Before the Border Patrol embarked on its high-profile raids in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans and Minneapolis, it tried out its tactics a year ago in Kern County, in California’s agricultural heartland.
A lawsuit filed against the federal government over its operations in Bakersfield and other parts of Kern County claimed that in some instances, Border Patrol agents had not identified themselves or presented warrants. In others, people were grabbed with force, and their requests to call a lawyer were denied.
And in one case, the lawsuit said, agents stopped a U.S. citizen driving a truck, slashed the tires, blocked the truck with another vehicle, arrested the driver and then released him a few hours later.
The raids last January, in the last days of the Biden administration, initially drew little attention outside the farm country of California’s Central Valley. At the time, the eyes of the world were focused on the two vast wildfires raging in Los Angeles County.
But the Border Patrol’s actions in Kern County, which it called Operation Return to Sender, can be seen as a blueprint for the broader immigration crackdown that was to come. Similar tactics have become part of the agency’s standard playbook in other places, including Minnesota, where federal immigration agents are making hundreds of arrests amid sustained protests from local leaders and residents.
The man who led the Kern County raids, Gregory Bovino, became a star among opponents of illegal immigration. When the Trump administration began an immigration crackdown in Los Angeles in June, Mr. Bovino was tapped to lead operations there, and he was later asked to lead crackdowns in other cities.
“The Kern County operation was a test run, or a pilot project, on Bovino’s part,” Minju Cho, a senior lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. “We called it his audition for the Trump administration, and unfortunately, it seems to have worked. It really propelled him into the national spotlight, and since then, he’s only gained greater prominence as he’s been leading these operations around the country.”
The Border Patrol promoted the Kern County raids as a success, saying that it had arrested 78 undocumented immigrants during the three-day operation, including some with criminal histories.
But the agency’s tactics also showed opponents that it could be challenged and even stopped.
The A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit on behalf of United Farm Workers and five Kern County residents that accused the agency of racial profiling and coercing at least 40 arrested immigrants “to accept voluntary departure.”
In April, Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of U.S. District Court issued a preliminary injunction barring Border Patrol agents from stopping Kern County residents without a reasonable suspicion of illegal presence, as required by the Fourth Amendment.
In the order, she cited evidence that the Border Patrol had violated its own policies by stopping people without reasonable suspicion, and she wrote that its public statements suggested that it would continue with its aggressive practices. She set out specific rules that the Border Patrol would have to follow for future stops.
The Department of Homeland Security has appealed Judge Thurston’s ruling.
In interviews with The New York Times last year, Mr. Bovino dismissed accusations that the Border Patrol was using racial profiling in its stops.
He also said that the Border Patrol had gone to Bakersfield because agency leaders believed that the area was a hub for smugglers. “It certainly opened our eyes to the need for interior enforcement, whether it’s attacking the smuggling networks going to and through Bakersfield or those illegal aliens that were already in Bakersfield,” he said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a separate agency within the Department of Homeland Security, was not named as a defendant in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit. ICE was not restricted by the injunction and has maintained a presence in the region.
Ambar Tovar, an immigration lawyer at the United Farm Workers Foundation in Bakersfield, said federal immigration enforcement in Kern County had shifted to ICE agents who target people showing up to court dates or supervisory check-ins.
“These are people who are in active proceedings,” Ms. Tovar said. “ICE knows who they are, where they live, and knows where to find them.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that the Border Patrol had not conducted operations in Kern County since Operation Return to Sender but that Homeland Security continued to enforce the law across the country.
In an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, President Trump said he had directed ICE to ease deportations in the agricultural industry. “They have great people working for them who have been working for them for 25 years,” he said. “They are almost like a member of the family, and I don’t want those people thrown out of the country.”
Still, long after the spectacle of the Border Patrol patrolling the streets has faded in Kern County, immigrant communities there remain shaken and on high alert. The county has two large ICE detention facilities, including one that opened last year, which have loomed large amid the crackdown.
Standing next to his rusty Chevy pickup in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Bakersfield earlier this month, Lazaro Ramirez, a day laborer, recalled the day a year ago when federal agents in green had showed up. Fellow day laborers fled into the street and into the store, he said.
Since then, jobs have become nearly impossible to find. “We never thought that this could happen,” said Mr. Ramirez, a Mexican citizen who has a green card. “This past year, honestly, we have not been well.”
Last week, on the anniversary of the Border Patrol raids in Kern County, Ms. Tovar and members of other immigrant advocacy groups gathered at the U.F.W. Foundation’s office in downtown Bakersfield to reflect on the past year. Some immigrants shared stories of detention and fear, including one woman who said her oldest son had been arrested at an ICE office in October and was still in detention at a facility in California City, in the eastern part of the county.
Leticia Perez, a member of the Kern County Board of Supervisors, said that the Border Patrol’s raids had been unexpected for many. “It was just very clear that Border Patrol was being very creative, very clever and very aggressive,” she said.
Ms. Perez said she had assumed the raids in Kern County would be a singular event. “Certainly in the beginning, I think I was in some denial, hoping that maybe this was to grab headlines and that we would get past it pretty quickly,” she said.
Then in June, Los Angeles became the target of large-scale immigration raids. Mr. Bovino, a Border Patrol chief, was named the commander of the Los Angeles raids, and he later led operations in Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans. Most recently, Mr. Bovino has been leading the agency’s surge in Minnesota.
Some of those other operations have drawn complaints similar to those in Kern County, including lawsuits claiming that Border Patrol agents targeted people based on the color of their skin or whether they spoke English.
Ms. Cho, the A.C.L.U. lawyer, said that she had noticed the parallels. In several cases that have been filed against the federal government over immigration raids, she said, judges have ruled that the operations have violated the law.
But other cities have not been able to have injunctions put in place the way Kern County did.
“They’re moving faster than courts can,” Ms. Cho said of immigration agents. “So unfortunately, it’s really difficult to hold them accountable.”
Sarah Saldaña, who served as an ICE director during the Obama administration, said she had noticed stark differences between how immigration enforcement was handled while she was with the agency compared with the second Trump administration.
ICE operations, Ms. Saldaña said, have typically required advance preparation and have targeted undocumented immigrants with criminal histories.
The Trump administration is casting a wider net by bringing in the Border Patrol, which uses different tactics. “The agents and the officers, it seems to me from what I can see, are just hitting the streets, as opposed to the targeted operations we did, certainly, under the Obama administration,” Ms. Saldaña said.
On Dec. 31, Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, led a coalition of 17 state attorneys general in filing an amicus brief in the Kern County case, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to keep the injunction in place. The filing describes a sense of fear among residents in the area. It cites examples of attendance drops at churches and reduced business at local stores.
“The unscrupulous tactics used by Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and his team of agents during raids in Kern County, Los Angeles, and across the nation threaten the basic civil liberties afforded to all who call this country home,” Mr. Bonta wrote in the filing.
As the presence of federal immigration agents in cities leads to clashes with protesters, Ms. Saldaña said she is worried about the future.
“This get-them-at-all-costs attitude,” she said, “is just going to continue to cause problems.”
Orlando Mayorquín is a Times reporter covering California. He is based in Los Angeles.
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