Sudden surge in ICE arrests empties streets in California’s San Joaquin Valley

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

In a dim storefront near downtown Fresno, a family gathered to mourn. 

They wore memorial T-shirts, lit candles, and told stories about their patriarch through tears and sobs.

Luis Arreguin didn’t die, but to his closest loved ones, it feels like it. 

The 54-year-old skilled laborer was arrested Oct. 1 by federal immigration agents on his way to work, disappearing into a vast and opaque detention system, his family said.

As more family members arrived at his “ICE memorial” on Wednesday night, his daughter Elaina Salazar tried to comfort her mother, Arreguin’s wife. The woman asked CalMatters not to use her full name despite the fact that she is a United States citizen. Her family has faced a barrage of online harassment, according to her daughter. 

Arreguin came to the United States as a child and has been here for 49 years. His family says he has four children, two of them minors, and four grandchildren.

While family members prayed and hugged their kids close, a few blocks away, a larger crowd gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices to protest. 

The dual events were a reaction to what San Joaquin Valley residents describe as a sudden surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the region. In the past three days, advocates say at least 100 people have been detained. 

“There’s been a huge influx in ICE activity here in the Central Valley, said Alfred Aldrete, leader of the local activist group Fresno Resistance. “Every single one of them is a life separated from their family and a family torn apart.” 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to confirm the increased activity. 

“For operational security and the safety of our officers, ICE will not disclose or discuss law enforcement operations,” said Jason Sweeney, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. “Every day, DHS enforces the laws of the nation across the country, including in California.” 

Sweeney did not respond to CalMatters’ questions about whether the enforcement operation was targeted or involved agents from outside California. 

Aldrete, who spends much of his time stationed outside the ICE offices in downtown Fresno, said that before this week, typically a couple of vans transporting people arrived per day. In recent days, that number has gone up to 10 to 15 vans per day filled with people.

The region is California’s agricultural heartland, where farms anchor a $60 billion industry that feeds the world. What became the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration campaign began near here when then-El Centro Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino kicked off a sweep in Kern County in January 2025, days before Donald Trump officially took office. Those sweeps are now subject to litigation, and a judge initially barred Border Patrol agents from conducting illegal, indiscriminate stops. 

In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of the Eastern District of California issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Border Patrol from conducting the types of sweeps community members say ICE is now doing. 

Since then, federal agents initiated a few high-profile raids, but the region as a whole did not seem to be the focus for the administration’s deportation campaign. Farmers who depend on immigrant labor told CalMatters last year they anticipated sweeps, but had not yet seen them.

“I do believe that here in the Central Valley, especially Fresno, we’ve had this false sense of safety because we haven’t been targeted in such a way,” said Aldrete. “We are waking up to a very rude awakening that this is and can be.” 

Salazar said because the migrant community here is so large and tight-knit that she never expected the level of activity seen in the last few days. 

“Up until now we felt very safe here in the Valley,” she said.  

Immigration arrests increase across California

In August, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals lifted Thurston’s injunction that restricted immigration sweeps in the San Joaquin Valley. 

Bree Bernwanger, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, the organization that sued Border Patrol on behalf of the United Farm Workers based on the Kern County raids in January 2025, said Thurston’s order basically instructed agents to follow the law and the Constitution.

“Federal immigration agencies like ICE have to follow the law, whether or not they are under a court order telling them to. But from what we know about these raids so far, ICE is showing us once again that it cannot be trusted to respect even our most basic constitutional and federal rights,” Bernwanger said.

Even before the caravan of white vans began lining up in Fresno in early October, immigration arrests across California were already climbing to record highs. 

For example, ICE records obtained by the Deportation Data Project, a research effort based at UCLA and UC Berkeley, show arrests in the San Francisco region spiked nearly 70% (from 2,928 in the first seven months of 2025 to 4,970 over the same period this year). 

Nationally ICE averaged more than 1,580 arrests a day in July, a record for the Trump administration, according to a CBS News analysis of the same records. 

Officials from mayors to congressmen are noticing, too. Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, a Democrat whose district covers Fresno and Madera, said federal officials are describing the latest operation in the Central Valley as “targeted enforcement.” 

“It’s a flat lie,” she said. 

In recent days, unconfirmed social media videos have flooded in, mostly showing what appear to be uniformed agents in bulletproof vests at construction sites in Madera; swarming parking lots at Dollar General stores in Chowchilla; and cars with missing drivers and smashed windows parked alongside the region’s vast farmlands. 

‘Empty’ streets

In Mendota, a small agricultural town about 35 miles west of Fresno, workers are carrying immigration documents just in case they’re stopped. The town has a large population of Salvadoran immigrants. 

Gilbert Antonio, a 32-year-old lawful permanent resident from El Salvador, said agents stopped him and asked him for his papers near the town’s pharmacy. 

“Why did they stop me? Because I’m Latino,” he said. “But I had my papers with me so they couldn’t do anything to me.” 

Gilbert said he’s been in the United States since he was a child and makes a living harvesting cantaloupe and watermelons.  

“The whole community is terrified,” he said in Spanish. “No one is going out to work. Look at these streets, they are completely empty,” he said, gesturing, “like a ghost town.” 

Gilbert said he planned on picking up several of his neighbors’ kids from school Thursday afternoon because the parents were too afraid to leave their houses. 

“It’s affecting everyone,” he said. “Only people with papers are picking up the kids from school right now because all the other parents are afraid.” 

Soria, the assemblywoman, said her office heard about a family whose parent was detained on his way to cash his work check, leaving them unable to pay their rent. She also said she heard that many in the Oaxacan indigenous community, who were set to be honored at the Madera City Council meeting Wednesday night, stayed home out of fear of being arrested by ICE. 

“They’re out there terrorizing our families,” said Soria. 

Back at the rally for Arreguin, his wife stepped outside the memorial with a cellphone pressed to her ear. Her body collapsed under the weight of some troubling news. She just found out Arreguin was being transferred again. No one can tell her when, where, or why. 

“We got to see him one last time,” said Salazar, his daughter, describing a cement room where she last saw her dad through partitioned glass at the processing center. “We were instructed to say our goodbyes.”

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