By Sergio Olmos, Wendy Fry, Lauren Hepler and Anat Rubin
CalMatters
The masked agents pull up quickly. They jump out of unmarked vans or trucks. They wear blue jeans or battle fatigues. They approach Latino men, at times yelling and carrying assault rifles. When someone runs, they’re taken. When they don’t answer a question, they’re taken. When they can’t produce papers, they’re taken.
Their families won’t know what happened to them. They’ll be shackled, whisked away to another state, forced to subsist for days on potato chips, apples, water, and the occasional cold sandwich. They’ll sleep on the floor with mylar blankets, without access to showers or even working bathrooms. These are not enemy combatants in a war zone, but people living and working in America’s second largest city.
In the last three weeks, federal agents have swarmed Los Angeles County, rounding up 1,600 people where they work, where their children play, where they shop for food. They have driven entire families into hiding. Videos of these encounters, shared on social media, have offered quick, shaky glimpses of the chaos.
But few details have emerged about what happens to those who are taken. CalMatters spoke with a number of men who were detained on the streets of Los Angeles during the first weekend of the raids. These are the stories three of them told about how they were arrested, how they were treated in government detention and, ultimately, how they were pressured to voluntarily leave the country.
At 3:10 p.m. on Sunday, June 8, Mauricio Oropeza was waiting for the 33 bus on the corner of Lincoln and Venice boulevards in Venice. He was headed back from his job cleaning apartment buildings for a maintenance company. It was a two-bus commute, and he was halfway home.
There were a few other people – three men, a woman and her daughter – waiting for the same bus. No one seemed to know what to make of the truck that suddenly pulled up in front of them, or of the men in jeans and baseball caps that stepped out of the vehicle. One of them was holding a photo of a Latino man with the word “BUSCA” – Spanish for “WANTED” – printed across the top.
“Have you seen this person?” he asked.
When two of the commuters began to run, Oropeza did the same. That’s when several Border Patrol vehicles stopped in front of them, he said, and armed men in tactical gear jumped out. One of the agents tripped Oropeza and pinned him to the ground.
“Don’t resist,” he told him.
The agents took his cell phone and Mexican passport. He was loaded onto one of the vehicles along with the other men from the bus stop, all of them struggling to adjust to their new reality. They would not be going home that night. They would not get to call their families to explain.
As they drove away, the agents spotted two Latino men walking on the sidewalk. Oropeza said they got on their radio, said “two more,” and then another vehicle peeled off to pursue them.
Less than two hours later and exactly a mile away, Omar Sanchez Lopez left his apartment on Rose Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard, in Venice, with his apron draped over his shoulder. He was on his way to work, bussing tables at a nearby Italian restaurant, when a Honda Civic pulled into the apartment complex parking lot. Lopez thought the driver, who was in jeans, t-shirt and baseball cap, was there to visit one of his neighbors. But then the man stepped out of the car and approached him. He was holding a piece of paper with photos of four Latino men, and he asked Lopez, in Spanish, “Do you know these people?”
Lopez, 27, didn’t answer. But the man continued: “Do you speak English? Where do you work? How old are you? Are you a citizen? Do you have papers?”
When Lopez asked, “Why are you asking me these questions?” the man pulled out his badge and said, “ICE.”
Lopez thought about turning around to go back inside, but a masked Border Patrol agent got out of the vehicle and told him to put his hands behind his back. Within minutes, he was handcuffed and sitting in the back of the car.
“What are you doing in the United States?” he said the agent asked him as they drove away. “It’s not your country.”
Lopez didn’t answer. He looked out the window at the traffic as the sedan pulled him farther and farther away from his home, his family, his life.
By the time Lopez and Oropeza were taken, Juan Flores Morales had been under arrest for more than 24 hours. He had been taking a lunch break on Saturday with three other men on his construction crew, eating a pizza outside the restaurant they were renovating in Inglewood, when masked Border Patrol agents rolled by in a truck.
Morales felt, for an instant, as though he was paralyzed. “The fear is crazy,” he said.
Then two agents got out of the vehicle, and Morales, 27, ran into the restaurant. He searched frantically for an escape, but a Border Patrol agent burst through the door and pinned him down.
“Tranquilo,” the agent told him. “Don’t move.”
They handcuffed him and asked whether he had participated in the immigration protests that had started the night before, following the first raids.
“I don’t get involved in that,” he told them. “You got us at work. You got us while working.”
They took his cell phone, he said, and plugged it into a device that unlocked it, which allowed them to look through his contacts and communications.
Morales thought his lack of a criminal record would help him. But it didn’t. “I don’t know why they don’t want us in Los Angeles,” he thought.
The agents drove him away, leaving his tools at the restaurant.
Lopez, Oropeza and Morales are now in Chiapas, Mexico City and Puebla, respectively, and we spoke to them by phone. Their accounts of their arrests, detention, and rapid removal suggest federal agents are working from a new playbook, one that dispenses with the longstanding practice of targeted arrests and relies on only the thinnest pretext, like a wanted poster, for approaching people who appear Latino.
In April, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless raids in the Central Valley. “You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston said, finding the warrantless stops likely violated the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.
The man who led that operation, El Centro Sector Chief Gregory Bovino, is now in charge of the operations across Los Angeles.
The men’s stories also suggest that agents are pushing people to sign removal forms before they can call home or speak with an attorney. Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, said those tactics would be “blatantly illegal.”
“You can’t condition phone access on anything,” Arulanantham said. “They have a right to call their family. They have a right to call a lawyer.”
He also raised concerns about the treatment the men described in government facilities. “It’s not permissible to manipulate the conditions of detention to encourage people to give up their rights,” he said.
Migrants can challenge the legality of their arrest and detention, he said, but they usually have to be in the country and be able to call a lawyer.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Immigration detention centers are well above capacity, and the men we spoke with were almost immediately moved to an ICE tent camp in Texas and, within days, across the border to an immigration facility in Ciudad Juárez.
Before the Trump administration began its mass deportation campaign, many immigrants arrested away from the border were released on bond with a notice to appear in immigration court. Those with criminal histories were typically held in detention facilities.
Now, Bovino has made clear, he considers anyone who crossed the border without documents – the farm worker, the day laborer, the paletero – a criminal.
“Bad people,” he called them during a press conference with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month.
New Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from June 1 to June 10, analyzed by the Los Angeles Times, shows that 69 percent of the people detained in the LA area had never been convicted of a crime.
A criminal records search in Los Angeles and the California state prison system for Oropeza, Lopez and Morales returned no results. Oropeza and Lopez said they had been caught at the border and deported years before.
From the bus stop on Venice Boulevard, Oropeza was taken to a parking lot in Santa Ana where the agents put him in shackles. He had chains on his wrists, his ankles, and around his waist. Then they loaded him onto another vehicle and drove him to a place he described as a kind of jail. There were no beds, he said, and everyone slept on the floor. Lopez and Morales were there as well.
At 5 am the following day, all three were taken to an airfield near the Mojave Desert, where they boarded a plane to Texas with around 35 other men from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.
For the next few days, they were detained in an ICE tent camp in El Paso. Lopez said he was given a small bottle of water, potato chips and an apple. The cells were kept uncomfortably cold, he said, and the detainees were given only Mylar blankets. When he asked to make a phone call, he was told he would need to share detailed information about the person he was calling – their name, address, place of work. He decided against it.
He said the agents told him that if he tried to talk to an attorney, he would be stuck there, under the same conditions, for eight months to a year. On Wednesday, just two days after he arrived in El Paso, he agreed to sign the voluntary deportation papers.
“How they treated you there, I would rather leave,” he said.
Oropeza signed the voluntary removal forms that day as well. Thirty minutes later, he was allowed to make his first call.
“I have a family, I have to provide for them,” he said. “I didn’t want to be stuck there.”
The next day, Lopez, Oropeza and Morales were driven across the border to Juárez, they said, along with dozens of other men from their cells who agreed to sign the forms. There, at a shelter set up by the Mexican government, they were able to shower, eat a hot meal and call their families.
They were also given 2,500 pesos – the equivalent of around $130 dollars – to make their way to somewhere else.