide financial support to immigrant workers so they can stay home and protect themselves from ICE.
“It is not acceptable that our community members continue to be kidnapped by the current administration,” he said. “We must take action. Our elected officials must take action. Put your money where your words are, and be able to fund the security and safety of our families to be able to shelter in place.”
People can report ICE activity, immigration raids, checkpoints, detentions and arrests of undocumented individuals to the 805 Undocufund’s Immigrant Rapid Response Hotline at 805-870-8855. The network will then text those enrolled in their service about confirmed ICE sightings. Text “ALERT” to the hotline number to receive real-time updates.
ICE targets Central Coast farms
At Thursday’s news conference, Davalos detailed the events of the two raids.
Early on Tuesday morning, ICE pulled over a car full of five undocumented immigrants near agricultural fields in Santa Maria at 1755 Stowell Road.
ICE had a warrant for one person in the car, but all five people were arrested, Davalos said.
As far as she knows, all five were still in detention as of Thursday morning.
ICE attempted to enter another farm in Santa Maria on Tuesday, but in the absence of a warrant, the owner denied the agents entry to the property, she said.
Also on Tuesday morning, ICE arrested 35 farmworkers from fields in Oxnard, 805 UndocuFund executive director Primitiva Hernandez said. Of those 35 people, 23 were from Mexico, while others were from El Salvador, Guatemala and other nations.
“Some of those people were deported that very same day that they were apprehended, giving no access to due process,” Hernandez said.
Volunteers were stationed at nine farms in Oxnard on Tuesday to report ICE activity to the community, Davalos said. At those farms, supervisors closed the gates, parked their trucks in front of the gates and denied ICE entry to the property.
Later, the supervisors invited lunch trucks onto the property so farmworkers could eat safely, she said.
“This was a powerful community response and shows how much fight we have here in the Central Coast,” Davalos said.
At the end of the day, volunteers found workers hiding in the fields — afraid to leave the farms at the end of the day. Volunteers drove more than 100 farmworkers home from work on Tuesday, she said.
“ICE is indiscriminately attacking immigrant communities like Oxnard and Santa Maria, trying to find anyone they can to meet their politically driven quotas,” she said. “It exposes that the Trump administration claims of targeted enforcement were always a bold-faced lie. They are seizing our family, friends, neighbors and co-workers.”
ICE is not responding to reporters or representatives
Maria Salguero, a senior attorney at the Immigrant Legal Defense Center in Santa Barbara who interfaces frequently with the Department of Homeland Security, said that federal immigration agencies are not following their own regulations.
Instead, they are “just operating under vibes,” she said.
“We’re winning cases, we have a judge’s order ordering the release of a person, and ICE is refusing to release them, and they have moved the case from here to out of state to avoid releasing the person,” she told The Tribune. “They’re getting incredibly creative and not even following their own policy.”
In some places, people have been arrested at their Immigration Court hearings by federal agents — sometimes in plainclothes — patrolling the courthouses, a controversial new strategy being deployed by immigration enforcement nationwide.
In most of the recent arrests Salguero has seen in Santa Maria, ICE has not been cooperative.
“We’re not able to get people out, and it’s usually people that do not have criminal records,” she said. “It’s terrible circumstances. I think the narrative that criminals are being chased down and it’s the criminals that are being targeted is a complete, flat-out lie.”
She called on local elected officials to protect their communities from ICE.
“There’s this misconception, right, that legally, local officials or state officials do not have jurisdiction. They don’t have the power legally to do more,” she said.
However, in 2014, the Santa Maria City Council voted to grant a development permit for the construction of an ICE processing facility in Santa Maria, the Santa Barbara Independent reported at the time. This shows that local elected officials have more authority over immigration policy in their communities than they say, Salguero said.
“To say that you don’t have the authority, or you don’t have the power, the jurisdiction, to do more is a lie,” she said.
At the time of this story, The Tribune had reached out to ICE many times via phone and email. Early contact that was made by a Tribune reporter with a representative of the agency at the beginning of the Trump administration has since ended and further attempts to reach them have gone ignored.
In response to The Tribune’s most recent email outreach to ICE questioning the number of arrests made in SLO County since Jan. 20, the agency responded: “Acknowledging receipt of your request,” then directed the Tribune reporter to ICE’s public statistics page, which is not up to date past December 31, 2024.
In Congressman Carbajal’s Thursday news conference,multiple reporters asked about the lack of transparency from ICE.
Carbajal said members of Congress haven’t had much better luck getting responses from ICE. On Thursday morning, just before Carbajal’s news conference, California Sen. Alex Padilla was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and forcibly removed from a Department of Homeland Security news conference in Los Angeles when he attempted to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question.
“We are not getting responses to our inquiries of ICE, and that is part of the problem, that there’s a lack of transparency like we’ve never seen before,” Carbajal said at his news conference. “… It’s unconscionable the way this administration is functioning, very authoritative, very dictator-like. We are seeing behavior that we’ve only seen come from dictators in the history of our world.”
