One Year After LA Raids, ICE Tactics Have Spread Nationwide
The summer 2025 ICE raids on Los Angeles were not a one-time enforcement surge. They were a rehearsal. Armed federal agents, border patrol, and National Guard troops descended on America’s largest undocumented population, arresting thousands, chasing down workers at car washes and garment warehouses, and raiding churches. A year later, the same tactics have moved to Chicago, Portland, Washington DC, and Minneapolis, escalating at each stop.
The human cost in LA was immediate and permanent. Several immigrants died while being chased by agents. Lawyers scrambled to locate detained people before ICE transferred them out of state or removed them from the country.
Families in neighborhoods like MacArthur Park and Koreatown stopped leaving their homes. The damage was not abstract.
The raids also swept up US citizens. Brian Gavidia, born and raised in East Los Angeles, was pinned against a gate at his workplace by agents who refused to accept his citizenship documentation.
“It makes me happy, to hear music playing, to see that little girl playing. But also, it’s not the same.”
Brian Gavidia, East Los Angeles resident and US citizen, June 2026
His account is not unusual. The ACLU documented dozens of cases nationwide in which US citizens and legal permanent residents were detained during similar sweeps.
Community Networks Absorbed the Shock ICE Left Behind
Mutual aid networks formed across Los Angeles within days of the raids, coordinating groceries, legal referrals, and emergency funds for families afraid to leave their homes. That infrastructure remains active a year later. Residents like Lorena, who stayed indoors for weeks while patrols swept her street, have returned to daily life. The networks they built helped make that possible.
Local elected officials in LA also responded by strengthening sanctuary city policies, limiting cooperation with ICE detainer requests. Those policies are now under direct federal legal pressure, and their survival depends on whether city and county officials hold the line.
The pattern from LA is documented: federal agents arrive, detain workers in public spaces, transfer detainees rapidly out of jurisdiction before lawyers can intervene, then move to the next city. Knowing that sequence in advance is the only way to interrupt it.
What You Can Do Now
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Call your US representative at (202) 225-3121 and ask them to demand oversight hearings on ICE’s use of warrantless workplace raids and the rapid out-of-state transfer of detainees that blocks legal access. The transfer tactic documented in LA has now been replicated in multiple cities.
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Contact your city or county council member and ask them to codify sanctuary policies in local ordinance, not just administrative policy. Find your local rep at usa.gov/elected-officials. Administrative policies can be reversed overnight; ordinances require a public vote.
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Know your rights before an encounter. The ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for immigrants explains what agents can and cannot legally demand, including during workplace raids. Share it at aclu.org/know-your-rights/immigrants-rights before the next city faces what LA faced.
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Connect with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of LA (CHIRLA) if you are in Southern California or want to support their legal rapid-response work. They coordinated legal intervention during the 2025 raids and maintain a hotline for detained individuals. Reach them at (888) 624-4752 or chirla.org.
Update, July 23, 2026: On July 17, 2026, a protest caravan in Houston passed the memorial of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was killed by an ICE agent, as new reporting traced how resistance networks have expanded since the raids documented in this brief. A Mother Jones investigation published this month identifies those networks as rooted in decades of prior organizing, including work by San Diego-based Uníon del Barrio, which began training residents to monitor Border Patrol activity in the early 1990s.
ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, launched in December, accelerated coordination between city-based groups and prompted businesses across Minneapolis to distribute know-your-rights materials translated into Spanish, Somali, and Hmong. In Los Angeles, volunteer patrols that began as informal neighborhood efforts have since built encrypted communication channels and structured dispatch systems across multiple districts.
The White House has announced plans to expand enforcement operations, and organizers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Bay Area say the networks built over the past year remain active. Groups now log ICE vehicle license plates, feed real-time location reports into shared chats, and document agent activity in ways that restrict where operations can proceed without immediate community response.
Update, July 29, 2026: Court documents released July 28 show ICE agents deployed to Los Angeles in summer 2025 used anti-immigrant slurs in internal text messages, including exchanges sent on July 2 and July 4, 2025. The messages were made public in a motion filed for a lawsuit five men brought against the Trump administration in June 2025, alleging the stop-and-arrest practices of ICE agents during the raids were unlawful.
Mayra Joachin, deputy director of immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Southern California, said the records showed “a pattern of racial profiling” and that officers detained people “often primarily because of the color of their skin.” Angel Santiago Tafolla, an Anaheim resident and U.S. citizen, stated in a court declaration that ICE agents handcuffed him at an Orange County car wash before realizing he was American.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs have asked a federal judge to bar any further detention stops based on race or socioeconomic status. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson responded that agents are “focused on protecting the American people — not entertaining performative outrage.” No ruling on the injunction request has been issued as of publication. (Source: The Guardian, July 28, 2026)
Sources
The Guardian: One Year After ICE Raids Terrorized Los Angeles, a City Reaches for Resilience
ACLU: Know Your Rights Guide for Immigrants Facing ICE Enforcement
National Immigration Law Center: ICE Workplace Raid Legal Guidance and Detainee Transfers
CalMatters: Los Angeles Sanctuary Policies Under Federal Pressure in 2025
CHIRLA: Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles Rapid Response