After ICE raids in LA, families of those detained are desperate for answers

They’re cousins, uncles, brothers, or in-laws.

“We’re a close community. We all kinda know each other,” Carlos Gonzalez told NPR. He said that’s why he was getting call after call. “My phone was just ringing.”

When he finally picked up, he said, his heart dropped. It was a friend of the family calling Friday to tell him that ICE had shown up at the Los Angeles warehouse where his older brother, Jose Paulino Gonzalez, has worked for the last 2 1/2 years.

They were rounding people up.

Federal agents arrested more than 40 people in workplace raids, including about two dozen employees from Ambiance Apparel in downtown LA’s Fashion District. Many of those workers formed part of a close-knit community, with ties to the same indigenous Zapotec town in Veracruz, Mexico.

So as soon as he heard, the younger Gonzalez threw on some clothes and rushed out toward the Fashion District.

The scene was already a melee by the time he got there, he recounted. Protesters were chanting and yelling at officials who were outfitted in tactical gear, helmets and masks as they executed a federal search warrant.

In an emailed statement, ICE officials wrote, “ICE and its federal partners are doing their job, enforcing immigration law and removing criminal aliens from Los Angeles communities.” Forty four people were arrested in Friday’s raid, ICE said.

According to the statement, ICE, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service, among other agencies, assisted in carrying out the arrests for alleged “administrative immigration violations in support of worksite enforcement operations.”

(Administrative immigration violations include overstaying a permitted visa, entering or reentering the U.S. without proper authorization, or making false statements on immigration forms.)

Amid the chaos, Carlos Gonzalez said he worked his way up to the gate and finally caught a glimpse of his brother.

“They had him up against a wall. Him and a bunch of other people were lined up and then I saw [officials] put chains on him and that was hard,” Gonzalez said.

The 22-year-old said he was close enough to see the expression on his brother’s face.

“Most people would think that it was very stoic, very calm,” Gonzalez said. “But I grew up with him and I was able to see that he was scared. … I know he was scared.”

In those few terrifying moments, he said, it was as if he could see that his older brother was processing the possibility that he’d have to leave behind the entire life he’d built for himself over the years.

Gonzalez said he tried shouting to tell his brother he was there but the chaos around them made it impossible to communicate. So he stood there, watching as his brother and several other people he knows, were handcuffed and loaded into white nondescript vans.

Gonzalez declined to share how long his 35-year-old sibling has been in the United States. But he confirmed that his family, and the families of about a dozen others who were swept up in Friday’s raid at the Ambiance Apparel warehouses, all come from the same small area in Veracruz, a Mexican state with a large indigenous Zapotec population.

How did they all end up packaging clothes or loading and unloading boxes out of cargo containers in Los Angeles?

“Word of mouth,” Gabriel Vasquez told NPR in Spanish. Vasquez’s brother, Jacob, was also among those arrested at the warehouse.

Gabriel Vasquez explained that over the years, word has spread about the jobs available at this particular company. “Someone finds out there’s an opening, and then you tell your sister or your cousin, … and that’s how my brother got his job,” he said. “He heard from a childhood friend who now is also detained.”

Ambiance Apparel did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

Apparently the arrival of ICE and other federal agents was not entirely unexpected. Sarai Ortiz told NPR that her father, Jose Ortiz, who was also detained by ICE on Friday, had been following immigration raids in the news.

Jose Ortiz was a floor manager and had been with the company for 18 years — he’s been in the U.S. for 30 years. He was proud of working his way up the ladder and being a good manager. So, he made it his job to get informed, she said. He started taking Know-Your-Rights cards to work, according to his daughter.

“He’d tell them to be informed and not to be afraid. He told them it was all going to be OK,” she said, breaking into tears. In January, she says, he’d also made it a point to memorize her number “so that way, if his phone got taken away he could still call me. He’d have the number.”

She still hasn’t heard from him.

One of the few details Carlos Gonzalez has been able to gather keeps him up at night. He’s heard from a handful of people that his brother tried to evade officials during the raid.

“He and some other coworkers tried to get away from it. They tried hiding. … And just knowing that he tried and failed, it hurts,” he said.

It makes him think that ICE officials arrived at the warehouse with a list of names, Gonzalez said. “I feel like if it’s just a quick raid or just an unexpected raid, you pick up the people that you can and you leave. But considering that they made sure to get every last person, that’s kind of I don’t know, to me, it’s suspicious. Sketchy.”

Their small family is devastated, he said. His mother is beside herself, and his sister, who lives with the elder, now-detained Gonzalez, is frantically trying to get information about where he is. They have lined up a lawyer, he said, who still hasn’t been able to locate where Gonzalez is being held.

The same day he was arrested, Gonzalez and his sister went to the LA County Jail, where many of the people arrested by ICE are being detained. Gonzalez said they were told to come back the following day, Saturday, because several of the arrestees hadn’t been processed yet. Then, when they showed up on Saturday, they were told to come back again on Sunday, for the same reason. “On Sunday they told us that they moved him to Santa Ana but we don’t know where,” he said.

County jail officials did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment.

And that’s where things currently stand. Gonzalez says he’s afraid his brother will be moved to a detention center in Adelanto, a two-hour drive away. Or worse, that his sibling will be taken out of state.

In addition to trying to track him down, Gonzalez says he and other families are trying to figure out how to get the workers’ most recent pay. Friday was payday.