What to do if Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes around
by Leslie Layton & Ken Magri | Posted July 10, 2025
NorCal Resist Sacramento and Chico maintain a hotline for ICE sightings. Photo courtesy of NorCal Resist.
Lee esta nota en español aqui.This resource guide was produced in a joint collaboration between ChicoSol and the Chico News & Review.
This guide will assist non-citizen immigrants and mixed-status families concerned about the crackdown underway by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The information — we’re publishing in both Spanish and English — includes links to organizations that can provide guidance. Please download and share this guide as a starter reference for free help, and seek legal advice as needed.
1. How to identify ICE vehicles and agents:
ICE vehicles are often not marked with a logo. Agents may be using unmarked cars with tinted windows and without license plates; they often travel in newer model American SUVs such as Chevy Tahoes.read more
After Border Patrol raids, town of Poplar comes to a standstill
by Peter Schurmann | Posted January 18, 2025
photo by Manuel Ortiz
Mari Pérez Ruíz of Community Valley Empowerment Alliance discusses the recent raids with a community of indigenous farmworkers in Tulare County.
POPLAR, Ca. -– In the early 1970s, this unincorporated town in California’s agricultural heartland was designated by county officials as having “no authentic future.” That designation—entailing dramatic cuts to basic services remained until as recently as 2023.
Now, following a series of raids on immigrants that began on Jan. 7 in neighboring Kern County, residents here say the future does indeed look bleak.
“People are scared. They don’t want to come out. We’re all scared,” says Gregorio, a resident of Poplar for the past seven years and the owner of a local business that caters to the community’s farmworker population. (We are not using Gregorio’s last name to protect his identity.)
“If you’re undocumented, it’s not safe to walk the streets,” he added. “And this is just the start. It’s going to get worse over the next four years.”
With Donald Trump’s inauguration as president just days away, the raids -— dubbed “Return to Sender” by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) -— are viewed here as a dress rehearsal for his promised mass deportation campaign of unauthorized immigrants.
CBP Agent Gregory Bovino, who led the raids, stated in a social media post that CBP officers maintained the right to make arrests of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally without regard to due process. He promised “more to come.”
CBP reports that some 78 arrests were made over the course of the three-day operation and included individuals with outstanding warrants for crimes ranging from sexual assault of minors to illegal drug and firearm possession, as well as DUIs and other lesser offenses.
CBP says the raids were confined to Kern County. But several Poplar residents say they witnessed CBP agents patrolling local gathering spaces in and around the town. Several individuals who asked not to be identified described agents apprehending one individual on private land.
Requests for comment from CBP to confirm the statements went unanswered by the time of publication. A spokesperson for the Tulare County Sheriff’s office said they were unaware of any operations or detentions within the county.
CBP spokesperson David Kim initially told news media that Operation Return to Sender was targeted to specific individuals and that it was not a widespread roundup. He acknowledged, however, that individuals not previously identified for apprehension due to past criminal convictions were also detained.
“We don’t know what’s going on with the raids,” noted Gregorio, adding the swirl of misinformation online is exacerbating the panic residents are experiencing. “People are posting all kinds of lies on social media. Everyone’s confused over what is true and what isn’t.”
The fear now gripping the community in Poplar and across the region is also taking a toll on the local economy. Silvia (we are withholding her last name to protect her identity) says sales at her bakery have fallen 70% since the raids last week, as residents and families fear leaving their homes for even the most basic of necessities.
“It is stressful,” she noted. “If I don’t see someone for a day, let’s say a regular, I worry about what might have happened to them. Did they get detained, deported … ”
Down the street at Sabroso Poplar, a local Mexican eatery, waitress Angelica Rana points to the empty dining hall. “Usually, this place would be full. Today, there’s no one here,” she says, adding that in her 18 years living in Poplar she’s never seen anything like this.
“We depend on the people who work in the fields. So yes, there’s been a big impact,” she said.
Poplar, with just under 2,000 residents, is located on the southeastern edge of Tulare County, one of the nation’s largest producers of dairy, citrus and berries, among other crops, a multi-billion-dollar industry built largely on the backs of migrant labor.
Two-thirds of Poplar’s residents are Latino, though there is also a long-established Filipino community, as well as a smaller Yemeni population and indigenous migrants from parts of Mexico and Central America.
An estimated 310,000 people live in unincorporated communities like Poplar across the San Joaquin Valley.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the town was the site of some of the earliest stirrings of what would become the farmworker movement led by labor groups like the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), among others. That history is celebrated in a new mural in the local park, which depicts the many faces -— past and present —- of those who have fought to improve conditions locally.
“This was an epicenter of the farmworker movement and one of the areas that experienced the most violence,” explains Mari Pérez Ruíz, co-founder of the non-profit Central Valley Empowerment Alliance (CVEA), which advocates on behalf of residents in Poplar and surrounding communities.
CVEA is housed in what used to be Poplar’s fire house, shut down years earlier as part of cuts to local services after county officials identified it as among 13 communities with no growth prospects. All 13 were majority communities of color. Cuts included essentials like water and sewage. CVEA fought successfully to restore services for Poplar during California’s record drought ending in 2016.
“They did not make it easy,” noted Pérez Ruíz, referring to county officials and the outsized interests of local growers.
Today, she and her team are busy supporting families too fearful to go to work or send kids to school. CVEA has produced small, pocket-sized “Know Your Rights” pamphlets that detail steps to take in case someone is stopped by immigration officials, as well as contact numbers for legal aid.
On a recent evening, CVEA volunteers handed out food and clothing to a small community of indigenous farmworkers on the outskirts of Poplar. Many spoke of lost wages during the previous week. “Why are they targeting us,” one man complained. “We’re doing honest work here, trying to feed our families.”
Gregorio says half of what people earn here typically goes to cover rising rents, with the other half going toward food, childcare and other expenses. “It’s impossible,” he says.
As for the mood among neighbors and customers, “It is the same conversation with everyone you meet,” he said. “How are you?” “Scared.”
Manuel Ortiz, Ed Kissam and Nicolás Díaz Magaloni contributed reporting for this story by Ethnic Media Services, posted on Jan. 17 here.
Editor’s note: There have been no verified reports of CBP in the Chico area in recent days, according to NorCal Resist Chico. Follow the organization’s Facebook page here for information on an upcoming Know Your Rights training.
by Leslie Layton and Kate Sheehy | Posted March 31, 2017
photo by Leslie Layton
Sandra Jimenez
Sandra Jimenez never expected that she’d have to visit her husband in 30-minute spells at an Elk Grove jailhouse. Or that only a few days after their one-year wedding anniversary, he would be fighting deportation and she would be wondering whether she’d have to leave her country — the United States — to be with him.
But that’s where it stands after the operation conducted last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in rural Northern California. Jimenez’s husband, Oscar Oseguera, 26, was detained by ICE officials March 21 as he left his Tehama County apartment in Red Bluff at daybreak to report to his job at a Driscoll strawberry plant.
In neighboring Glenn County, Sheriff Rich Warren said he had been advised there would be a three-county operation involving Tehama, Glenn and Shasta counties, but there would be no round-up of law-abiding immigrants. “I was assured that ICE agents would be targeting specific criminal aliens, any person that has been convicted of a crime who has been in the country illegally,” Warren told ChicoSol Thursday.
ICE responded by email to a ChicoSol inquiry asking about Oseguera’s arrest. “Mr. Oseguera had been encountered by [Department of Homeland Security] enforcement personnel and repatriated to Mexico in 2014,” said the email from San Francisco-based spokesman James Schwab.
Oseguera’s attorney, Anthony Palik of San Francisco, said his client is undocumented but has no criminal record. Palik acknowledged that Oseguera had been apprehended once before by immigration authorities, but said his client left the United States then as a “voluntary departure.”
“People are scared. A lot of people don’t want to go out” — Sandra Jimenez
The recent ICE raids turned lives upside down, and they rattled working-class neighborhoods, and they upset public schools. In Red Bluff, shoppers disappeared from the aisles of stores. “People are scared,” Sandra Jimenez said early this week. “A lot of people don’t want to go out.”
In Gerber, about 10 miles southeast of Red Bluff, attendance at the elementary school plunged the day after a parent was arrested after leaving his home, the Red Bluff Daily News reported. School officials told the paper that they took some children home at the end of the school day to ease fears and ensure their safety.
On the evening of March 28, officials from Red Bluff High School met with a small group of parents in a classroom to hear their concerns and review student rights. Attendance at the school – about 25 percent of the student body is Latino — wasn’t affected by the raids, but several students had approached school counselors about their concerns.
Red Bluff Joint Union High School District Superintendent Todd Brose said officials had been caught off guard.
“I’ve been in education in this county 19 years and this is the first immigration raid or sweep or whatever you want to call it that I remember,” Brose told ChicoSol the day after the meeting. “Because we are a rural, isolated area, the impact is greater on our families.”
Brose that day had been on the phone to other school-district officials in the area. “We need to gear up for this emotional stress for our students,” he said. “There are things we can be talking about as districts.”
Assistant Tehama County Sheriff Phil Johnston said his office had been notified March 18 that the ICE Mobile Criminal Alien Team had “targeted 41 criminal alien individuals” in the area.
Palik, the attorney representing Oseguera, said immigrants with no criminal record can easily get caught up in sweeps as the Trump Administration casts a wider net. He suspects that ICE officials stumbled upon Oseguera, perhaps while looking for his father-in-law, Heriberto Jimenez.
Heriberto Jimenez, the father of 22-year-old Sandra, is an undocumented immigrant who had twice been convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol. The ICE statement notes that Jimenez had been “repatriated to Mexico three times over the course of the last 10 years” and has “multiple prior criminal convictions.”
He was also arrested by ICE that morning.
Sandra Jimenez and her husband had begun a stay with her parents only a few weeks prior to the arrests and in order to facilitate their plan to move from Gerber to Red Bluff.
At about 6 a.m. on that Tuesday morning, Sandra Jimenez heard an insistent knocking on the front door. She didn’t open, though, until officers who identified themselves only as “police” showed identification belonging to her husband through a window and said they had detained him. Sandra Jimenez said she opened the door, her father, Heriberto, approached, and the officers then said they were from ICE.
“They asked for my dad’s ID, and right away they arrested him,” Sandra Jimenez said. “I got mad at the officers and said, ‘This is why you wanted me to open the door for you?’ I just wanted to go off on him, but I know I can’t, it’s just going to make things worse.”
Oscar Oseguera was taken to the Sacramento County Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center, but Palik says he’s going to be transferred to a facility in Texas, perhaps because California’s immigration courts have become “overloaded” by the crackdown underway.
Palik says he believes his client qualifies for a cancellation-of-removal based in part on the fact that his wife is a U.S. citizen, and his mother, a green-card resident of the Red Bluff area, depends on him for financial support. “He can claim adjustment of status because they deserve, if you will, to be supported by him,” Palik said.
“It has that feeling — people being yanked out of their houses willy-nilly…” — Anthony Palik
Sandra Jimenez was born and raised in this country, and her husband grew up mostly in the area, attending school in the nearby town of Anderson. But his family went back and forth between the United States and Mexico, trying to escape the violence of its Michoácan village. Twice, she said, Oscar asked her what she’d do if he was deported.
But Sandra Jimenez said she never really believed it would happen, and as a result, “we never got to a plan as to what we’d really do.”
Instead, the couple was focused on their life here: finding a house near their families in Red Bluff, starting a family.
Mariela Hernandez, a staffer at Northern Valley Catholic Social Service in Corning, said ICE officers were in Gerber the day after the Red Bluff arrests, apparently with a list that may have included immigrants with “prior deportation orders.”
“I kept getting calls that ICE was in the area,” Hernandez said. “People told me they were pulled over by ICE and questioned but not detained. They were afraid [officers] would come back for them.”
Illegal entry into the United States after a deportation has more severe consequences than an initial unauthorized crossing. And a recent executive order makes immigrants deportable regardless of whether a case or even an allegation is resolved.
Asked to comment on the North State raids, ICE released this statement: “Every day, as part of routine operations… Fugitive Operations teams target and arrest criminal aliens and other individuals who are in violation of our nation’s immigration laws for the safety and security of our communities.”
Palik said the new immigration policy is “inhumane” because it “tears families apart.” He compared it to a pogram – the term traditionally used to describe past persecution campaigns against Jews.
“It has that feeling anyway,” Palik said. “People being yanked out of their houses willy-nilly, placed in shackles, sent hundreds or thousands of miles away from their loved ones.”
