Border Patrol agents raided a Home Depot and other locations in Sacramento on Thursday in what appeared to be a heavily orchestrated operation intended to send a message that the Trump administration would not back down on immigration enforcement, despite legal blockades.
While the raids took place miles from the state Capitol grounds, Greg Bovino, the U.S. Border chief of the El Centro sector who has been leading operations in Southern California, recorded a video in front of the statehouse shortly after.
“There is no such thing as a sanctuary city. There’s no such thing as a sanctuary state,” Bovino posted on X, in a produced video featuring the state capitol building and highway signs reading Sacramento. “This is how and why we secure the homeland for Ma and Pa America. We’ve got your back, whether it’s here in Sacramento or nationwide, we’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office immediately blasted the sweeps.
“The Border Patrol should do their jobs — at the border— instead of continuing their tirade statewide of illegal racial profiling and illegal arrests,” said Diana Crofts-Pelayo, a spokesperson for Newsom.
On Wednesday, Newsom had railed against Trump’s immigration crackdown during a news conference at a Downey Memorial Christian Church, where agents swarmed and arrested a patron in June. Parishoners at the church remain shaken, and one girl he met was carrying around her passport.
“She’s here legally. She’s carrying her passport,” he said. “That’s Trump’s America, 2025.”
The Sacramento enforcement came after a federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday blocked agents from using racial profiling to carry out warrantless arrests that have upended hundreds of lives in immigrant communities throughout Southern California. And it took place in an area that, along with the Central Valley and a large swath of Northern California, is under a similar preliminary injunction stemming from unlawful raids launched by Bovino in January, targeting farmworkers and laborers in Kern County.
The Department of Homeland Security said 11 undocumented immigrants were arrested during the operation including, Javier Dimas-Alcantara, who they said is “dangerous serial drug abuser” who “has been booked into jail 67 times.”
“You would not want this man to be your neighbor,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “And yet, politicians like Gavin Newsom defend criminals who terrorize American communities and demonize law enforcement who defend those same communities.”
Bovino, who has been a key figure in the raids across Southern California and is named in both lawsuits, said on X operations unfolded in Los Angeles and Sacramento on Thursday. Another individual, he said, was arrested on suspicion of impeding and or assaulting a federal officer.
Based on videos posted Thursday, that man appears to be Jose Castillo Jr., who was on his way to work as an HVAC repairman in the Sacramento area when he stopped at the home improvement store. His wife, Andrea Castillo, said he is a hard-working family man who would “not be out instigating.”
Her nearly three-minute video of Castillo Jr. being arrested circulated on social media.
In the video, an agent can be seen standing up to Andrea pointing a spray can at her.
“Get the f— out of the way,” he says.
Her husband, a 31-year-old American citizen, appears in the background struggling with several other agents on the ground. She runs with the agents toward him.
“He’s a U.S. citizen!” she screamed over and over.
Agents pinned him to the ground and he was cut on his face and bleeding, she said. She said she could hear him say, “I can’t breathe.”
The scene looked similar to other raids that took place in Los Angeles during June.
“His brother is an active U.S. Marine. He is serving the country and look at what they are doing to this country, to him,” he said.
Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor U.S. Customs and Border Protection responded to requests for comment about Castillo. The Border Patrol told Fox News that it had surveilled locations in Sacramento and ran license plates for two days before executing the arrests. Some plates came back as owned by previously deported immigrants in the country illegally.
Giselle Garcia, a member of NorCal Resist, a volunteer mutual aid group that has been responding to the raids, said she was skeptical of the accusations.
“We have a long pattern of false allegations made by ICE and CBP that it is either immigrants or witness that incite the violence, which later turn out to be false,” she said.
Elizabeth Strater, a national vice president of United Farm Workers, said her office has been flooded with calls about the Home Depot raid. The group is among several plaintiffs that brought a lawsuit against Border Patrol for raids in Kern county in January. In April a federal judge found the agency engaged in a “pattern and practice” of unconstitutionally detaining people without reasonable suspicion they are here illegally and ordered them to stop.
Strater said she saw a video Thursday morning in which she described two large federal agents kneeling on a small woman “who is face down, while she struggles.”
“There’s no reason for that kind of brutality,” she said. “That is just brutalizing a community … it’s disgusting.”
She said they are working to determine if Border Patrol was violating the terms of the judge’s order.
Sacramento City Councilmember Caity Maple, whose district borders the Home Depot, said she was shocked to learn of the raid, noting that she’d “never heard of Border Patrol in Sacramento” — which is more than 480 miles from the Mexican border.
Maple said law enforcement was not notified of operations.
“We’re pretty far inland. We’re not close to the border of either Mexico or Canada,” she said. “For me, it was shock and concern of how do these individuals who are meant to protect our borders ostensibly end up in a place like Sacramento?”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
