Jorge Lopez Leon with his wife and four children at Disneyland
This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
When Blanca Corona saw that her sister-in-law called her twice in a row, she began to suspect something was wrong.
She soon received a follow-up text that said simply, “Call me.”
Corona learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were at her husband’s place of work, a paint business in El Cajon, California, called San Diego Powder and Protective Coatings. She rushed to the business, with a document from the family’s immigration attorney in hand, to show that her husband was in the process of getting a green card.
But the officers didn’t care that Corona is a U.S. citizen or that her husband’s attorney was already working on his case, she said.
ICE arrested Jorge Lopez Leon, Corona’s husband, along with roughly 14 other workers, including the general manager, on March 27. The arrests are among many recently publicized across the country that are adding to communities’ fears of detention and deportation.
ICE has accused the El Cajon business of knowingly employing undocumented workers. The raid included dozens of agents, some walking around with large guns in hand, according to video footage and observers.
“[The workers] weren’t doing anything bad for them to go in like they did,” Corona said.
ICE declined to comment beyond a press release detailing the four criminal charges that came out of the operation.
Adriana Jasso, program coordinator for the U.S./Mexico Border Program at American Friends Service Committee, who witnessed much of the operation while standing with anxious family members on the sidewalk outside the business, said the weapons in particular made the operation “very intimidating and very scary.”
The general manager and three workers are facing criminal charges, according to ICE. A press release from the agency said that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged the general manager with conspiracy to harbor aliens and the three employees with using false documents to work in the United States.
According to Jasso, ICE has already deported three of the other detained employees after they decided not to fight their cases in immigration court.
Lopez Leon, meanwhile, is waiting at Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego to see a judge. His wife said she hopes that he will be allowed to pay a bond in order to come home to her and their four children while his case continues.
He came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and used to have protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program created by then-President Barack Obama. His DACA status was not current at the time of the arrest, Corona said.
They’d started the process to get his green card through Corona’s status as a U.S. citizen, but Corona said she was nervous about the requirement for him to leave the country and do his visa interview in Mexico, she said. (If an immigrant does not have an official entry on record with the U.S. government, they often have to leave the country to do the visa process from outside before they’re able to come back.)
Jorge Lopez Leon with his son
She has had anxiety and depression about the situation for years, she said. On top of those concerns, Corona is now worried about being able to pay rent on her own.
“We both work, and we barely make enough to survive, and right now, by myself, it’s hard,” Corona said.
She said she and Lopez Leon have been married for more than a decade and that they grew up together. When she was still in high school and he had recently graduated, he saved her from the unwanted advances of another man at a party, and the pair ended up dancing together for the rest of the night, she said.
An avid soccer fan, Lopez Leon plays on a team, and the family loves attending his games as well as their children’s scrimmages. He also coaches soccer for one of their children’s teams.
“When I get home, he’s there with his uncles—it’s everything about soccer, watching soccer, talking about soccer,” Corona said. “It’s weird that he’s not home.”
Meanwhile, the community of El Cajon and the greater San Diego community are shaken by the operation.
Jasso said that the El Cajon City Council’s recent vote to work with ICE as much as possible despite California law restricting such activity feels like it set the stage for the operation. Local activists are pushing the city government to change its stance and have submitted a records request to see communications between city officials and federal immigration officers.
“We are watching the City Council and, if they had anything to do with it, then we want them to take responsibility,” said Violet, a member of Latinos en Acción who asked not to be fully named because of safety concerns.
She said that some of the city’s residents were afraid to leave their homes—even to get groceries.
She said that community members should be able to go to work unafraid that they will be taken away in a raid.
“It breaks up homes,” Violet said. “There’s a lot of pain and suffering. We crippled our families. They’re here working normal jobs.”
She said that dozens of workers for the paint business who were either U.S. citizens or had visas to be here working were also detained for hours and held in the sun without access to food and water.
“It’s inhumane and something that shouldn’t really happen to anybody,” she said.
Jasso said small business owners and workers across the county are asking what they can do to be prepared in case they’re targeted next. She said her organization encourages them to have a plan in place and to learn how to recognize a judicial warrant. She said that if officers don’t have a judicial warrant, the business doesn’t have to allow them onto the property.
In the paint business case, officers do appear to have had a warrant requested by ICE Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Jonatan Ramos and signed by U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Major. The warrant details an undercover operation that took place prior to the raid that involved an agent posing as a worker and presenting false documents in order to get a job.
Corona said she tried to hide what happened from her children at first. When she got home late that night after spending hours outside of the paint business, she told them that their father had to go work somewhere else for a little while. But once the story ended up on the news, a nephew found out about her husband’s arrest, and she realized she would have to tell her kids.
Their daughter’s birthday is coming up at the end of April.
“She keeps asking, ‘Is my dad going to be here for my birthday? The only thing I want is for my dad to be here for my birthday,’” Corona said.
More Wire on the Wall
Military troops are adding concertina wire to a part of the San Diego border known by agents as Whiskey 8, according to Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program.
The area has two layers of border wall, both roughly 30-foot tall bollards with anti-climb plates on top. In photos shared by Rios, the coils of wire run along the south side of the bottom of the second layer of border wall.
Pedro Rios/American Friends Service Committee
When the number of border crossings was higher, Border Patrol agents often used Whiskey 8 as an open air holding area, keeping migrants there for days at a time with little access to food or water. Humanitarian volunteers, including Rios, set up a station on the north side of the border wall to pass supplies through the bollards to the waiting migrants.
It’s not yet clear whether the coils will cover the stretch of wall where the volunteers stood. When asked about the wire, a spokesperson for the military deferred to Customs and Border Protection. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Northern Command said that its destroyer USS Spruance provided “vectoring assistance” to the U.S. Coast Guard, which resulted in the apprehensions of 13 people trying to cross the border undetected. The ship also rescued 18 people, including a U.S. citizen, from a sinking panga boat in international waters southwest of San Diego and transported them to the Coast Guard, the military said.
Other Stories to Watch
ICE detained a Venezuelan man who was in the U.S. to be an organ donor for his brother, who has kidney failure. After public pressure, ICE released the man.
A Salvadoran man who had won protection from removal to his home country was deported there due to an “administrative error,” according to the Trump administration. A judge has ordered his return, but so far the Trump administration has said that it cannot bring him back. On Monday, the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the judge’s order while the justices consider the case.
Texas Monthly profiled a Venezuelan teen who was among those sent by the Trump administration to a Salvadoran prison. His is one of many stories in which the family says the deported person had no gang ties, contrary to the administration’s claims. (I wrote in the last newsletter about a Venezuelan father who had no criminal history but is now in a Salvadoran prison. His wife told me Sunday that she still hasn’t heard anything from him or about how to get him out.)
Mother Jones talked to the loved ones of 10 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador who similarly said their loved ones had done nothing wrong. The outlet spoke with a former ICE official who said that the administration should be able to bring the men back without issue.
Salvadoran outlet El Faro has details about prison conditions and the case of another Venezuelan who attorneys say was wrongfully sent there.
Two Venezuelan women who were on those deportation flights to El Salvador that sent hundreds to prison spoke with NBC about their experiences. El Salvador refused to accept the women and sent them back to the U.S. The women said ICE lied to them about where they were going, telling them they were bound for Venezuela.
Colombian grandparents who had spent decades in the U.S. were deported after a routine check-in with ICE.
At a dairy farm in New York, ICE detained a mother and her three children. One of the children was in elementary school, and the other two were in high school.
A Hmong mother who had lived since infancy in Milwaukee was deported to Laos even though she has never lived in that country, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Migrant Insider reported on a new app called SignalSafe that tracks ICE activity across the country.
The Trump administration revoked the visas of five University of California, San Diego, students and detained and deported a sixth who had just arrived at the border, according to the university. This follows highly publicized visa revocations and arrests of university students who advocated for an end to the genocide in Gaza. Among those is Rümeysa Öztürk, whom attorneys say has had three asthma attacks in ICE custody, where she hasn’t had access to an inhaler.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate funding for lawyers for unaccompanied migrant children, but those attorneys say they’re still worried about actually receiving the funds.
A group of legal organizations—the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Council, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, RFK Human Rights, and CASA—have sued the Trump administration over its policy requiring immigrants to register with the federal government.
ICE requested and received data from the city of Houston about people ticketed for driving without a license, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The Department of Homeland Security is ending a Biden-era program that allowed temporary entry to certain Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Those who came to the U.S. on this program will have their status revoked at the end of April.
Legal services nonprofit Al Otro Lado posted a list of suggestions that people can follow to support U.S. immigrant communities given the heightened fears and risks they are currently facing.
