“No firmes nada,” a union organizer shouted into a bullhorn as he stood atop the flatbed of a truck outside Ambience Apparel, doling out battlefield legal advice not to sign anything. “You have a right to a lawyer. You are not alone.”
Advocates and lawyers had arrived at the downtown store minutes after tips began to pop off at the hotline set up by the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, a coalition of 300 volunteers and 23 labor unions and immigrant rights and social justice groups that was organized last year to respond to enforcement.
They joined protesters and tearful family members jostling around a plate glass window to catch glimpses of federal officials arresting immigrants inside the clothing retailer on Friday, in what would become a flashpoint that would put Los Angeles at the center of President Trump’s aggressive immigration policy.
“They were really coming in with a military style mindset,” said Angelica Salas, a veteran advocate and director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. That morning she went to another location where union leader David Huerta had been arrested.
Although she had never seen any sweeps like it in scale and aggression, she said advocates were prepared. “It’s a very well-organized community. That’s why coming into L.A. is so important for this Trump administration, because what they want to do is they want to break us.”
The coalition of advocates is in a fight for their lives, as the administration undermines its funding while escalating detention and deportation of the people they are meant to help. Many have been doing the work for decades, but the anti-immigrant vitriol has reached a pitch that has them unnerved like never before.
Salas said her office has received death threats. Two weeks ago, vandals threw bricks through the front office window, smashing a few items inside. Workers have reported threatening calls.
“It’s always been hard, and it’s always been, what I would say, controversial,” she said. “But this is at a different level.”
The newest fear — one she never would have thought possible in the past — was that the federal government would start prosecuting them for simply doing their jobs and trying to uphold the right to due process.
On Friday federal officials arrested Huerta, the president of Service Employees International Union California, on suspicion of interfering with federal officers. The union is part of the rapid response network. The U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, seemed to suggest on Sunday that other union officials and organizers would be investigated.
“We saw union activists and organizers be involved in these efforts to resist our operations,” he told local television station KCAL. “We’ve got lots of video online and both surveillance videos. We have FBI teams working around the clock. We will identify you. We’ll find you and we’ll come get you.”
Salas said they are doing nothing illegal. But she takes the threats seriously.
“What they want to do is shut us up and not to be able to expose what’s happening to the human beings that are impacted by this,” she said.
Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, put it more bluntly.
“When federal elected officials are pondering the arrest of our governor, obviously, all of us who are doing this work are concerned,” she said, referring to an offhanded comment Trump made about arresting Gov. Gavin Newsom.
GOP leaders across the country are ramping up their attacks on the organizations, arguing that they are funding the violent agitators with state and federal grant money.
“The LA Riots are taxpayer funded,” Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), wrote on X on Monday.
Two Republican Congress members announced Wednesday that they would lead committee investigations of 200 nongovernmental organizations, including CHIRLA, “that were involved in providing services or support to inadmissible aliens during the Biden-Harris administration’s historic border crisis.” And Josh Hawley, a Missouri senator who chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, threatened an investigation solely into CHIRLA, saying that it was “bankrolling” civil unrest.
“Credible reporting now suggests that your organization has provided logistical support and financial resources to individuals engaged in these disruptive actions,” he wrote in a letter to CHIRLA that he posted on X, but that Salas said she had not received. “Let me be clear: bankrolling civil unrest is not protected speech. It is aiding and abetting criminal conduct. Accordingly, you must immediately cease and desist any further involvement in the organization, funding, or promotion of these unlawful activities,” Hawley wrote.
CHIRLA was founded in 1986 by a Catholic priest after President Reagan signed a landmark law that gave wide amnesty to immigrants but made hiring undocumented people illegal. Over the decades, the group has been funded by the state and federal government to organize citizenship programs. California has also provided funding for legal services for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and other immigrants.
The organization has deep political and philanthropic ties in a region. And many in those circles have immigrant roots or came to political consciousness during the 1990s when anti-immigrant sentiment roiled the state.
Miguel Santana, president and chief executive of the California Community Foundation and the son of undocumented parents, said although his $2.3-billion charitable organization isn’t part of the response network, it is helping in other ways.
“We have mobilized resources to provide legal representation, to assist families on the front line, and we are encouraging other funders to act boldly and join us in this work,” he said at a news conference Wednesday.
Shortly after the raid began Friday — before the tear gas and tactical vehicles came to quell the unrest — the rapid response members arrived. Among their first task was to begin collecting information on who might be detained from those who knew them.
Family members who got word of the raid had already been gathering outside — a daughter whose father has been in the country for more than 20 years, the wife of an accountant at the company who stood in the parking lot teary-eyed, worried about what her children’s future would look like.
Armed with a list of names, lawyers for the group began filing requests to see those detained. By nightfall, families were in line, with at least four lawyers from the network, at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
Inside, they were crowded into the hallways, waiting to see loved ones among the 200 detainees being held in crowded basement facilities, said Elaina Jung Hee Vermeulen, a lawyer and Skadden fellow at California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.
Vermeulen said it became clear to her early on that she would not be able to meet with most of the people on her list. After hours of waiting, a detention officer allowed her to meet with one client, a father of three who had been in the United States for decades.
“He is the sole breadwinner and they have a young baby,” she said. “Bearing witness to what happened was so traumatic and even in a best scenario if the family is reunited it leaves deep scars that last generations. Families are now in a greater place of precarity.”
Salas said the coalition found at least one individual picked up in the sweep who said they were asked to sign deportation documents and told that if they didn’t, they would be fined $5,000.
Already, local immigrant rights groups had been overwhelmed. Since Trump took office, he has sought to eliminate much of the funding directed to groups that provide legal orientation to families of children and people with mental disabilities in detention centers. And he signed a series of executive orders and pushed policies that made it harder for immigrants to maintain their legal status.
In April, Toczylowski, co-founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, said she had to lay off 30 members of her staff of 205.
“It’s clear from the funding being cut beforehand that their hope is that lawyers will not be able to hold them accountable,” she said. “Due process is inconvenient to their plans for mass deportation.”
In May, federal agents began arresting immigrants after their court hearings, or during routine immigration check-ins. Advocacy groups had been sending lawyers to the immigration courts to offer advice to the families of detainees — most of whom were following a judge’s order in hopes of staying in the United States. Whereas defendants in criminal court have a right to free counsel, no such right exists in immigration court. Now the nonprofits are scrambling to figure out how to pay for the attorneys to go there.
Toczylowski’s organization is representing a gay Venezuelan makeup artist whom the Trump administration removed to a prison in El Salvador, after dismissing his asylum case.
“We are working as hard as we can and trying to harness the many volunteers and community advocates that are hoping to help us do that, but it is no small task to be having to do more with less, to be having to face bigger threats with a team that is smaller than what we had because of the federal budget cuts,” she said.
Lawyers from her organization were at the downtown detention center over the weekend and learned of one family with a 3-year-old child who had been there for days.
“They were only given Lays Chips and animal crackers and milk for two days before being transferred” to a family detention center in Texas, she said.
Hundreds of immigrants have been arrested and detained in Los Angeles since Thursday, and lawyers have been frustrated by the lack of access to them. Toczylowski’s team spent full days at the federal detention facilities in Adelanto, Calif., where some of those arrested are being held, but was able to see only four people as of Tuesday. Officials at the detention center denied entrance to several Democratic Congress members who sought to do oversight visits on Sunday, she said.
“This alarming lack of transparency and lack of allowing congressional members and lawyers to have access to people who are being detained really begs the question, what are they afraid of us seeing?” she asked.
The Trump administration is not letting up. On Wednesday, tips about raids continued to pour in to the hotline as enforcement actions continued. Salas said her organization fielded more than 3,000 calls in the last week.
Members of the coalition say they cannot become demoralized and give up.
“While the protests were raging downtown and they were raiding car washes in West L.A., there were calls happening from all sectors of the immigrant rights movement and others coming together to figure out, how do we do this,” Toczylowski said.
In Los Angeles County, 1 in 3 residents were born elsewhere and 1 in 4 children live in families with mixed legal statuses.
“These are people who you know were working, who had kids in school, and who were just ripped out of our communities. And I think that it feels like a real attack on our city,” Salas said. “They’re testing California. They’re testing our city.”
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