A year-end wave of immigration raids in the Central Coast led to the apprehension of 147 people, sparking outrage from elected officials and immigrant-rights groups.
Federal immigration agents took people from their homes, job sites, businesses and on the streets as they ran errands, Santa Maria City Councilmember Gloria Soto said during a Friday morning news conference. She said at least 87 people were taken by agents in her town from Saturday through Tuesday.
“This makes Santa Maria the epicenter of what we have been seeing over the holiday break,” she said. “It’s devastating because this is happening during the holiday season when people are supposed to be with their loved ones.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security could not immediately be reached for comment Friday.
The operations, Soto said, have brought terror to her community and destabilized the local economy.
“Children are returning home to empty houses, [elderly people] are starting to isolate themselves and workers are staying home out of fear,” she said. “We cannot live in terror.”
Primitiva Hernández — executive director of 805 UndocuFund, a nonprofit leading the Rapid Response Network that documents immigration sweeps in San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties — said the operations were mostly carried out in working-class towns with predominantly Latino populations.
“What we are witnessing is the indiscriminate racial profiling of communities of color,” she said. “Families are being ripped apart, workers are disappearing from job sites, and fear is being used as a weapon. The harm will have devastating consequences for people’s well-being and for the economic stability of our region and we must take action today.”
Hernández said the operations began on Saturday when 38 people were detained — 36 in Santa Maria and two in San Luis Obispo. The following day, 15 people in Lompoc, eight in Santa Maria and two in Santa Barbara were taken. Officials said the number of people detained seemed to have peaked on Tuesday.
In a phone interview, Soto said she held the news conference outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Santa Maria for a few reasons: to demand greater transparency from federal immigration authorities amid reports of due process violations and mistreatment of immigrants, to give stage presence to immigrant-rights groups and to put pressure on her City Council colleagues to take action.
At the conference, immigrant-rights advocates read the testimonial of a father whose entire family — save his 3-year-old U.S.-born son — was taken by ICE. He said he has received calls from federal immigration agents telling him they know where he lives and that they were coming for his son.
Hernández said the 805 Rapid Response Network uses a real-time alert system to send out texts with verified information about sweeps and other crucial information. But it comes at a price — each text alert costs about $600, and the nonprofit has already spent more than $8 million, making donations and community support vital.
Soto said she hoped Friday’s news conference would put pressure on her Santa Maria City Council colleagues who “are not wanting to take any action when it comes to ICE.”
Earlier this fall, she said, she called for the creation of an ad hoc committee that could serve as a bridge between the council and residents. The committee could help document how the raids are impacting people but also identify policies that could help support immigrants.
But she said her council colleagues did not want to address the issue until February.
“The communities that are being terrorized don’t have the time for legislative bodies to be waiting around,” she said. “We have to take action now.”
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