Federal agents have raided the homes of three southern California immigration activists in what the activists allege is the latest escalation in a Trump administration campaign to harass a volunteer-led advocacy group that organizes neighborhood ICE-watch patrols.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the main investigatory branch of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), executed a pre-dawn raid on 13 May at the home and business of Leonardo Martinez, whose group VC Defensa runs a rapid response hotline and supports immigrant families across Ventura county. The homes of two other current and former VC Defensa volunteers were also targeted. No arrests were made.
Members of the group were previously arrested in an HSI operation last October in connection with protests over massive immigration raids at cannabis greenhouses last July. VC Defensa alerted the community to the July raids after a government convoy headed to the greenhouses was spotted, rallying large numbers of protesters to the scene.
The July raids led to the death of a farm worker and hundreds of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests, while immigration agents, flanked by the national guard, deployed less-lethal ammunition at demonstrators.
The group’s lawyer, Reem Yassin, described last week’s 3am raids as “fishing expeditions” built on “baseless” search warrants.
“These raids are nothing more than an intimidation tactic to suppress free speech,” Yassin said during a press conference on Thursday at the federal building in Los Angeles, which houses an HSI office.
Yassin said a coalition of lawyers is preparing a civil lawsuit alleging violations of the volunteers’ constitutional rights. Supporters chanted, “Trump, escucha, ¡estamos en la lucha!” (in English, “Trump, listen, we’re in the fight!”). Passing cars honked and federal officers watched from behind glass doors.
“We’re gonna continue to fight back, we’re gonna continue to organize, we’re not gonna stop,” said Lainy Yompian, a VC Defensa leader.
Martinez said ICE agents were the ones acting lawlessly.
“If we did a fraction of the things that they do to us, we would immediately all get rallied up and thrown in federal facilities,” he said.
Early-morning patrols
At 5am the day before the raids, Martinez began patrolling the city of Oxnard, about 60 miles (100km) north of Los Angeles, an agricultural hub where over three-quarters of the city’s roughly 200,000 residents are Latino, including many undocumented farm workers.
Under a dark, foggy sky, Martinez drove a 1990s pickup truck outfitted with a blare horn and megaphone, front and rear dashcams, and floodlights for peering into the tinted windshields of ICE vehicles.
Shortly before Trump’s second term, Martinez formed VC Defensa with several activist friends. Today, the organization numbers more than 1,000 volunteers. That morning, roughly 40 were scouting the county for ICE vehicles. It was the first time a journalist had ridden along on a VC Defensa patrol.
At that early hour, the streets between densely populated apartment buildings came alive with hazard lights, as people poured out of their homes into the cars of raiteros, who drive workers to the fields. It’s also peak time for ICE arrests in recent months, Martinez said.
Martinez looped through neighborhoods often targeted by ICE operations, where his organization regularly knocks on doors to share their hotline number, recruit residents to “know your rights” trainings and add them to their neighborhood’s group chat for alerting ICE sightings.
He passed the block where he said volunteers first deterred an ICE arrest last spring. A parent had saved the hotline number after seeing it posted in a Laundromat. While dropping their child off at daycare one morning, they spotted an ICE officer and called, Martinez recounted.
“We had two volunteers show up within five minutes and were able to scream and kick them out of the neighborhood,” Martinez said.
The group advises volunteers to observe ICE activity at a distance. But Martinez said volunteers have repeatedly deterred agents into leaving a scene before making arrests by honking and yelling. Volunteers sometimes follow ICE vehicles back to the local field office. It’s a more aggressive stance than other rapid response networks take, which has inspired respect as well as criticism and safety concerns from community members and local law enforcement.
When arrests do happen, volunteers connect families with support: legal resources, childcare, groceries, rental assistance, rides to appointments, driving citizen kids across the border to reunite with parents in Mexico. While patrols are a high-profile part of VC Defensa’s operations, Martinez insisted that 80% of the work is family support and community outreach.
Spotting a white Dodge Charger with dark windows – a model driven by local ICE agents – Martinez accelerated. Then he noticed the car’s stickers. A false alarm. By 6.45am, he’d cleared the neighborhoods on his checklist.
He drove down an industrial road where an ICE officer rammed his car last October, sparking national attention after videos debunked the officer’s claim that Martinez hit him. In March, his car was hit again. Both times, Martinez was arrested – but he said he has not been charged – and briefly hospitalized.
Martinez said his mom, also a volunteer, wishes he would patrol less. Her worries? “That they drag me into a dark alley and fucking brutalize me,” he said.
‘A pattern of targeting’
Less than 24 hours later, Martinez and his mom were woken at 3am by a blaring megaphone and flashing lights outside their Ventura home. Before they reached the front door, agents busted it open, with guns pointed at them, Martinez said. He was handcuffed as agents swarmed inside.
Simultaneously, agents broke in the door to Martinez’s Oxnard business and the Oxnard home of immigration activist Alexandria Quintanar, whose 16-year-old son was handcuffed as Quintanar’s toddler watched, according to Yassin. In photos taken after the raid and reviewed by the Guardian, damage to the front doors of both homes is visible. A third volunteer’s home in Thousand Oaks was searched.
More than 100 federal immigration agents were present across the four locations, Yassin said.
Warrants for Martinez’s home and business reviewed by the Guardian authorized agents to seize evidence of conspiracies to impede or injure federal officers or destruction of government property.
At Martinez’s screen-print and design studio, which doubles as a hub for VC Defensa operations, a DHS inventory sheet shows that agents took a USB drive, two knives, a phone, skateboards and a riot shield, among other items.
Phones and a computer were taken from Martinez’s home. Shrugging off concerns about what agents might find, he said: “We’ve never had anything to hide.”
When presented with detailed questions about the raids, including whether armed agents pointed guns at Martinez and his mother, a DHS spokesperson said that HSI executed search warrants on “individuals associated with an anti-ICE organization” but didn’t provide more details, citing an “ongoing investigation”.
“Several members of this organization have been previously arrested for ambushing federal law enforcement and destruction of government property,” the spokesperson said, an apparent reference to pending criminal charges against the two VC Defensa volunteers arrested in October. “Under President Trump, if you assault law enforcement officers, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Yassin said the raids are part of a pattern, and that more than 50 people associated with VC Defensa have been targeted by federal officers over the past year, from arrests, raids and car rammings to agents pepper-spraying volunteers or following them home.
One of the first incidents occurred in May 2025. After a morning ICE patrol, volunteer Mitch Lillie said he received more than 80 calls from unknown and blocked numbers. His mother answered an unknown caller who said, “Tell your son to stop harassing us,” according to Lillie.
This past March, Lillie’s phone was seized by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the Los Angeles airport without a warrant, he said. The Guardian reviewed a CBP receipt of the phone seizure.
Lillie said the incidents form part of a long history of US government repression of leftwing movements, citing the Cointelpro program that sought to destroy groups the FBI considered subversive.
A March New York Times report uncovered a DHS taskforce investigating VC Defensa as part of a push to build cases accusing protesters of organizing radical leftist conspiracies. The investigation centers on two volunteers accused of a conspiracy to build a roadblock and throw rocks at federal vehicles during large-scale protests of the July 2025 immigration raids at Glass House cannabis farms.
Court documents show that a federal prosecutor recently assigned to the case, Colin Scott, works for the terrorism and export crimes section of the US attorney’s office of the central district of California. Scott is also named in the search warrants for Martinez’s home and business.
The DHS and the FBI did not respond to questions about whether VC Defensa is being investigated for domestic terrorism.
Across the country, hundreds of protesters have been arrested on charges of assaulting and impeding federal officers during immigration-enforcement operations, but government prosecutors have struggled to secure convictions, with officers’ testimony frequently contradicted by bystander video. Another demonstrator at the Glass House raids, university professor John Caravello, was recently acquitted of assault charges for tossing a teargas canister toward border patrol agents.
‘Gracias a los papás’
At the press conference after the raids, Martinez addressed the crowd in Spanish: “El trabajo que nosotros hacemos diario son los gracias que nosotros les damos a ustedes, a los papás.” (In English, “The work we do every day is our way of thanking you, the parents.”)
Martinez continued: “Because we were once those little kids, and we saw the grueling hardships you endured for so many years.”
Martinez had spoken similar words two days earlier to a father who approached the diner booth where Martinez ate breakfast after his dawn ICE patrol with two other VC Defensa members.
In Spanish, the man said he recognized the group and thanked them for protecting his community. His children sat at a nearby booth.
“Not everyone would give up their job to do what you do,” he said. Laughing, the volunteers said they also had day jobs. One is a children’s therapist; another, a hospital worker who coaches high school soccer.
After the family left, a server came by.
“That man bought you breakfast,” she told them.
