Latest news with #VenturaCounty
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE Is Making an Example of California
In California, well before federal immigration agents reach their targets, their regular, brutal raids are sometimes augured by a video. 'They passed Ventura, entering Santa Barbara, 10am,' read the caption on an Instagram post the morning of Thursday, July 10. Shot through the windshield of a moving car on the freeway, it showed a line of vans, SUVs, and other large vehicles, the type often spotted at raids. 'Fucking caravan, you guys—fucking caravan,' a voice in the car added. The footage was reposted by two immigrant rights groups in Ventura County, 805 Immigrant Coalition and VC Defensa. Then it spread over social media. A few hours later, an ABC7 news chopper hovered over the scene as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on farms near Camarillo. It was late afternoon on the East Coast when I opened the news station's live feed on YouTube. Almost instantly, I felt sick. From high overhead, the chopper's camera zoomed in on ICE agents in an apparent standoff, their vehicles parked in dusty brown earth at the roadside, as if abandoned. Striding around casually while dressed for war, agents could be seen lining up farm workers. Some agents stood a few feet from a stretcher with a person lying on it. All told, the arrests a week ago may add up to the largest single roundup yet by this administration. According to the Department of Homeland Security, more than 300 people were arrested in the raids on farms in Camarillo and Carpinteria. But the arrests did not target only workers. Additional federal agents, their faces covered with neck gaiters and reflective sunglasses, launched smoking canisters into the group of witnesses and community members gathered behind a length of flimsy yellow police tape drawn across the road. Stacks of water bottles appeared roadside, to drink and as an eye flush in case of tear gas. This was direct action more than protest; few, if any, signs could be seen. People were putting their bodies in ICE's way, a rolling vigil over hours. Periodically, different witnesses raised their phones aloft, pointing them at officers blocking the road. The whole thing was recorded from so many angles. At times, individuals stood motionless, inches from the front of the federal agents' vehicles. The live feed of the arrests and protests, almost completely silent except for an eerie mechanical buzz, went on for hours, too. It was numbing to watch until those moments when the scene seemed to mark itself for future inclusion in a documentary series or a civil rights case (or a news story). That quantity of footage may be too much to consume, especially on top of the myriad videos that demonstrators themselves shot and shared on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky. As available as all of this material was, a record right at our fingertips, the simple facts of the raid could get submerged. Breaking news stories euphemistically described an 'immigration enforcement action' and 'clashes'—a disingenuous term that suggests equal force on both sides—between protestors and federal agents. But the story is both clear and simple: Federal agents arrested workers at a large commercial farm near Camarillo, and federal agents also arrested the people who came out to defend the workers. Defending workers is something Californians have been doing in rising numbers for weeks now, ever since Trump's close advisor, Stephen Miller, and Trump's 'immigration czar,' Tom Homan, selected California residents as the people to be made an example of in their contemptible national crackdown. This week marked the fortieth day of ICE raids in California, during which an estimated 3,000 people have been arrested, and 2,000 National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines remain stationed in Los Angeles. In mid-June, Border Patrol released a video of its agents, also faceless and in full gear, making arrests in Los Angeles. The video, titled 'A Relentless Mission – LA Protests – U.S. Border Patrol,' underlines the extent to which these 'immigration enforcement actions' are deliberately choreographed displays of power, meant to suppress and shrink immigrant communities and political opposition alike. The raids are spectacles, designed for the rest of the country to applaud or fear, in which immigrants are scapegoated and dissenters are punished for the cameras: a cautionary action-horror movie playing out in real time. In addition to the Border Patrol, National Guard and police blockaded access to the farms, reported Mel Buer, an independent journalist in Los Angeles who has been covering the response to ICE raids. 'But people,' she wrote, 'came anyway.' Arriving as the sun set, Buer could hear them chanting well before she reached them. She saw more than 100 demonstrators facing down 'a thick line of Border Patrol agents and National Guard kitted out in riot gear–helmets, gas masks, and shields.' Angelmarie Taylor, a student at California State University Channel Islands and part of 805 Immigrant Coalition, was one of those demonstrators. 'We are average community members who have been volunteering our time to patrol our own streets to keep each other safe from these ICE agents,' Taylor said on Democracy Now on Friday. While the federal agents harmed the demonstrators and violated their rights, she said, those agents used 'even more intense violence' on the farmworkers themselves. Also among the witnesses and protesters was Jonathan Caravello, a professor at California State University, whom Taylor said had been targeted for speaking out in defense of the immigrant community. After he was arrested on Thursday, Caravello vanished for days. The California Faculty Association, Caravello's union, condemned his 'abduction and disappearance,' and said they were still working to locate him. 'The Trump Administration's barbaric attacks on peaceful observers aim to force people of good conscience into silence and complicity while Trump tears our nation apart,' said Arnulfo De La Cruz, President of SEIU Local 2015 and Executive Board Member of SEIU California. CFA and SEIU California jointly called for the release of all the people who were taken by immigration agents in the raid on Thursday and for 'a stop to all immigration raids, immediately.' Late Monday afternoon, Caravello was released from federal detention. Unusually, federal prosecutors did not announce the charges against him until Sunday, and when they did, it was in a post on X by Bill Essayli, the interim U.S. attorney for the Central District of California. The same office is pursuing federal charges against an activist who brought face shields to distribute at a protest, to protect people from chemical agents used by police. In the Department of Justice, such overreach is now par for the course: The day after Caravello was released, federal prosecutors in Spokane, Washington, charged a group of protestors, including the former city council president, for 'conspiracy to impede or injure officers.' Most of those who were charged in Spokane had merely blocked a bus carrying people whom ICE had detained, a type of intervention we are seeing now across U.S. cities. 'This politically motivated action is a perversion of our justice system,' said Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown. In bringing such specious prosecutions, the Trump administration is hunting for ways to criminalize people who oppose the ICE raids, including those engaging in nonviolent self-defense. Protestors are not a monolith. In opposing the raids, they offer a range of arguments and tactics. Some defend the contributions of immigrant workers. Some do practical work like documenting ICE raids. But the point of these raids is to demonstrate that no one, no matter what they contribute to the community, will be spared arrest. In fact, some, including citizens and elected officials, were targeted precisely for their contributions. Ultimately, neither 'good' immigrants nor 'good' protestors can use their goodness as a shield from ICE's violence. Trump's campaign of 'mass deportations' was never just about carrying out more immigration raids. We knew this campaign would reach far beyond those immigrants who are living in the country without authorization—not just because the number of people he said would be deported exceeds the numbers of undocumented, but because his plans also involve making more and more people deportable. Sure enough, some of the workers who were detained in the July 10 raids were citizens, the United Farm Workers said in a statement. George Restes, a disabled veteran and American citizen, was arrested and held for three days without a phone call, he said, and without treatment after agents pepper sprayed him. These detentions may have been aimed at managing perceptions of the raid. The UFW pointed out that many of those detained reported being released only 'after they were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones.' ICE's project goes well beyond the violent scenes of the raids: It has transformed everyday life in California. Family pets are filling Southern California shelters, given up by owners who have been forced to leave the United States. At a Glendale hospital, ICE agents camped out for days, scaring people away from seeking care; National Nurses United shared Know Your Rights guides for all health care workers. Countless children are left waiting for parents to return, like 16-year-old Alexa, whose pregnant mother was arrested Thursday, forcing Alexa to become the caretaker for her younger siblings until their mother returns. Other family members of missing workers, including their young children, went to the farm the next day, hoping to be reunited. The family of Jaime Alanís, one of the workers gravely injured in the chaotic raid, reunited with him in the hospital, where he died on Saturday. His surviving family members have said that he will be brought to Huajumbaro, Michoacán, his hometown: 'His wife and daughter are waiting for him.' People have long asked themselves what they would do when faced with something like these mass roundups and detentions—an injustice of historic proportions. Until recently, this question may have seemed to be asking you to imagine yourself into the past. But then the Trump administration opened an American concentration camp in the Everglades. What would you do? You would do what you're doing right now. Now it is becoming routine in California for armed agents, without warning or cause, to arrest and detain and deport the people who have, for years, been vilified by an unpopular regime leader. That's why any resistance to these raids is being met with such fierce repression and reprisal. Seeing the evidence of the roundups in front of us doesn't necessarily lead people to do anything differently. But seeing other people push back sometimes does. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Army vet calls for investigation after being detained for three days in ICE raid
A U.S. Army veteran who was detained during the massive immigration raid in Ventura County last week said Wednesday that he wants 'a full investigation' into how he could have been held behind bars for three days despite being an American citizen. 'What happened to me wasn't just a mistake,' he said in a written statement. 'It was a violation of my civil rights. It was excessive force.' At a news conference Wednesday, George Retes, who is 25 and the father of two children, said he had been on his way to his job as a security guard at Glass House farms on July 10 when 'I got caught in the middle between protesters and [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents.' Retes had been focused on his 3-year-old daughter's upcoming birthday party and didn't realize that Glass House, one of the largest legal cannabis operations in California, was being raided by scores of heavily armed immigration agents. Read more: Immigration raid at cannabis farm in Ventura County sparks chaotic protest Officials with the Department of Homeland Security later said they detained more than 360 people in the raid, including numerous undocumented immigrants who had been charged with crimes. As agents moved through the company's greenhouses, many workers fled in a panic. One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, 56, died after he fell three stories while trying to evade capture. Protesters and family members of workers, meanwhile, massed at the Glass House gates on Laguna Road, squaring off against federal agents, who deployed chemical agents and less-lethal ammunition. Retes said he had worked at Glass House as a contractor for the security firm Securitas for seven months. He said he unwittingly headed straight into that melee as he drove down Laguna Road to report for his afternoon shift. 'I had no clue about it,' he said. 'When I pulled up, I saw all the cars, I saw all the traffic, and I was just trying to make my way through.' He did not get to work. Instead, he said, agents smashed his car window, pepper-sprayed him and dragged him out at gunpoint. 'I let ICE agents know that I'm a U.S. Citizen, that I'm American,' he said. 'They didn't care. They never told me my charges. They sent me away.' Read more: Details emerge about pot-farm immigration raid as worker dies Retes, who served in Iraq, said agents never told him why he was being detained at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. He was packed off, without a phone call, access to a lawyer, or even a way to clean the pepper-spray residue off his clothes and face, he said. While in custody, Retes said, he became so distressed that he was put on suicide watch, but he was still not allowed to contact an attorney. His sister and wife meanwhile gave tearful interviews to local television stations, pleading for information as to his whereabouts. "We don't know what to do," his sister Destinee Majana told KABC-TV Channel 7 last week. "We're just asking to let my brother go. He's a U.S. citizen. He didn't do anything wrong. He's a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car." "I just don't know where he's at. I've been up since 6 a.m. trying to call the sheriff's, the police department, Oxnard, Camarillo, Ventura,' added his wife, Guadalupe Torres. 'They say they don't know.' Finally, on Sunday, Retes said, guards came to his cell and told him he was going to be released. 'An officer walked me downstairs,' he recalled. "I signed a paper to get my stuff back. That was it. They let me go.' In a statement, officials at the Department of Homeland Security said: 'George Retes was arrested and has been released. He has not been charged. The [U.S. attorney's office] is reviewing his case, along with dozens of others, for potential federal charges related to the execution of the federal search warrant in Camarillo.' Retes said he is home in Ventura now, spending time with his children and 'enjoying being free. I took that for granted.' He recovered his car, which he said still has a smashed window, numerous dents and a sharp tang of pepper spray. But he said he plans to file a lawsuit against the government over the way he was treated. 'What they did isn't right,' he said. 'I'm here speaking for everyone who doesn't have a chance to speak.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
CBS News
6 days ago
- Politics
- CBS News
Immigration agents release Army veteran detained during Camarillo farm raid
A U.S. Army veteran detained during the immigration raid at a Ventura County marijuana farm last week said he plans to file a lawsuit against the federal government after agents held him in custody for three days. George Retes, 25, served in the Army for four years and deployed to Iraq. He was driving to work his security guard shift at Glass House Farms in Camarillo on July 10 when he encountered federal agents conducting an immigration operation. He was next to the marijuana facility when protesters clashed with U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. The Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. Customs and Border Protection was serving a search warrant at the farm. Retes tried to speak with the agents but said they ignored him. "They ignored me," Retes said. "They didn't care what I had to say. They automatically accused me of just, I guess, doing something wrong. They escalated it from there." Video from a CBS News Los Angeles photographer at the scene showed a line of agents telling the crowd to move back and disperse before they began deploying what appeared to be less-than-lethal rounds and tear gas canisters. Retes said agents shouted conflicting commands and smashed his window before he could understand what was happening. The veteran said they sprayed him with pepper spray and deployed gas before dragging him out of his car at gunpoint. "They took two officers to kneel on my back and then one on my neck to arrest me, even though my hands were already behind my back and I was covered in [pepper spray,]" Retes said. Retes said they held him in federal custody for three days without charges. At the facility, agents did not provide him with medical care, nor did they allow him to contact his family or an attorney, according to Retes. He said he missed his daughter's third birthday. "They didn't allow me to shower, didn't give me a phone call, didn't let me speak to an attorney," Retes said. "My hands burned the entire night. I wasn't able to sleep. Even after I got home and showered, I still had [pepper spray] residue." Retes said agents never explained why he was arrested and ignored him when he said he was a U.S. citizen heading to work. DHS officials said more than 300 immigrants were arrested during the raid on the Camarillo farm and another facility in Carpinteria. Agents said there were at least 10 undocumented children at the facilities. They launched an investigation into possible child labor, exploitation and human trafficking charges. "The way they're going about this entire deportation process is completely wrong," Retes said. "It doesn't matter if you're an immigrant. It doesn't matter the color of your skin. It doesn't matter if you voted left. It doesn't matter if you voted right. It doesn't matter if you're black, brown, yellow, green. No one deserves to be treated this way. That shouldn't have happened. And I hope this never happens to anyone ever again." RELATED: Federal judge orders ICE to halt immigration raids in Southern California
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Farm worker who died after California Ice raid was ‘hardworking and innocent', family says
The farm worker who died from injuries he sustained after falling from a greenhouse roof during an Ice raid of a California cannabis farm was a 'hard-working, innocent farmer' and the sole provider for his wife and daughter, his family says. Jaime Alanís died a day after a frenzied immigration raid of Glass House Farms in Ventura county where authorities arrested at least 200 workers. The 57-year-old, who was from the town of Huajúmbaro in Michoacán, Mexico, is the first known person to die during the Trump administration's enhanced immigration enforcement operations in southern California. The federal government's ramped up enforcement activities have brought chaos across southern California as Ice agents descend on parks, car washes and farms. The operations – and the mobilization of US military – have sparked widespread outrage and protests as authorities arrest a growing number of immigrants with no criminal history, despite the administration's claims that its primary concern was 'violent criminals'. US citizens have also been swept up in the raids. The Department of Homeland Security said it executed criminal search warrants on Thursday in Camarillo and Carpinteria, California, at facilities of Glass House Farms, which grows cannabis, tomatoes and cucumbers. Agents arrested hundreds of people suspected in being in the country without legal statuses and identified at least 10 immigrant children. Related: Troops, terror and tears in Los Angeles as Ice raids show no sign of slowing During the raid Alanís called his family to say he was hiding and possibly fleeing agents before he fell about 30ft (9 metres) from the roof, according to information from family, hospital and government sources. Family members said he suffered catastrophic injuries – including a broken neck, fractured skull and severed artery – during the 'reckless' raid. Alanís was never in Customs and Border Protection or Ice custody, Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, said in a statement. 'Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a greenhouse and fell 30 feet. CBP immediately called a medivac to the scene to get him care as quickly as possible.' Alanís had worked at Glass House for a decade and was 'his family's only provider', according to a GoFundMe fundraiser by his niece, Yesenia Duran. 'My uncle Jaime was just a hard-working, innocent farmer. He has his wife and daughter waiting for him,' Duran wrote. United Farm Workers pledged to assist the family. 'Our hearts are heavy for the grieving family of Jaime Alanís, who died from injuries sustained during a chaotic raid on Thursday,' the advocacy group said. 'We'll do everything we can to support them. We continue to work with hundreds of farm worker families navigating the aftermath of this violent raid.'
CBS News
6 days ago
- CBS News
FBI release photo of suspected gunman in Camarillo immigration raid
The FBI released another photo of the man accused of firing a pistol at immigration agents during a protest at a Ventura County farm last week. The federal operation happened on July 10 at the Glass House Farms facility in Camarillo. Tensions between protesters and law enforcement escalated after U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents were in the process of "executing a warrant at a marijuana facility," according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security provided to CBS News. Agents formed a line to prevent a crowd of protesters from crossing the roadway. Video from a CBS News Los Angeles photographer at the scene showed agents telling the crowd to move back and disperse before they began deploying what appeared to be less-than-lethal rounds and tear gas canisters. At around the same time, the suspect allegedly fired a pistol at law enforcement. "FBI has issued a $50,000 award for information leading to the conviction of an Unknown Subject who appeared to fire a pistol at Federal Law Enforcement Officers near Camarillo," Bill Essayli wrote in a post to X last week. "The shooting occurred on 7/10/25 at approximately 2:26pm on Laguna Rd between Wood Rd and Las Posas Rd." The initial photo released by law enforcement failed to capture the suspect's face because he was wearing a mask. Aerial footage from the protest shows the suspect appearing to point the firearm at officers. No one was wounded in the shooting. Federal agents said they were also executing a criminal warrant at another farm in Carpinteria around the same time. The DHS stated that approximately 200 people were detained at both sites. Investigators asked anyone with information to call 1(800) 225-5324. As mentioned by Essayli, the FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for info leading to his identification, arrest and conviction.
