The ABCs of ICE
ICE agents grabbed six day laborers on their way to Altadena to help in the rebuilding effort.
Pasadena is a city just a few miles from Los Angeles and around the corner from Altadena. That’s where a massive fire pretty much leveled the town of 45,000 in an unincorporated area of LA county in January 2025. (You heard more about Pacific Palisades, on the coast.)
You’d like Altadena, up at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, one of the racially inclusive towns in the area. Glendale, L.A. adjacent and a few miles west wasn’t’—it was a sun-down town–as in, don’t be caught on the street after sundown if you’re Black.
Altadena has a history of being a lovely, mixed-race place, one of the few California cities without the redlining policies that shut out Black. Latino and Asian families. After the January 2025 fires, people have been struggling to rebuild—many with the help of raza day laborers.
This past week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who as you know by now, is not here to help Altadena, showed up at a bus stop in Pasadena outside a Winchell’s Donut shop—leave it to cops to be hanging out at a donut shop—and grabbed up six day laborers headed to Altadena to work in the re-building effort.
That’s but one ICE story.
It’s all over the news that people are being snapped up by masked men with face covering, no apparent ID and many with pretty sizable panzas. Not to body shame, but you watch the news and it’s no doubt crossed your mind.
So here at Latinopia we’re here to take a peek at ICE and how they operate. This will be an ongoing project.
Why do purported ICE agents always wear masks? On the TV news we see these panzones in masks grabbing people. They may be yelling that they’re ICE but are they really, or are they just hired guns? Why the masks?
If you get caught by ICE you have a shocking lack of legal options.
“Who are these people?” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass asks. “And frankly, the vests that they have on look like they ordered them from Amazon. Are they bounty hunters? Are they vigilantes? If they’re federal officials, why is it that they do not identify themselves?”
LAist, a southern California news outlet, asked some of these questions this week and the Department of Homeland Security has yet to answer back. The story reports: “As crowds protested the sudden presence of Immigration Customs and Enforcement and other agencies in Los Angeles, law enforcement officers responded in some cases with tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets.”
If you get caught by ICE you have a shocking lack of options legally speaking. For one thing—no court-appointed lawyer—you have to hustle your own. A Google search over here makes tracking one down look pretty daunting—and bet you don’t get to keep your phone so you can track down counsel.
Latinopia is burrowing into the ICE subcontracting world and what (if any) private companies might be on the payroll to sweep up brown people.
One thing that’s already out in the open and widely reported—when it comes to detaining people, private companies are cleaning up. The majority of the 119 ICE “facilities”, as they are politely described, are privately owned entities: Core Civic and Geo Group are gearing up to make big bank with all the raids and apprehensions.
It’s not their job to judge the process. Only to pick up the cash.
But there are yet efforts alive to undermine ICE impunity and possibly protect immigrants and others.
This week in California by Jess Arreguin and Scott Werner, Democrats, introduced SB 627, the No Secret Police Act barring police from wearing masks while on duty.
This week in California by Scott Werner, a Democrat from San Francisco and Jess Arreguin, a Democrat from Oakland, introduced SB 627, the No Secret Police Act. It’s is kind of simple really—if passed into law, it would prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing masks while on duty. Reports are that the measure is not super-popular in the legislature but that can change and we’ll keep bird-dogging its progress.
Meanwhile, an elected official in the city of Cudahy— a city of 23,000 about 10 miles south of Los Angeles–is on the griddle in local and probably national news media.
The Vice-Mayor, Cynthia Gonzalez, is in a hot mess for kind of calling on cholos to push back against ICE on a now deleted Tik Tok post and calling them out for the wrong focus.
“You guys are always tagging everything up, claiming hood, and now that your hood’s being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there ain’t a peep out of you,” she said on a now-deleted Tik Tok post.
“It’s everyone else who’s not about the gang life that’s out there protesting and speaking up,” she said on the social media post she will no doubt regret for life. “We’re out there fighting our turf, protecting our turf, protecting our people and, like, where you at?”
You will note that she doesn’t call for weapons anywhere here.
The message seems to be: if you’re all that, tough guys, how about pushing back when the migra shows up near you–that’s who you should be focused on to protect your neighborhoods. Not pursuing this foolish my-block- versus your-block fighting and shooting one another.
ICE is coming for you, or your parents or siblings.
En otras palabras–stop fooling around, fool. This is serious.
This week there was a rally in Pasadena outside Home Depot demanding Immigration raids stop.
In the mean-time, day laborers in Southern California have been being scooped up at, among other locations, Home Depots where they wait for work. Just like those day laborers in Pasadena who thought they were on their way to help repair Altadena fire damage or rebuilding and instead ended up in detention,
This week there was a rally outside Home Depot in Pasadena to demand that immigration raids stop.
In one action a participant in his 70’s whose family came from Mexico when he was three years old, spoke to a reporter.
“This is something that we heard about, we read about in Germany back in the ’30s with the Jews being rounded up like this, and this is exactly what is happening to this country. And everybody kept saying, ‘Watch out. Watch out.’
And a lot of people didn’t believe it would happen, but it’s happening right in front of our eyes.”
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Copyright 2025 by Bobbi Murray. Photo of Altadena fire copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions. All other photos in this blog are in the public domain.