The Brief

A church-going agricultural worker. An Echo Park man taking his son to school. A 16-year-old kid searching for work to support his family in Mexico.

Three weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge of some of the first Californians targeted in his high-profile immigration crackdown. It’s very different from the descriptions of hardened criminals President Donald Trump has touted. People CalMatters interviewed about the raids across California suggested those swept up in them are dedicated family members and employees, their lives deeply woven into their communities. None appeared to pose the risks to national security or public safety Trump promised he’d target during his campaign.

The state has only begun to grapple with the resulting fear and need for reliable information. Last week Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation allocating $25 million to provide immigrants with legal services to fight immigration proceedings against them.

A spokesman for ICE said officers do not target noncitizens indiscriminately. “ICE’s enforcement resources are based on intelligence-driven leads,” said Richard Beam, a spokesman for ICE’s Los Angeles office.

Some people detained during the statewide crackdown said that’s not what it feels like on the ground.

“It was just a regular morning,” said Loreal Duran from Echo Park in Los Angeles, describing her family’s before-school rush to get the kids out the door and loaded into the car.

But on the morning in question, Jan. 23, as her husband fastened their two young children into their seats, an immigration officer walked up, asking Loreal to show identification. “As he got closer to the car, he saw my husband, and basically, he just went around to the other side to grab my husband out of the car and take him away.”

Loreal Duran holds a photo of her with her husband Giovanni Duran at her apartment in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 2025.

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Joel Angel Juarez

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CalMatters

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The Durans’ one-year-old daughter, whose identity is being withheld for privacy concerns, eats breakfast at their apartment in Los Angeles.

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Joel Angel Juarez

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CalMatters

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The Durans’ eight-year-old son, whose identity is being withheld for privacy concerns, sits on their bed at their apartment on Feb. 8, 2025.

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Joel Angel Juarez

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CalMatters

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Giovanni Duran, 42, came to California from El Salvador without federal authorization when he was 2 years old, brought by his family. He worked as a busser in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles, Loreal said. Duran is now being held in the Adelanto detention facility, run by a private company under contract to ICE, awaiting deportation to a country he doesn’t know.

“I haven’t talked to him in almost two days,” said Loreal last week. She’s had to get counseling for her 7-year-old son after he saw his dad taken away by officers.

“He was telling his classmates, ‘Oh, daddy got arrested for not wearing his seatbelt,’” Duran recounted. Later, the second grader asked his mom, “Did daddy get arrested because he’s Brown? I replied back to him, I go: ‘Yea, he kinda did.'”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported on social media 8,276 arrests nationwide between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31. The agency would not break out those numbers for California or different cities.

Casting a wide net

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune reported less than half of the approximately 8,200 people arrested from Jan. 20 through Feb. 2, so far have criminal convictions, according to government data they obtained.

In California, the apparently broad crackdown has immigrant advocates working around the clock. There have been several high-profile protests – one that shuttered a freeway in Los Angeles and another that prompted police to fire off tear gas at people in National City. Social media channels have been flooded by reported sightings of immigration officers and phones have been ringing nonstop.

“You can sense that kind of panic and also hunger; hunger for correct, reliable information as to what they should do in times of a raid or in times of an encounter with an immigration agent,” said Ian M. Seruelo, an immigration attorney in San Diego.

Two days after President Donald Trump visited wildfire-scarred Los Angeles, promising to work with California on needed federal assistance for recovery, his administration announced, with few details, immigration enforcement operations in the city carried out by federal agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department, “and other federal law enforcement partners.” Video released with the announcement showed officers in camouflaged uniforms and bullet-proof vests approaching apartment buildings and standing around armored vehicles and mobile command centers.

Trump authorized law enforcement agents from across the federal government to participate in immigration enforcement activities. He also lifted longtime guidelines restricting ICE from operating at “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches or hospitals.

ICE messaging about its enforcement actions has emphasized the apprehension of criminals. Last week, Enforcement and Removal Operations Los Angeles, a part of the agency, said officers arrested a 47-year-old non-citizen who was convicted of DUI. “This noncitizen had previously been arrested for driving without a license and evading a peace officer,” officials said on social media. They also said they arrested an “unlawfully present Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang member. This noncitizen is currently in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”

Law enforcement officials spread out through an apartment complex during a raid in Denver on Feb. 5, 2025. Officials have also been conducting immigration enforcement activities across California.

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David Zalubowski

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Reuters

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Nayna Gupta, the policy director at the American Immigration Council, an advocacy group for immigrants, said for the Trump administration to deport millions of people as the president promised, it will have to target people who have not had contact with the criminal system.

“Based on recent data, we know that fewer than 1 in 10 undocumented immigrants has a criminal record,” said Gupta.

More than one in three people in Los Angeles County are immigrants, according to a report last year from the University of Southern California. Tens of thousands of county residents had to evacuate following a series of wildfires that began in early January.

“It is unconscionable to have or plan for immigration enforcement activities in a natural disaster,” said Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.

In the name of public safety

California Republicans appear to be on board with Trump’s actions so far. They urged Newsom to veto two bills signed into law last week. One was the $25 million for immigrant legal defense and the other allocated another $25 million for Attorney General Rob Bonta to pursue litigation against the Trump administration.

“We have a public safety problem in California, and a big component of that is international gangs and cartels. Human trafficking has exploded, and it knows no bounds,” said Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, a Republican from Santa Clarita, during a floor debate on the legislation.

During his campaign, Trump and his advisors repeatedly invoked hardened criminals and threats to national security when promising mass detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants.

That’s what Estefany Peña, 30, from Lincoln, California, believed when she supported Trump for reelection.

“I thought they were going to be targeting criminals. No one mentioned during the campaigning of Donald Trump that residents … legal residents … were going to have to go through this,” she said. Her husband, who came to the country legally in 1999 and has a green card, went to an immigration office in San Francisco for a check-in in late January and still hasn’t come home, she said.

“Everything just came crumbling down,” she said of when immigration officers wouldn’t let her husband leave.

The husband, Joel Jacuinde, 40, is the breadwinner for his family, working at a rice dryer company east of San Francisco. Peña said he also volunteers for his church and provides the primary source of transportation for the family, regularly taking their 11-year-old son for treatment for his asthma. Both children are covered for health care under Jacuinde’s Medi-Cal account, she said.

“My kids are very close to their dad, so it’s taken a terrible toll on them,” she said.

Jacuinde doesn’t show up in a database of people being detained by ICE. Peña said he was told he was not free to leave the immigration office and that agents were holding him to pressure him to sign a voluntary removal form. The family has contacted dozens of attorneys but hasn’t been able to secure legal representation, she said.

In Tijuana, outside a federal shelter set up to assist recently deported Mexicans, a 16-year-old told CalMatters he had been detained trying to reach Stockton to find work. “They grabbed me,” he said, and within hours, he was back in Mexico.

Leaving the same Tijuana shelter, Mario Guerra, 39, a construction worker from Bakersfield, said he ran from about seven or eight ICE agents on Jan. 31. Though he grew up in Bakersfield, he said he was in the U.S. without federal authorization. Guerra said the agents caught him, detained him, and sent him back to Mexico after two days in detention.

Protesters gather over U.S. Route 101 in Downtown Los Angeles in support of the “Day Without Immigrants” march on Feb. 3, 2025.

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J.W. Hendricks

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CalMatters

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Guerra said the officers handcuffed his feet and hands and left him in a transportation van for hours from Bakersfield to San Ysidro with no restroom breaks and nothing to drink.

“We were, basically, telling them that we needed to use the restroom, but they didn’t answer at all,” he said.

“The kids are the ones who are going to suffer the most,” he added about his children who are still in Bakersfield.

Thirty-four-year-old Vilma Ordóñez said she and her husband and children went out to eat in East Los Angeles on Jan. 26. As they got out of the car in front of the restaurant, two agents wearing bulletproof vests approached “and told my husband that he looked like someone they were looking for,” Ordóñez described.

Her stomach dropped as she remembered advice she’d read online, telling her husband, who is in the U.S. without legal status, “Let’s not say anything; let’s just look for an attorney.” The agents kept insisting the couple show them their IDs, she said.

“He had to take out his ID,” she said. “He showed it to them, and they said, ‘Oh, we knew you were not the right person.’”

“They knew he was not the right person, but yet they still insisted on asking him for his ID?” she asked in Spanish.

It’s possible the agents were looking for indications on Ordóñez’s husband’s ID that he was not an authorized immigrant. In 2013, California passed the Safe and Responsible Drivers Act, granting undocumented residents the ability to obtain driver’s licenses. More than a million undocumented Californians got the special licenses, which look slightly different than regular state licenses. Some advocates worried at the time the licenses could be misused by immigration authorities to identify people who are undocumented. ICE did not respond to a request for comment about whether it is identifying immigrants without legal status by their AB60 driver’s licenses.

Ordóñez said the agents let them go, so they went into the restaurant with their children and had dinner. But when they returned to the parking lot, four agents were standing around their car.

“They told him he had signed a voluntary return in 1996 and had not left the country, and so they were going to detain him and take him,” she said, adding that he’s currently being held in a California detention facility. Ordóñez said her husband never signed the voluntary return form.

“The father has a very important role in the family, and right now, our children are traumatized. More than anything, our kids are suffering,” said Ordóñez. “My husband has always paid his taxes every single year since he entered, and he’s always worked and taken care of his family.”

Attention: If someone close to you has recently been detained by immigration agents, and you want to share your story, please reach out to us via wendy@calmatters.org.

Atención: Si tienes un ser querido que recientemente ha sido detenido por agentes de migración y quieres compartir tu historia, por favor comunícate con nosotros: wendy@calmatters.org.

The Long Beach Unified School District is looking for a new operator to handle a major after-school program following the city of Long Beach’s decision not to participate in an attempt to save money.

Since 2002, the city’s Parks Department has helped anchor the initiative, known to families as WRAP. It provides free programming for hundreds of transitional-kindergarten through eighth-grade students across seven local campuses: Garfield, Edison, King, Grant, Lafayette, Burbank and Herrera.

Long Beach Unified officials stress that the vital student services will continue under a new operator this fall. It’s not clear yet who it will be and what, if any, changes they’ll make.

The city’s quiet retreat from the program has sparked deep anxiety among three full-time and 80 part-time municipal workers who now face potential layoffs.

Workers say they were first notified of the decision during a June 15 staff meeting with a city superintendent, where they were told their employment with the program would conclude on Aug. 15.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” said one 13-year city employee based at an elementary school, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her position. “I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for 13 years; we had people there that had been doing it over 20 years that had never moved sites.”

Today, the before- and after-school services are paid for primarily through the state-funded Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP), a combination of California’s After School Education and Safety (ASES) grant and specific ELOP apportionments.

Historically, the city was granted this funding by the school district without a formal bidding process, typically receiving roughly $15 per student plus administrative fees, which it supplemented with allocations from its own general fund.

This year, however, the school district was forced to overhaul its grant-funding process and consider bids to meet tightening state mandates for the program’s ELOP funding.

Shortly after, the city informed the school district it would not bid on the program.

City spokesperson Jennifer De Prez said the decision “was made so that the department can focus its limited financial resources” on other programs it runs.

The city is facing an estimated $61 million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year — a deficit that top administrators warn makes citywide reductions inevitable.

The city could not immediately provide numbers on how much money it expected to save by ending its participation in the WRAP program. Last year, the city provided $193,254 of in-kind-services at its own expense on top of the program’s grant-funded budget, according to documents provided by De Prez.

Meanwhile, the school district went ahead with a bid application for a replacement operator on May 22. Proposals were due June 12 and are scheduled to go before the Board of Education for consideration at its July 15 meeting.

District officials emphasized that the state funding remains fully intact and that student services will continue without interruption.

The district and the city are also working on a joint letter to families detailing the transition, which is scheduled to be sent out soon.

But for the frontline staff, the transition has been destabilizing and abrupt.

These part-time employees, who work between 20 and 30 hours per week depending on the season, rotate through campuses where individual site enrollment ranges from 85 to 160 students.

The employee who spoke with the Post said that despite directives from supervisors to keep the changes quiet until future plans solidified, she chose to notify parents so they would have time to prepare.

“As a parent, I would want to know if it’s not the same people that I’ve trusted my kids with for years,” she said.

The long-term fate of the workforce remains unresolved, forcing many to look for employment elsewhere.

“As far as employment opportunities, they didn’t lay us off, they didn’t fire us, they just basically told us the contract with the schools will be done August 15,” the anonymous employee said. “Past that, we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

City officials say they will soon meet with representatives of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union to discuss the workers’ future.

“We are committed to ensuring this process is transparent, informed by complete information, and focused on protecting both employees and the quality and continuity of the vital services the WRAP program provides to the Long Beach community,” said Sashi Muralidharan, a spokesperson with IAM 947.

Editor’s note: This story was updated with more information about the program’s cost to the city.

A community organization in Los Angeles is criticizing how the FBI enforced a strict no-drone policy around World Cup venues after federal agents disrupted a community gardening event in South L.A.

The incident took place the first Sunday of the tournament, while crowds were watching matches at the FIFA Fan Festival at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Nearby, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site.

Then someone flew a drone to photograph the moment. Minutes later, Department of Homeland Security agents and Los Angeles police officers were on the scene, according to Bz Zhang, a project manager who was helping run the event. Soon the FBI arrived. They confiscated the drone and fined the person operating it.

The Neighborhood Land Trust was hosting a celebration for teenagers who had created a native plant garden on a patch of land that used to be an oil drilling site when authorities arrived.

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Wendy Salvador

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" We were unknowingly in violation of federal airspace, and we were told that we were a threat to national security," said Zhang, who witnessed the encounter.

The drone had violated temporary flight restrictions implemented for the World Cup. The Federal Aviation Authority has banned unauthorized drones within "3-nautical-mile radius and up to 3,000 feet above ground level" around stadiums on match days and also prohibited them around certain fan events, like the one at the Coliseum.

Since the tournament started in L.A., federal authorities have seized dozens of drones near SoFi Stadium and the Coliseum, according to the FBI. In total, more than 600 drones have been confiscated across the country.

The crackdown is part of an effort across all 11 U.S. host cities to identify and remove unauthorized drones from the skies around World Cup venues and fan events. Ahead of the tournament, FEMA awarded host cities $250 million specifically to combat drone usage.

"We knew we needed to act quickly to keep the World Cup safe from the rising threat of unmanned aircraft systems and that’s exactly what we did,” said Karen Evans, FEMA's acting cdministrator, in a statement announcing those funds.

But Zhang said that the incident at the garden represented the unintended consequences of hosting mega-events like the World Cup for ordinary community members.

" It's one thing to be aware of construction. … It's another to be expected as residents to know, to the 10th of a mile, that I'm in a particular zone and that, to the hour, I need to be in compliance," Zhang said.

Laura Eimiller, FBI spokesperson, disagreed. She said drone operators are responsible for knowing the rules and that every person in L.A. who had a drone confiscated during the World Cup also received a fine.

"There's been a zero-tolerance approach," Eimiller said.

Hiding out among the luxury beachfront condos in the Newport Beach neighborhood of Corona Del Mar is an outpost where scientists have been conducting important marine research for nearly a century.

And you can go check the place out for yourself.

A ‘magical’ marine station 

With its Spanish style architecture that includes a central tower and red-tiled roof, Caltech’s Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory looks like it’s been teleported in from another time and place.

Originally built as a boat and club house, it was purchased by Caltech in 1929 for use as a beachfront science outpost.

Victoria Orphan, James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech and director of the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, said the place is one of the oldest running marine labs on the West Coast.

“There’s something just really magical about marine stations. They’re rustic, so it’s not like you’re going into a fully polished clean room. But that’s part of the charm and you really feel the history,” Orphan said.

One of her favorite spots? The tower. That’s where Orphan said some famous papers were written.

“Sometimes when I have writer’s block, I’ll go and sit in the tower and try to channel the scientists of old,” she told LAist.

That would include the work of Wheeler North, one of Orphan’s heroes. From 1962 to 2002, he conducted pioneering research on the ecology of kelp forests. Orphan said North’s work was instrumental for learning how an imbalance in the sea urchin population can decimate kelp forests.

These days that important research continues, with scientists at the lab looking at how microbes can capture carbon dioxide, mitigating global warming. They even have a 4-foot, bright yellow autonomous vehicle that scans the seafloor so scientists can learn more about seagrasses, which are important for oxygen creation and carbon capture, serve as fish nurseries and help protect the coastline from storm surge.

Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Corona del Mar

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Courtesy Caltech photo archive

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“In areas where you have seagrass, you get less sediment erosion [and] a little more protection of the property on land, which people who live on the coast care about,” Orphan explained.

Engineers from Jet Propulsion Laboratory are also interested in using autonomous vehicles in cooperation with the lab to see how they can help study the deep ocean right outside the harbor.

You can visit the lab to learn about all of the science going on there, with free open houses on Tuesdays and monthly ‘Science and Sunsets’ events that include dinner and cocktails at the historic outpost.

A pop-up book that’s seeking to break the world record for size has unfolded at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles.

The art piece is 31 feet wide, more than 11 feet tall, and weighs in at 1,800 pounds.

Luceros y Penumbras, which roughly translates to “starlight and shadows,” is rooted in L.A. artist Daniel González’s experience visiting the library and his family in Mexico as a child.

“It's a knowledge tree that's been shaped by all these different things that I've learned at the library, about myself, about the city I grew up in, [and] about the town where my family's from,” González said.

The nonprofit Library Foundation of Los Angeles collaborated with the library to commission the piece as part of the Central Library’s centennial celebration.

The project is inspired, in part, by the library’s Toy Movable collection, an archive of more than 2,000 pop-up books.

“Normal pop-up books … they seem so simple, but something amazing pops out when you open the page,” said Todd Lerew, the foundation’s director of special projects. “That sort of childlike wonder that you feel that's persistent, even as an adult, is something that was really important to capture and dial up to 11 with this project.”

The origin of 'Luceros'

The foundation asked González in June 2025 to create a book that told the story of his personal relationship with the library. As González pondered questions including  ”What did the library do for me as a young person?" and "Why was I so attracted to it?" he thought about how knowledge was passed down in his family through the generations.

His grandmother told him stories about the stars above her farm near Teúl, Zacatecas, in Mexico. She said those that emerged at dawn — luceros — were among the most special because they signaled the start of a new day.

“ I looked at those stars … and the histories that my grandparents were sharing with me as these guiding lights,” González said. “Just like the library is a guiding light for many people.”

Daniel González's maternal grandmother, Isabel Gómez, told him stories about the creatures that lived near her farm, including owls, that could teach healing.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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González grew up blocks away from the Benjamin Franklin Library in Boyle Heights.

“ I spent summers there because it was literally the coolest place to be,” González said. “It just gave me the opportunity to explore anything that I had an interest in.”

Daniel González, as a child, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a kite after a trip to the library.  "My dad's like, 'I'm gonna take a picture of you so you can see what you look like when you get grumpy,'" he said.

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Courtesy Daniel González

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Later, he’d visit the Central Library during a middle school field trip and return on the bus to wander the stacks and ask the staff questions.

“ I'm really lucky that I met the people that nurtured that curiosity,” González said.

From sketches to ‘paper engineering’

First, González sketched the images, carved them into linoleum, printed them with ink and digitized them to add color and other details.

A few of Daniel González's tools. In the future, he plans to sell prints related to "Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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Matthew Reinhart, children’s book author, illustrator and “paper engineer,” was tasked with translating the images into three dimensions.

“ My job is really making mistakes,” Reinhart said. “Making mistakes, figuring out where they are and solving them and — of course — making them look good.”

The construction and the fabrication of the book took the work of more than 30 people over a series of months. At least a dozen people using giant poles capped with cushions turn the pages.

Luceros y Penumbras is four pages that open to create two scenes — one of the Central Library building and another of a sprawling tree with an I Spy-like collection of creatures and images throughout. The featured pages will change throughout the exhibition, which is open until mid-November.

There are at least a dozen different symbols throughout “Luceros y Penumbras."

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Mariana Dale

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LAist

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The sea turtle at the base of the tree is a reference both to the creatures that live in the San Gabriel River and to the original inhabitants of the L.A. basin. The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe tells a story that connects the region’s earthquakes to the turtles.

“When we think of sea turtles, we think of these faraway places where they live, like tropical places,” González said. “But they exist here and they've had to adapt to a changing climate, a changing environment, and find places to call home, just as people do.”

Other images include:

• A star resting in an outstretched hand in honor of Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction writer who also spent time in the library. 
•  Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent Aztec deity and a frequent motif in East L.A.’s murals. 
• An owl, a symbol of knowledge associated with the Greek goddess Athena and the Roman goddess Minerva. 

González said the goal is for viewers to create their own narrative about what they see.

“ I just hope that people carry with them a sense of curiosity to further explore the things that I present, but also maybe something within them,” González said.

Visit the pop-up book

Central Library Centennial Festival

On display