The messy aftermath of an immigration sweep in Pacoima

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

The 54-year-old woman was splayed on the sidewalk with her shirt half-raised, unconscious. Nearby, federal immigration agents stood guard as people screamed at them.
Arturo Hermosillo, a U.S. citizen, was in his work van, recording it all when an agent ordered him to back up to make room for an ambulance that was en route for the woman.
As he was reversing, he said, another agent started banging on his window and side view mirror, pushing it in. He couldn't see behind him and felt a bump.
Hermosillo opened his door to tell the agents he couldn't move. But not long after, they dragged him out of his van.
'I told them I didn't do anything illegal,' he said.
Hermosillo was arrested and sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. The woman, who later said she had fainted while an agent bear-hugged her to the point she struggled to breathe, underwent heart surgery at a Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. A doctor told her she had suffered a heart attack.
The immigration sweep on June 19, just outside a Lowe's Home Improvement store, is one of many that have taken place in Southern California and encapsulates the chaotic methods employed to detain people over the last month. A federal judge on Friday ruled that there was sufficient evidence that agents were using racial profiling to target people and ordered a halt to the indiscriminate sweeps, saying they violated the 4th Amendment.
Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said in an email response to The Times that a person 'rammed his vehicle into a law enforcement vehicle' during the June 19 operation.
'CBP Agents were also assaulted during the operation and verbally harassed ... despite this, CBP arrested 30 illegal aliens in Hollywood and 9 illegal aliens in San Fernando and Pacoima,' she wrote.
The Times sought clarification as to which operation involved the ramming of the federal vehicle, but neither McLaughlin nor the agency responded to the follow-up question.
Eyewitness videos, as well as interviews with Hermosillo and the 54-year-old woman, tell a different story and underscore the public's outrage and criticism of the immigration sweeps.
Matilde, who declined to give her last name because of her immigration status, said she was selling tamales by the entrance of the parking lot shared by Lowe's and other businesses when the 54-year-old got word that federal immigration agents were in the area.
Matilde got nervous and began taking down her stand. She was about to put her umbrella away when a white car with tinted windows pulled up.
'I saw two agents get out,' she said in a phone interview. 'I didn't run.'
She said the agent that ran to her never identified himself, provided a warrant or requested documentation of her immigration status. Instead, she said, he grabbed her from behind.
'I could feel his vest against my ear,' said Matilde, who is about 5 feet tall. 'I told him I couldn't breathe.'
A second agent showed up to grab her hands to handcuff her. She said as they tried to do that one of the agents unintentionally lifted her shirt, exposing her bra. She reached to pull her shirt down and the agents used more force as if she were resisting.
What happened next is something Matilde can't fully recall.
'I don't know if I fainted or if they threw me down,' she said.
But she woke up on the ground and started to plea with agents.
'I told them: I can't breathe, I can't breathe and that my chest hurts,' she said. 'But they didn't listen. They ignored me.'
She said she looked up at the tree where she had a framed picture of the Virgin Mary and began to pray: 'Virgin Mary, please help me, don't abandon me. I don't want to die.'
She said a third agent came and told her he was a paramedic, asking her if she had any medical conditions. She told him she suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes and that her chest was hurting.
He took her pulse before the agents dialed 911. She said the agents left her on the ground.
Videos taken by people at the scene and shared on social media show Matilde on the ground, unconscious and surrounded by agents. In another video, firefighters are caring for her while a small crowd shame the agents for hurting the woman, especially those agents who appear to be Latinos.
'You have Latino blood,' one woman yelled at the agents in Spanish.
'Does it feel good doing this?' another woman screamed out.
As paramedics arrived to transport Matilde to the hospital, three federal agents were trying to drag Hermosillo out of his van.
A video shows an agent pulling on Hermosillo's leg to drag him out. A second agent tries to do the same before trying to snatch Hermosillo's arm but loses his grip and falls down. A third agent with a vest that reads 'medic' joins in shortly after.
'Dude, let him go!' a woman screams in the background.
'Oh my God, why [do] you guys act like animals?' the woman recording the video says.
'What has he done?' a man screams out at agents trying to keep people back.
The video shows the three agents struggling to pull Hermosillo out. Once he's out of the van, he is shoeless on one foot and is pushed down to the hot ground so they can handcuff him.
'What's your name?' the woman recording yells out to Hermosillo, who responds with his name.
'Tell us where you're from so we can get you out of jail. Where are you from? What's your address? We want to call your family,' people call out.
In another video, Hermosillo is seen being placed in the back of a white van, screaming: 'Fight back, fight back.'
'We're going to fight for you!' a woman shouts back to him.
Once in custody, he said agents accused him of obstruction and took him to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A. There, he said, the agents mocked him.
'They were saying things like I was never going to get out and that I better lawyer up,' he said.
When one agent told him he didn't understand why the public was making a big deal of the immigration sweeps, he got angry.
'It's because you guys are Nazis,' Hermosillo said he told the agent.
He said they continued to tell him he would be in prison for nearly a decade. Hermosillo told the agents he was fine with that.
'I was like, they're not going to break me,' he said. 'I'm going to continue my education in here; I'm going to continue organizing in here.'
He said that after some time, Homeland Security agents showed up to speak to him.
'They told me, 'You were never arrested. You're just being detained, but you can't leave L.A. County for six months to a year,' and that they were going to proceed with the offense but that they were letting me go.'
He said he signed release documents.
'They let me out in the street with no shoe, no phone,' he said. 'I had nothing with me because it was in the vehicle.'
Hermosillo said he recorded the incident but declined to provide it to The Times as part of his defense against the federal government.
'You know the difference between them and us,' he said. 'It's that our struggle comes from love, and all they have is hate.
'My struggle is for the love of my people.'
Once Matilde was placed on a gurney and moved into an ambulance, she was taken three miles to Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.
There, she said, doctors treated her partially blocked arteries in the heart, telling her she had suffered a minor heart attack.
'The doctor said I was lucky they weren't too clogged up or else they would have needed to do open heart surgery,' she said.
She stayed in the hospital for five days and was prescribed heart medication as well as medication for anxiety, which she developed after the June 19 incident.
'At night I can't sleep because I have nightmares,' she said.
The anxiety creeps up on her. Sometimes, she said, she can feel the agent's breath when he held her tightly. She said she has bruises on her legs, arms and belly and has been unable to do much, even cook.
It's not the America Matilde envisioned when she came to the U.S. 29 years ago.
She and her husband came for work and a steady income. They wanted to send money back home so her husband's parents, who were bouncing from one relative's home to another, could have their own place. They also wanted to raise a family, but in a country that provided better opportunities. She said her 28-year-old daughter is a nurse assistant, and her 15-year-old son wants to go to college to become a structural engineer.
'We both suffered from our sacrifice,' she said. 'But we wanted a better future for our kids.
'We wanted things just to be better.'