What Court Order? Federal Agents Keep Raiding LA Workplaces Despite Ban

The Intercept

3 days ago

As day laborers and street vendors selling breakfast lined the parking lot of the MacArthur Park Home Depot in Los Angeles early Wednesday morning, a yellow Penske moving truck pulled into the lot. Its driver claimed he was looking for movers, according to organizers, security guards, and a day laborer who witnessed the event and spoke to The Intercept.
That's when a group of at least seven Border Patrol agents dressed in tactical gear stormed out of the back of the truck and rushed toward the day laborers and street vendors gathered outside.
Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino dubbed the raid 'Operation Trojan Horse,' sharing video on social media from a Fox News reporter who was embedded with agents inside the moving truck.
Agents detained at least 16 people during the raid, which appears to be in direct defiance of a temporary restraining order a federal judge put in place in early July after immigrants rights groups sued the government. After a month of militarized raids and racial profiling throughout Southern California, Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of California's Central District, in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by community organizations and detained workers, delivered the Trump administration a major blow. She issued an order that prohibits federal agents from targeting individuals based on their race and ethnicity; whether they speak Spanish or English with an accent; their location such as a car wash, department store parking lot, or other worksite; or their occupation, such as landscapers or street vendors.
The Trump administration appealed, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld the temporary restraining order. The order had brought relative calm to the region in recent weeks, slowing what had been near-daily operations to occasional isolated incidents. But the Trump administration's Southern California campaign was not over.
Since Friday's decision to uphold the temporary restraining order, federal agents have raided at least five other worksites in Los Angeles County, according to organizers and witnesses who spoke to The Intercept. Though it's unclear whether federal agents had warrants for the operations, the raids did not appear to be aimed at any specific individuals and took place at worksites that had been previously targeted, all with predominantly immigrant and Latino workforces.
'Basically everything that they said not to do in the [temporary restraining order] was on a to-do checklist for today,' said a day laborer organizer at the MacArthur Park Home Depot on Wednesday who was not authorized to speak with the media. 'Racial profiling, check. Going to a Home Depot, check. That was on purpose to undermine the courts and to undermine the power of the law.'
The organizer said witnesses had reported seeing agents brandishing firearms at bystanders in front of the Home Depot, including at U.S. citizens. 'There's so many violations to the Constitution, not just to migrants,' he said
Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to The Intercept's request for comment.
Penske said it was not aware its truck would be used in Wednesday's immigration operation and said its policy 'strictly prohibits the transportation of people in the cargo area of its vehicles under any circumstances.' The company said it planned to reach out to the Department of Homeland Security to 'reinforce its policy to avoid improper use of its vehicles in the future.'
Since Friday's decision upholding the temporary restraining order, federal agents raided a car wash in Lakewood, detaining two workers on Saturday; a Superior Grocers in Lynwood on Sunday; another Home Depot in Hollywood on Monday, where at least two individuals were taken; and the Magnolia Car Wash in Fountain Valley, Orange County, where agents on Tuesday detained four workers, according to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center.
Among those taken in Fountain Valley was a father originally from El Salvador who was the main financial supporter for his mother, according to a GoFundMe page set up by a relative.
Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, or IDEPSCA, which advocates for the rights of day laborers and immigrants, said it is still working to confirm how many people were detained at the Hollywood Home Depot on Monday. During that raid, federal agents used a horn that tamaleros use to call people over to buy tamales in an attempt to lure people to detain them, said Maegan Ortiz, executive director of IDEPSCA, in a video posted on social media.
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Deceptive tactics used by immigration authorities were recently banned in the context of home raids as a part of a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit based in Los Angeles. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of people who were lured out of their homes by ICE agents who claimed they were local law enforcement officers.
The Penske moving truck plot on Wednesday may have been beyond the scope of that settlement, but still prompted concern from organizers.
'They had a lot of officers and did it quickly, and did not present warrants, and were targeting people indiscriminately,' said Zoie Matthew, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which has run a community defense center at the store since the initial June 6 raid. 'They were violating the TRO completely — which it seems like has been the case for the past several Home Depots they've hit this week.'
Even after the restraining order was granted, Bovino, who is heading Border Patrol operations across California, doubled down, promising to deliver on Trump's pledge to carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in history with a daily quota of 3,000 arrests per day.
'Different day, different illegal aliens, same objective,' Bovino wrote on his X account on Wednesday, alongside an edited video montage of agents detaining workers at a car wash. 'We're on a mission here in Los Angeles. And we're not leaving until we accomplish our goals.'
The Fox News reporter who embedded with agents, Matt Finn, quoted DHS on his X account, saying that 'MS 13 has a chokehold on this area, which is one reason they're carrying out the highly optic immigration raids.' The government and Fox News have both evoked MS-13 to justify a previous raid in MacArthur Park in early July in which ICE agents, alongside military service members, surrounded and swarmed soccer fields and other recreation areas where a summer camp was taking place — but made zero arrests. Even so, Wednesday's raids appeared to target only workers. The majority of people detained during immigration operations in the LA area in recent months do not have criminal records.
Video taken by residents who live in an apartment directly overlooking the MacArthur Park Home Depot parking lot showed two Border Patrol agents yanking one man toward the pavement, while other agents pulled three women from a row of tables topped with food and drinks. The workers and vendors were led toward a white van parked in front of the Penske truck.
A day laborer told The Intercept he managed to run inside the Home Depot with other workers during the raid and hid for a half-hour. He immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala a year ago to stay with his cousin and to find work.
'I'm nervous,' said the man, who goes to the Home Depot every day to find work. 'I'm nervous because I feel like they're going to come back again,' he said. Even so, the man said he plans to continue returning to the store, the only place he knows where to find a job.