Border Patrol is conducting legally dubious raids across California — and bragging about it online

San Francisco Chronicle​

25-05-2025

By any reasonable measure, Ernesto Campos Gutierrez is a pillar of his Bakersfield community. A resident of more than two decades, he is a homeowner. He is a business owner. He is an active member of his church.
There's no clear reason why he was stopped by an unmarked SUV as he drove to his gardening job on Jan. 8, with a mini trailer containing his equipment in tow. He wasn't speeding, and his license and registration were up to date, according to court documents.
More than five months later, there are even fewer answers as to why the encounter turned violent.
Campos Gutierrez handed officers his ID, but when they refused to say why he'd been pulled over and demanded his keys, he said no, according to court documents. Agents then forcibly removed his passenger after threatening to shatter his windows with a handheld tool. Then an officer slashed his tires.
Campos Gutierrez was arrested, he was told, for 'alien smuggling' — and detained for hours in a facility about 20 minutes away, despite telling officers he was a U.S. citizen.
He was far from the only one swept up in Bakersfield that day.
Bree Bernwanger, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, represents several of those targeted by what turned out to be a series of coordinated raids. She told me immigration agents ' were sending their roving patrols to agricultural areas, to Home Depot, to places where farmworkers go for breakfast, and they were timing it with their shifts, so they were clearly going after farmworkers and day laborers.'
These raids weren't just unusual for their brazenness. They were conducted by a Border Patrol unit hundreds of miles from its typical territory — one that has not just ramped up its activity far from the border but has boasted about legally dubious behavior on social media.
Many of the initial reports about the raids assumed Immigration and Customs Enforcement was responsible. It didn't occur to most people that such actions would be carried out by another agency, a sector of Border Patrol based in El Centro, a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in Imperial County, more than 300 miles away.
In Facebook posts following the Bakersfield raid, which the El Centro sector named Operation Return to Sender, it boasted: 'We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield' and promised 'We are planning operations for other locals (sic) such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.'
Since the Bakersfield episode, El Centro agents have descended on more locations far from the southern border, including El Monte and Pomona in Los Angeles County.
Its in-person confrontations and its social media presence are now being closely scrutinized. In two separate legal cases over the past month, lawyers have used the agency's posts as evidence of agents' intent to act unlawfully; in both cases, judges intervened to block the Border Patrol's actions.
The El Centro section is responsible for 70 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Jacumba Mountains east of San Diego along the rugged desert terrain of Imperial County. Nearly 1,000 agents and 149 support staffers are spread among three stations at El Centro, Calexico and Indio. But the agency is technically allowed to operate within 100 miles of any border — including the ocean, meaning most of California and a vast majority of the U.S. population is subject to its authority.
Under Trump, the El Centro Border Patrol sector in particular has seized on this authority, both to sow havoc across California and to antagonize state and local leaders who've tried to protect immigrants in their communities.
Like the president himself, the agency's social media imprint is a vortex of insults, boasts and highly produced videos that paint its agents as heroes and the immigrants they encounter as a subhuman invading force.
One post includes a photo of a car with its front windshield blown to bits, shards of glass pooled on the driver's seat. It was published the same day many news outlets reported that Elon Musk, in his role leading Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, would be requiring federal employees to send weekly reports laying out five things they'd done that week.
The post read: ' #DOGE is really catching on! This illegal alien is listing his accomplishments for this past week: Refused to open window during an immigration inspection; Got his window shattered for an extraction, Arrested by the #PremierSector, Went to jail, Got deported.'
People in the comments cheered: 'FAFO,' wrote one, an acronym for the taunt 'f— around and find out,' alongside three laughing emojis.
'FAFO in full effect,' the official El Centro account wrote back, with its own smattering of laughing and smiling emojis.
The El Centro sector has at least five people working on producing videos, CalMatters reported in April.
Then there's the moniker the El Centro sector has created for itself. In virtually every piece of content coming from the account, the agency refers to itself as the 'Premier Sector,' typically in the third person — but also using #PremierSector, or in photos, where it's stamped across the faces of the people it arrests.
It's never a good sign, in my experience, when someone gives themselves a nickname.
A spokesman for Border Patrol's El Centro sector declined to answer my questions about its approach, but wrote in a statement that it 'uses its official social media platforms to communicate directly with the American people — reinforcing our mission, highlighting operations, and offering a window into the work of our agents and officers. We actively monitor communications to ensure they reflect agency priorities and public expectations.'
ACLU attorneys in their court filings provided an extensive rundown of social media posts by the El Centro Border Patrol sector to show that in its own words, the agency had expressed a clear intention of breaking the law — repeatedly.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston of Fresno cited those posts in an April 29 order sharply curtailing the agency's practices.
The Border Patrol must have 'reasonable suspicion' that a crime or immigration violation has taken place in order to stop someone, under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And, absent a warrant, it cannot arrest someone without evaluating whether they present a flight risk. By constantly posting about agents' intentions to go into communities and arrest as many people as possible, agents showed they 'do not intend to comply with the requirements … but to perform warrantless arrests without probable cause,' Thurston wrote.
For now, she has prohibited the agents from using the kind of tactics they deployed in Bakersfield.
Bernwanger told me she's been 'floored by the brazenness with which they have operated and talked about their operations' on social media.
In a separate case this month, a U.S. district judge in San Diego temporarily blocked the expedited deportations of several men arrested as part of another raid hundreds of miles from El Centro. Agents swarmed a Home Depot parking lot in Pomona, east of Los Angeles, and detained multiple people based solely on the fact that they walked or ran in the other direction when they saw a marked Border Patrol vehicle.
In that case, too, an attorney for the men detailed numerous social media posts by the El Centro sector in court documents, arguing they present a pattern of flouting the limits of its authority.
One of them was a post on X in which a user asked about the Border Patrol's apparent strategy of 'standing outside gas station stops at (H)ome (D)epots preying on any random person.' Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino responded: 'Undocumented means just that. I recommend returning to the country of origin, obtaining proper documents, and doing it the right way. If not, we will arrest.'
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw wrote that 'the public interest in enforcement of immigration laws, although significant, does not override the public interest in protecting the safeguards of the Constitution.'
After Sabraw blocked the expedited deportations and ordered Border Patrol agents to testify in court, the agency abruptly dropped the effort and transferred the case to immigration court.
'The social media posts indicate the sector is operating in a way that doesn't comply with the law. They're basically saying, 'The gloves are off, we're coming after you regardless of the law,' ' said Niels Frenzen, co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic, who is representing three of the men facing deportation after the Pomona raid.
It's perhaps not a surprise that an agency emboldened by Trump is mimicking his bombast on social media.
The El Centro sector's social media accounts similarly mock and insult anyone it encounters who is not cheering agents on. Ironically, though, those posts are now interfering with Trump's desired endgame of removing thousands of immigrants.
A late April Facebook post brags about arresting two legal residents who weren't carrying immigration documents when confronted by officers.
One woman responded: 'I'm a US citizen and brown, what should I carry to prove my status?'
The El Centro account shot back: 'Is that chip on your shoulder something you always carry?'
The Facebook account frequently derides those it arrests as 'fools,' 'Jesse James wannabes' and 'baby faced criminals' and calls one woman 'devoid of motherly instincts.'
A photo of a man it describes as a 'foreign fugitive' handcuffed in the back seat of a patrol vehicle, his lips turned down and eyes fixed at the camera, says: 'It's too late to pout … you're on your way OUT!' and 'Making puppy-dog eyes won't save him from answering for his criminal past.'
One highly produced 30-second video is set to music and shows agents gripping various weapons in slow motion.
'M-4s up. Stack tight. Move silent. Hit hard!' it says. 'This is a message to all those who break the law. The Premier Sector gives no warnings, just boots, breaches, & warrants with names on them.'
Ironically, its lack of warrants figures prominently in both legal cases against the agency.
This is not how most government agencies — even those that interface with immigrants — present themselves to the public. Professionalism and upholding American immigration law are not mutually exclusive.
Take the clinical way the U.S. Coast Guard described a recent encounter with a boat carrying undocumented immigrants: 'The aliens aboard the 15-foot vessel consisted of four adult males all claiming Mexican nationality. All four aliens were taken into custody by the Coast Guard and transferred to U.S. Border Patrol personnel.'
Frenzen said he believes El Centro's approach to social media reflects a desire to create a sense of fear among immigrants so intense that they 'self-deport,' or leave the country voluntarily.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees Border Patrol, this week made clear she knows or cares nothing about the fundamental rights protecting people under her purview.
'Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to,' she told senators at a hearing Wednesday (she was cut off based on how sideways her answer had already gone).
Noem, Trump and eager Border Patrol offices like the El Centro sector are still hoping to deliver their promises of mass deportations. It's why they've cast such a wide net — one that's at times ignored due process and ensnared everyone from gardeners in Bakersfield to student activists in New York.
So far, their bombast has worked against them in court. But it's unclear how long that will last.
Should they prevail, Californians should prepare for their state to look and operate much differently than most of us are accustomed — or would like.