Immigration advocates on California’s Central Coast are reeling after Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations reportedly conducted operations across the region this week, including a May 4 arrest in Oxnard that reportedly left two young people alone at a gas station after agents detained their father.
“They arrested someone,” gas station attendant Juan Conches said in Spanish in a video shared by 805 UndocuFund, an immigrant advocacy group. “They left the children inside the truck.”
The station attendant said he saw about six vehicles surround the truck before the arrest.
The advocacy group identified one of the man’s children as a 19-year-old “old enough to be alone but unable to drive, stranded, and powerless to leave.” The age of the other is unknown.
The Independent has contacted the regional ICE field office for comment.
Over the last week, ICE has conducted three confirmed raids resulting in seven total arrests, with activity centered around Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood, home to a large population of migrant farm workers from Mexico’s Mixtec community, an 805 UndocuFund organizer told SFGate.
“They have overwhelmed our community,” Beatriz Basurto said.
Other arrests included May 4 and May 5 apprehensions in Santa Maria, The Santa Barbara Independent reports.
ICE’s Los Angeles field office announced further Los Angeles-area arrests in Riverside and North Hills on May 5.
As The Independent has reported, farming communities across the state are filled with anxiety as the Trump administration has pursued a wide-ranging deportation campaign, detaining undocumented people, legal permanent residents, and U.S. citizens alike.
The Border Patrol kicked off 2025 with a mass sweep in Southern California farm towns, where critics said targets were stopped largely because of their appearance. The ACLU sued over the operation, and a federal judge in April issued a preliminary injunction barring the agency from making immigration arrests without reasonable suspicion.
“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 during a hearing in the case, Cal Matters reports.
Immigration officials have been accused of boundary-pushing actions in support of President Trump’s campaign promise of rapidly deporting millions of immigrants, including arresting migrants at appointments with immigration officials and a Massachusetts case in which agents smashed a car window to apprehend a Guatemalan man, in a case later dropped for failure to prosecute.
