{"id":211286,"date":"2026-05-21T09:13:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T09:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/immigration-activists-whose-homes-were-raided-accuse-federal-agents-of-intimidation-campaign-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-05-21T09:13:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T09:13:54","slug":"immigration-activists-whose-homes-were-raided-accuse-federal-agents-of-intimidation-campaign-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/immigration-activists-whose-homes-were-raided-accuse-federal-agents-of-intimidation-campaign-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Immigration activists whose homes were raided accuse federal agents of intimidation campaign – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

VC Defensa organizes ICE patrols, a hotline and community support for immigrants in Ventura county, California
Federal agents have raided the homes of three southern California<\/a> immigration activists in what the activists allege is the latest escalation in a Trump administration<\/a> campaign to harass a volunteer-led advocacy group that organizes neighborhood ICE-watch patrols.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the main investigatory branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), executed a pre-dawn raid on 13 May at the home and business of Leonardo Martinez, whose group VC Defensa<\/a> runs a rapid response hotline and supports immigrant families across Ventura county. The homes of two other current and former VC Defensa volunteers were also targeted. No arrests were made.
Members of the group were previously arrested in an HSI operation<\/a> last October in connection with protests over massive immigration raids at cannabis greenhouses last July<\/a>. VC Defensa alerted the community to the July raids after a government convoy headed to the greenhouses was spotted, rallying large numbers of protesters to the scene.
The July raids led to the death of a farm worker<\/a> and hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests, while immigration agents, flanked by the national guard, deployed less-lethal ammunition<\/a> at demonstrators.
The group\u2019s lawyer, Reem Yassin, described last week\u2019s 3am raids as \u201cfishing expeditions\u201d built on \u201cbaseless\u201d search warrants.
\u201cThese raids are nothing more than an intimidation tactic to suppress free speech,\u201d Yassin said during a press conference on Thursday at the federal building in Los Angeles, which houses an HSI office.
Yassin said a coalition of lawyers was preparing a civil lawsuit alleging violations of the volunteers\u2019 constitutional rights. Supporters chanted, \u201cTrump, escucha, \u00a1estamos en la lucha!<\/em>\u201d (in English, \u201cTrump, listen, we\u2019re in the fight!\u201d). Passing cars honked and <\/strong>federal officers watched from behind glass doors.
\u201cWe\u2019re gonna continue to fight back, we\u2019re gonna continue to organize, we\u2019re not gonna stop,\u201d said Lainy Yompian, a VC Defensa leader.
Martinez said ICE agents were the ones acting lawlessly.
\u201cIf we did a fraction of the things that they do to us, we would immediately all get rallied up and thrown in federal facilities,\u201d he said.
At 5am the day before the raids, Martinez began patrolling the city of Oxnard, about 60 miles (100km) north of Los Angeles, an agricultural hub where over three-quarters of the city\u2019s roughly 200,000 residents are Latino, including many undocumented farm workers.
Under a dark, foggy sky, Martinez drove a 1990s pickup truck outfitted with a blare horn and megaphone, front and rear dash-cams, and floodlights for peering into the tinted windshields of ICE vehicles.
Shortly before Trump\u2019s second term, Martinez formed VC Defensa with several activist friends. <\/strong>Today, the organization numbers more than 1,000 volunteers. That morning, roughly 40 were scouting the county for ICE vehicles. It was the first time a journalist had ridden along on a VC Defensa patrol.
At that early hour, the streets between densely populated apartment buildings came alive with hazard lights, as people poured out of their homes into the cars of raiteros,<\/em> who drive workers to the fields. It\u2019s also peak time for ICE arrests in recent months, Martinez said.
Martinez looped through neighborhoods often targeted by ICE operations, where his organization regularly knocks on doors to share their hotline number, recruit residents to \u201cknow your rights\u201d trainings <\/strong>and add them to their neighborhood\u2019s group chat for alerting ICE sightings.
He passed the block where he said volunteers first deterred an ICE arrest last spring. A parent had saved the hotline number after seeing it posted in a Laundromat. While dropping their child off at daycare one morning, they spotted an ICE officer and called, Martinez recounted.
\u201cWe had two volunteers show up within five minutes and were able to scream and kick them out of the neighborhood,\u201d Martinez said.
The group advises volunteers to observe ICE activity at a distance. But Martinez said volunteers have repeatedly deterred agents into leaving a scene before making arrests by honking and yelling. Volunteers sometimes follow ICE vehicles back to the local field office. It\u2019s a more aggressive stance than other rapid response networks take, which has inspired respect as well as criticism and safety concerns from community members and local law enforcement<\/a>.
When arrests do happen, volunteers connect families with support: legal resources, childcare, groceries, rental assistance, rides to appointments, driving citizen kids across the border to reunite with parents in Mexico. While patrols are a high-profile part of VC Defensa\u2019s operations, Martinez insisted that 80% of the work is family support <\/strong>and community outreach.
Spotting a white Dodge Charger with dark windows \u2013 a model driven by local ICE agents \u2013 Martinez accelerated. Then he noticed the car\u2019s stickers. A false alarm. By 6.45am, he had cleared the neighborhoods on his checklist.
He drove down an industrial road where an ICE officer rammed his car last October, sparking national attention<\/a> after videos debunked the officer\u2019s claim that Martinez hit him<\/a>. In March, his car was hit again<\/a>. Both times, Martinez was arrested \u2013 but he said he had not been charged \u2013 and briefly hospitalized.
Martinez said his mom, also a volunteer, wished he would patrol less. Her worries? \u201cThat they drag me into a dark alley and fucking brutalize me,\u201d he said.
Less than 24 hours later, Martinez and his mom were woken at 3am by a blaring megaphone and flashing lights outside their Ventura home. Before they reached the front door, agents busted it open, <\/strong>with guns pointed at them, Martinez said. He was handcuffed as agents swarmed inside.
Simultaneously, agents broke in the door to Martinez\u2019s Oxnard business and the Oxnard home of immigration activist Alexandria Quintanar<\/a>, whose 16-year-old son was handcuffed as Quintanar\u2019s toddler watched, according to Yassin. In photos taken after the raid and reviewed by the Guardian, damage to the front doors of both homes is visible. A third volunteer\u2019s home in Thousand Oaks was searched.
More than 100 federal immigration agents were present across the four locations, Yassin said.
Warrants for Martinez\u2019s home and business reviewed by the Guardian authorized agents to seize evidence of conspiracies to impede or injure federal officers or destruction of government property.
At Martinez\u2019s screen-print and design studio, which doubles as a hub for VC Defensa operations, a DHS inventory<\/a> sheet shows that agents took a USB drive, two knives, a phone, skateboards and a riot shield, among other items.
Phones and a computer were taken from Martinez\u2019s home. Shrugging off concerns about what agents might find, he said: \u201cWe\u2019ve never had anything to hide.\u201d
When presented with detailed questions about the raids, including whether armed agents pointed guns at Martinez and his mother, a DHS spokesperson said that HSI executed search warrants on \u201cindividuals associated with an anti-ICE organization\u201d but didn\u2019t provide more details, citing an \u201congoing investigation\u201d.
\u201cSeveral members of this organization have been previously arrested for ambushing federal law enforcement and destruction of government property,\u201d the spokesperson said, an apparent reference to pending criminal charges<\/a> against the two VC Defensa volunteers arrested in October. \u201cUnder President Trump, if you assault law enforcement officers, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.\u201d
Yassin said the raids are part of a pattern, and that more than 50 people associated with VC Defensa<\/a> have been targeted by federal officers over the past year, from arrests, raids and car rammings to agents pepper-spraying volunteers or following them home.
One of the first incidents occurred in May 2025. After a morning ICE patrol, volunteer Mitch Lillie said he received more than 80 calls from unknown and blocked numbers. His mother answered an unknown caller who said, \u201cTell your son to stop harassing us,\u201d according to Lillie.
This past March, Lillie\u2019s phone was seized by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the Los Angeles airport without a warrant, he said. The Guardian reviewed a CBP receipt of the phone seizure.
Lillie said the incidents formed part of a long history of US government repression of leftwing movements, citing the Cointelpro program that sought to destroy groups the FBI considered subversive.
A March New York Times report uncovered a DHS taskforce<\/a> investigating VC Defensa as part of a push to build cases accusing protesters of organizing radical leftist conspiracies. The investigation centers on two volunteers accused of a conspiracy to build a roadblock and throw rocks at federal vehicles during large-scale protests of the July 2025 immigration raids<\/a> at Glass House cannabis farms.
Court documents show that a federal prosecutor recently assigned to the case, Colin Scott, works for the terrorism and export crimes section of the US attorney\u2019s office of the central district of California<\/a>. Scott is also named in the search warrants for Martinez\u2019s home and business.
The DHS and the FBI did not respond to questions about whether VC Defensa is being investigated for domestic terrorism.
Across the country, hundreds of protesters have been arrested<\/a> on charges of assaulting and impeding federal officers during immigration-enforcement operations, but government prosecutors have struggled to secure convictions<\/a>, with officers\u2019 testimony frequently contradicted by bystander video. Another demonstrator at the Glass House raids, university professor John Caravello<\/a>, was recently acquitted of assault charges for tossing a teargas canister toward border patrol agents.
At the press conference after the raids, Martinez addressed the crowd in Spanish: \u201cEl trabajo que nosotros hacemos diario son los gracias que nosotros les damos a ustedes, a los pap\u00e1s<\/em>.\u201d (In English, \u201cThe work we do every day is our way of thanking you, the parents.\u201d)
Martinez continued: \u201cBecause we were once those little kids, and we saw the grueling hardships you endured for so many years.\u201d
Martinez had spoken similar words two days earlier to a father who approached the diner booth where Martinez ate breakfast after his dawn ICE patrol with two other VC Defensa members.
In Spanish, the man said he recognized the group and thanked them for protecting his community. His children sat at a nearby booth.
\u201cNot everyone would give up their job to do what you do,\u201d he said. Laughing, the volunteers said they also had day jobs. One is a children\u2019s therapist; another, a hospital worker who coaches high school soccer.
After the family left, a server came by.
\u201cThat man bought you breakfast,\u201d she told them.<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VC Defensa organizes ICE patrols, a hotline and community support for immigrants in Ventura county, CaliforniaFederal agents have raided the homes of three southern California immigration activists in what the activists allege is the latest escalation in a Trump administration campaign to harass a volunteer-led advocacy group that organizes neighborhood ICE-watch patrols.Agents with Homeland Security […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":211287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-211286","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}