‘Snatching off the streets’: Ice targets churches, car washes and workplaces

With the US military deployed on the streets of Los Angeles, federal immigration authorities have been conducting sweeping raids across California, arresting people at their homes and at workplaces as part of Donald Trump’s promised immigration crackdown.

Agents have apprehended people outside churches, in fields in the California agricultural heartland, in residential Los Angeles neighborhoods and at Home Depot parking lots and car washes. Ice agents have been seen near LA schools, prompting some students and their families to skip graduation events. A woman who was nine months pregnant and a US citizen was detained during a sweep over the weekend.

On Thursday, the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, was seen accompanying federal immigration agents on an operation in Huntington Park, a predominantly Latino city south of Los Angeles.

The rapid rise in Ice activity and arrests has created a climate of fear in the region, officials have said, and upended daily life for many. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has said the administration’s approach as “chasing hard working people through ranches and farms and snatching women and children off the streets”.

The pastors of a small Christian church in a suburb near Los Angeles have expressed their outrage after a group of armed men in face coverings detained a Latino man in the church’s parking lot on Wednesday.

The Rev Tanya Lopez, the senior pastor of Downey Memorial Christian church, said three SUVs with tinted windows and out-of-state license plates arrived outside the church as she was working in her office. Five men got out of the vehicles, wearing tan bulletproof vests marked “POLICE”.

They detained the man, described as a dark-skinned man with dark hair who only spoke Spanish, in the church parking lot.

Lopez said the men did not identify what agency they worked for and refused to provide their names or badge numbers when asked.

The detained man, who Lopez said she did not recognize and believed to be a passerby, was placed into one of the SUVs. As she tried to communicate with him in Spanish, she said one of the men drew a rifle on her and the group proceeded to laugh at her, then drove off.

“Who knows if this man is a citizen? They were not letting him answer any questions or provide any identification,” Lopez later told reporters. “They surrounded him and started to just get ready to grab him. And that’s why I could not just stand idly by.”

“They kept asking us to step back, and telling us that we couldn’t be there. Some words were exchanged,” said Lopez, another pastor from the church who was there.

“And this will stand in my mind – when we said we don’t want this in our property, a gentleman just shouted, “The whole country is our property.”

“I’m incredibly shaken,” Lopez told the New York Times. “It’s when I’m quiet and when I have a moment to catch my breath that it really hits me.”

The incident has stirred fear in Downey, a largely Latino suburb about 12 miles south-east of downtown Los Angeles, particularly amid ongoing reports of immigration enforcement activity across the state.

Later that day, Downey City council member Mario Trujillo spoke at a news conference in Los Angeles, stating that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents had detained several people during raids at local businesses. According to Trujillo, four people were picked up at a fitness center and two at a Home Depot.

“These raids at Home Depots, restaurants, places of worship or schools are not keeping our community safe,” Trujillo said. “They are creating havoc and fear.”

The council member said he believed the raids were being carried out without a focus on individuals with criminal records or outstanding warrants.

“They have classified someone being in the United States illegally as a criminal and that’s why that’s their narrative,” he said. “But to us, these are hardworking undocumented workers that are part of our economy, that are part of our city. These are our neighbors.”

Federal immigration authorities under the Trump administration have ramped up enforcement efforts, including workplace raids. At least five car washes in the LA area were targeted, according to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a local labor advocacy group. It was unclear how or why agents were choosing to raid certain businesses.

Natalie Ziegler was there on Sunday when Ice agents in unmarked vans drove up to the Express Hand Wash in Culver City. “I was sitting on a bench, scrolling through my phone waiting for my car when I hear the ‘thump, thump, thump’ of footsteps,” she said.

An agent carrying an assault rifle began chasing after a customer, pursuing him across a four-lane road. “I immediately was hysterical. I didn’t know what to do – I felt so helpless,” she said. Other customers began screaming at the agent: “Don’t shoot”.

Eventually the agent caught the man, tackled him to the ground and cuffed him. That’s when Ziegler realized his son had seen the whole thing, and was crying inconsolably.

Ziegler immediately called up Public Counsel, a non-profit legal group, to help aid the families of the customer and a worker who was arrested. After Ice returned to the car wash the next day, the owner closed the business.

“It really made me feel sick to my stomach,” Ziegler said.

The crackdown comes as Trump and California’s governor clash over the administration’s decision to deploy federal troops into the city, over the objections of Newsom and local officials. Newsom has described Trump’s actions as “illegal overreach”, unconstitutional and “provocation” and said he never mentioned federalizing the national guard when the two spoke by phone last week, although the president has claimed otherwise.

“He lied, stone cold liar,” the governor told the New York Times podcast the Daily on Thursday morning.

California has sued to attempt to put a stop to the deployment. But the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has refused to say whether he would follow the courts if they ruled against Trump’s move to send active-duty marines to Los Angeles. When asked whether he would abide by such a decision during a House hearing on Thursday, he said: “What I can say is we should not have local judges determining foreign policy or national security policy for the country.”

• Lauren Gambino contributed reporting