ICE Watch

By Alexander Sammon

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Oct 27, 20255:50 AM

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“Are you here for the knitting club?” a voice in the parking lot asked.

It was pitch-black out—not even a suggestion of dawn streaked the sky above. But the Wilmington Rec Center was suspiciously crowded with cars. It was not yet 6 in the morning, and the cars were not empty. Doors opened and shut, and people began to emerge, gathering into a semicircle. Still more cars crept into the lot and their headlights exposed a growing rank of silhouettes before the engines were killed and the lights cut and more people got out and joined.

I was not prepped on this passcode, the challenge everyone had to pass, and so I faltered: “I’m a journalist, with, uh, Slate magazine. I think you guys knew I was coming?”

I was not the only new “recruit”—there was David, in plaid pants, plus two friends of an existing member, who needed no introduction, as they had someone to vouch for them. The guy who I was there to meet, who was going to vouch for me, was a late no-show.

This was Friday morning, and the Harbor Area Peace Patrol, a group in Los Angeles’ South Bay that monitors U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which happens to have one of its most important operations in the country headquartered just a few miles away, was getting ready for rounds.

First they were onboarding the plebes. Everyone had a nickname, or a call sign, or a handle from the group chat. No one was who they said they were.

“Everyone go around the circle and say your Signal name.”

“I’m Vic,” said Victor.

“I’m Chapel,” said Yoshi.

David, new, in the plaid pants, didn’t have a Signal name yet. So he just said “David.” When it came to me, I introduced myself. “We’re gonna call you Slate,” someone said.

Supplies in bags were passed back and forth, new batteries pressed into a bullhorn. The night before, an email had leaked to the press, citing “trusted sources,” about a forthcoming ICE operation called “Freaky Friday” that was reportedly going to pressure certain vulnerable children to give up their legal rights and applications for humanitarian protection and accede to deportation. The crew, which had many public-school teachers in its midst, talked about getting that information spread. There was some uncertainty as to just how real this program was—the Trump administration later claimed it was not happening—but Merci, one of the members, said that they had an inside source who had confirmed it.

The unit, now numbering in the double digits, split into two separate deployments. The greenhorns were paired with veterans and set out on patrol. There were numerous parking lots, high-concern businesses like Latino grocery stores and shops, places where ICE could be staging in advance of a raid or places ICE had raided in the past. All of them had to be reviewed and marked safe.

The cars rolled out of the lot. I rode with Vic and Chapel. Vic drove, Chapel sat shotgun and wielded the cellphone, which was used to take photos and relay intel. Reports came in over Signal and then were uploaded to their Instagram page and transmitted to a group called Union del Barrio, whose Instagram has 140,000 followers, and which has local chapters all over Southern California.

Those Instagram stories were monitored closely by locals, who would use this information to plot their routes to work, to decide whether to hazard a trip to the grocery store, whether they could risk taking their kids to school.

Our first target: a Home Depot parking lot, the type of place that had become a magnet for ICE ops. We drove through and saw nothing. It seemed like everyone was still asleep. All clear.

“New guy David shared suspicious plates at the DoubleTree,” Chapel said. “Should I run the plates?”

Our second target: Target. The store had a large, subterranean parking lot. After various missions, the unit had figured out that the lot opened around 3 a.m. Usually, that would make it an ideal place for a homeless person to sleep in their car, but it was also large and open early, which made it an ideal place for ICE to gather up vehicles in advance of a raid.

It was crowded in the lot, even though the store wouldn’t open for hours still. For a second, our vehicle lingered at the threshold. Breath was drawn, Vic stepped on the gas pedal, and the car rolled in. We drove alongside some of the vehicles, peered in windows, and ascertained it was nothing. All clear.

We drove back to the rec center, where the sun began to show. Now for a more dangerous deployment—one that only veterans would be allowed to participate in.

The reason the Harbor Area Peace Patrol exists, the reason the fledging group, its ranks now 74 strong, had been doing this for more than 100 days and counting, was right down the street. Past the towering cranes of the Port of Los Angeles, all lit up in the early morning with LED lights that blazed like constellations, past the colorful shipping containers piled to mountainous heights in proprietary green and gray and pink, and before the towering cranes of the Port of Long Beach, there was the base camp of ICE. Nestled right in the heart of the nation’s busiest port, where stuff was shipped in from all over the world, was the force tasked with shipping people from all over the world out.

It was there that we were headed, call sign “TI”—Terminal Island. This was the local ICE HQ.

President Donald Trump had said that Los Angeles had been “invaded and occupied” by immigrants, that he would “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion,” and so, to solve the problem of occupation and invasion, he sent National Guard troops and the Marines, a full military detail, along with ICE, to—how better to say this—invade and occupy Los Angeles, along with all sorts of federal agents.

“We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles,” said Gregory Bovino, technically the Border Patrol sector chief of El Centro, hundreds of miles away. He has since taken up residence in Los Angeles, according to his own narration online, and leads the Trump administration’s urban immigration raids as an at-large commando with a spiky haircut and combat boots. Just days prior, Bovino had made headlines with his shock-and-awe raid in Chicago, featuring agents rappelling out of Black Hawk helicopters and roughing up a public housing block. But Los Angeles was his ground zero.

The one place with enough federal land to facilitate a federal occupation in Los Angeles is Terminal Island. It has just one road in and out, where all the masked and unidentified agents have to go to clock in, and where all the unmarked cars depart from, headed all over the state of California, as far south as the border, as far north as Ventura County. And because there is no one to keep ICE accountable—not the courts, not the Los Angeles Police Department, not a politician or elected official who will force these agents to doff their masks, to show their badge numbers, to identify themselves, to use warrants, to comply with judicial rulings, to obey with traffic laws—well, what was left was this group of nurses and teachers, who, for all summer and now the early days of fall, had been compiling intel. They had plate numbers and makes and models of cars, and sometimes even VINs; they had scouts and lookouts; they had canvassed businesses and compiled surveillance footage. They were keeping a record. They were divining patterns and proclivities. Anyone could be ICE—but so could anyone tip off a vulnerable person before the agents showed.

A few hundred feet from Terminal Island’s manned checkpoint, three cars full of volunteers got out. They donned highlighter-yellow high-vis vests. Some wore masks or balaclavas. They held up iPhone cameras, and higher-end DSLRs, and began to snap photos of license plate numbers, of vehicles, of the drivers in the seats.

The reason they were able to get this close to the base, and its militarized perimeter, was because of its status as a public monument. It got that way because of a different pronounced period of racial animus toward an immigrant group. In 1942, right after Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order that led to Japanese internment, wherein 100,000 Japanese Americans were sent to camps, the federal government ripped through the Japanese American fishing village on this very spot and destroyed it. Residents were given 48 hours to relocate. The basic facts might sound familiar. Now, there was a statue, and a plaque, and despite the great displeasure of ICE, there was nothing they could do to evict these monitors from this location.

The Terminal Island Japanese Fishing Village Memorial in San Pedro, California. AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

When this began, back in June, just a small number of volunteers spearheaded reconnaissance. But it got dangerous quickly. “I had guns drawn on me right here,” Vic told me, showing me a video of masked agents indeed pulling up to right where we were standing and pointing some sort of gun right at him. Every day for three weeks after that incident, he told me, there were cars with out-of-state plates parked in front of his house. He asked his neighbors, and no one had anyone visiting, and no one could account for the strange traffic. (ICE did not respond to detailed questions for this article.)

One of the other patrollers, Amanda, “was kidnapped from here, and held for 36 hours.” She was “pinned to the ground, handcuffed, and thrown into a van.” Then, as she recounted to the New Yorker in an article about the group, “the agents drove her into the complex, where she was detained for several hours. Later, she was moved into a second vehicle by masked, armed men.” If that weren’t enough, the government then sent agents to rifle through her car and search her belongings.

“From that point on,” Vic said, “We were like, ‘We’re gonna have to have numbers out there.’ ”

Vic is a lawyer who works in workman’s comp. He’s Salvadoran, with some tattoos; he grew up in the neighborhood nearby. He showed me another video, of a car accelerating and swerving at the patrollers.

“That’s why we wear the vests now, so they can’t say they didn’t see us,” he said. “As their tactics evolve, so do ours,” Chapel added.

They were watching, and they were being watched. Behind a chain-link fence rose a soaring tower with a cluster of security cameras at the top, a surveillance installation of palm-tree proportions. “Two weeks after we came out, that security camera tower went in,” Vic said.

Chapel manned two clickers: one counting traffic going in, another counting traffic going out.

Cars entered, cars left. After more than 100 days of this, many of the vehicles had begun to look familiar, and so had the antics. One federal agent saw the patrollers, turned up his music, and began heckling the group as he rode in.

“You’ll see a lot of chicanery,” Vic sighed. Sometimes the agents would stage mannequins in the passenger seats, or drape curtains over the windshield, or put a bag over their heads to avoid being photographed. The volunteers had seen it all.

This was also a big day for ICE. The new Trump budget, the One Big Beautiful Bill, with its supersized funding for the agency, eventually bequeathing it more annual funding than the entire military of Turkey, had come online Oct. 1. ICE had hoped to bring on 10,000 new officers; it had received 150,000 applications. It was October now, and that meant one thing: new recruits.

A familiar car drove out. “Kidnap car!” yelled Gina, one member of the unit. It was a Chevy SUV, black. That was old-fashioned: At first, ICE was rolling in all American-made. Now, more Subarus, Hyundais.

Click-click-click-click-click.

The license plate was captured. It was known. The alphanumeric code went out on the chats, on the Instagram. BOLO was the phrase they used—BE ON THE LOOKOUT. One ICE agent, the driver, wore a balaclava covering his face. His passenger held up a red folder covering his.
“My phone is all photos of vehicles,” Vic joked. “I don’t even know what my family looks like anymore.”

Click-click-click-click-click.

A second kidnap car drove by, a Kia with Arizona plates. Then a third: a Volkswagen ID.4, electric. Sometimes, the group said, it would see vehicles with no plates, or plates blacked out with electrical tape, or temporary paper plates that just so happened to tear off in the wind. Sometimes multiple cars would have the same plates; sometimes the numbers were laughably fake: ABC1234, for instance. Somehow, the cops never seemed to pull these cars over.

Reports came in over Signal. Just as ICE had range all over SoCal, so too did the group have contacts with other groups, scouts, and observers spanning the region. Some of the cars were showing up in San Diego already, meaning they must have left before the crew had even gotten there; “4:30 to 6, solid coming in, triple the traffic,” read one member from a phone. But that was too early, too dark, to take photos.

For an hour and a half it was like this. Shipping containers from distant lands on semitrucks clogged the road: China Shippings and Evergreens and Maersks and COSCOs all inched along on-ramps, onto freeways. Unmarked cars with masked men blended into traffic.

The final count was 141 inbound, eight outbound. This was a slow day so far.

“This week has been pretty brutal,” Vic said. “Five different raids. They’ve taken 16 people.”

Fridays tended to be the busiest, so the low count was a relief.

Back one final time to the Wilmington parking lot. The teachers had to get to work, the nurses had to get to work. It was still before breakfast, before first period, before shift change. Everyone would continue monitoring the chats, the page, and more. Certain members agreed to stake out high-traffic locations during their lunch breaks, or if they were working remotely.

One woman rolled down the window. “Marina del Rey!” she yelled. There had already been a raid in Marina del Rey, so early they must have missed the car. “Marina del Rey!”

“I’m parked by the Staples. Red SUV.”

I pulled into the parking lot of the Carson Home Depot, a sprawling Southern California blacktop shared with Albertsons, Staples, and a McDonald’s.

There was a changing of the guard taking place. Allison had been in the lot two hours; she’d had a soft spot in her work schedule and come down. Vic and Allison conferred beneath a tree. Both wore whistles around their necks, their implement of last resort if an ICE raid struck—they would blow, and everyone would run. She was relaying the information that had been picked up during her stakeout, which wasn’t much. Then she got back in her car and left.

ICE had—thanks to the suggestion of Stephen Miller, the White House official—turned Home Depot parking lots, where laborers have often waited for piecemeal work, into battlefields. The Carson Home Depot was proving difficult ground to defend. There were multiple entrances and exits, which spilled right out into a busy intersection. Its close proximity to Terminal Island meant that it was a prime locale for a raid of convenience for agents headed back to the base after a long day, perhaps dogged by low arrest numbers, or riding high on record ones. While the shock-and-awe raids had dominated the news, this had become the new normal: Show up, grab the runners, toss them in the back, transfer them to central booking. Those with papers would get out eventually; those without would get sent to ICE detention in Adelanto, or Arizona, or, depending on their nationality, be deported within 24 hours—you never knew for sure where or for how long. The Supreme Court said this was fine.

After months of quiet, the lot had been hit hard, twice in the last week. Seven days ago, on Friday, agents had descended upon the lot at 1 p.m. and blitzed it. No warrants, no warnings. “They just pulled up and saw who ran,” Vic said. They had arrested four jornaleros that day, day laborers, eventually releasing two of them on account of the fact that they had papers.

Then again on Wednesday, just 48 hours prior, they had descended on the lot, also at 1 p.m., and taken another three people. One of them ultimately had been let go.

Vic spoke to one of the guys who had run during the most recent raid. He fell through a bush and got scratched up and bruised. He was a legal permanent resident. “Why would you run?” Vic had asked him. Because, he told Vic, during that first raid, ICE had dumped the documented guys at the Metro Detention Center downtown, 30 miles away, with no wallets and no phones and no way to get back. Better just to make a break for it.

Now, it was almost 1 p.m. again. Vic turned on the car and began to drive, crawling up and down the aisles, alert.

The Carson Home Depot was close to home for Vic, who had been coming there through the summer. Often, he would patrol there three to four times a week.

The stakeouts had been having some success, until recently. Once, one of the monitors caught ICE staging in the loading bay behind the store, preparing to raid it. “So 10 of us showed up,” he said, taking photos, videos, warning the people in the lot. “And they left.” On another occasion, they’d noticed a familiar unmarked vehicle, a “scout car,” sitting in the lot, and blown whistles to alert people, who fled.

Vic had spoken to nearly every jornalero who was regularly in the lot looking for work, guys who turned up every morning hoping to be hired out on a landscaping job, a construction site, demolition, hauling waste. Some had their own trucks and sheltered in the cabs of them; others sat out in the open, like ducks.

Not everyone wanted to speak to Vic. Many of the jornaleros didn’t even want to speak to each other. They were, after all, competing for work, which had gotten increasingly scarce. Some of the laborers had papers; others didn’t. By his count, six or seven of the men looking for work actually lived in their trucks in the lot. The lot had its own rhythm. The Home Depot employees were not terribly sympathetic or useful when it came to relaying information; employees of the McDonald’s, whose windows faced the Home Depot, were. The security guard who patrolled the lot went off the clock at 1 a.m., which was when the truck dwellers made their return to sleep. There was a homeless guy who lived in the back, where they had caught ICE staging. They had considered giving that guy money to keep watch.

Vic drove to the loading bay behind the Home Depot, and there was no one there.

He had tried to get names and countries or origin and contact info for these guys, for their families, in case the worst happened, but few wanted to give up that information. They, too, all had fake names, and nicknames—El Chino, El Ronco. No one was who they said they were.

When the raids came, they hit close to home too. When they lost someone, it affected Vic personally. Suspiciously, the last raid had happened just minutes after he’d left the Home Depot lot, and it had been orchestrated by a Terminal Island car, with plates Vic had seen, and photographed, again and again.

He had known the guy they’d taken on Friday, too. They had spoken, never at great length, but they were familiar. He was known as El Ronco; 52 years old when he was taken, 53 now, he spent his birthday being transferred to ICE detention. He had a reputation for having bad luck. Actually, his name was Marco, one of the guys had told Vic after he got snatched. After hours of amateur detective work, Vic found out that his real name was actually—well, let’s just say his name was José Rey. José had been in legal status for 10 years, until the Department of Homeland Security changed a policy, and suddenly he wasn’t. He had ended up in an ICE lockup in Adelanto, leaving behind a partner and three perplexed children.

“It just upsets me that it was a guy I know and a car I know,” Vic told me. It was weighing on him. He was exhausted and exasperated. “It’s been a rough week and a half.” After he finally found the guy’s real name on a receipt, he managed to find a relative to pick up his truck, and through him contacted his partner and children, too. They were paying $2,000 for a two-room apartment, and they were behind, and the partner couldn’t drive. Vic told me all this, and that he had just gone to visit them, had just given them $600, to at least get them paid up through the end of the month.

Now it was 1 p.m. I thought for sure the laborers would all be gone, knowing ICE’s pattern. A surprising number remained, presumably those who had papers, but you never knew, and it didn’t matter. Half of the arrests had been guys with papers. They needed work, even if they were putting themselves in the line of fire. Some had tried to post their availability online, wait for phone calls, stuff like that. But work wasn’t coming.

“My days are starting to blur,” Vic told me.

Then, I saw red and blue lights, and a squad car. No one flinched. A van and a passenger car had crashed in the turn lane outside the lot. Vic barely looked up. The cops were irrelevant here—no help, no consequence.

Vic drove truck to truck and checked in one by one.

Cómo estamos? How are we? Todo bien? Everything OK?

Some guys threw thumbs-ups. One came to talk.

There was concern about one of the guys who’d gotten snatched in the Wednesday raid. Even before ICE got him, he had been sickly. A jornalero, himself middle-aged and missing teeth, told Vic he had seen the guy leaning up against his truck with his head folded in his arms. He lived in that truck in the lot.

They had no idea if he had family, or where he was from, but they’d figured out his last name.

The jornalero gave a name. “Cómo se escribe?” Vic asked. How do you spell that?

Everyone gets sick in detention, which is notoriously crowded, and notoriously cold, and there was concern, now, that this man had not made it back. Some people popped up in far-off ICE detention centers, some people popped up in their country of origin, some people just did not pop up. “We’re worried that we’re never gonna hear from him again,” Vic later told me.

So we continued pacing the lot. It was getting harder even to spot the scout cars. ICE seemed to be rolling out more female agents of late, who were better at blending in. At that moment, news broke that the Apple Store had removed “ICE Block,” the app that allowed people to upload information about ICE’s whereabouts when they spotted them. I told him, and Vic shook his head.

Closed lanes to the Culver City Express Hand Car Wash and Detail where an ICE raid occurred, as seen during a press conference with families of detained car wash workers on June 11, 2025, in Culver City, California. AP Photo/Ethan Swope

Gina pulled up to the Lucky 7 car wash and parked on the street, right in front. Location is one important thing about Lucky 7, situated as it is, conveniently, at the corner of Miraflores Avenue and North Gaffey Street in San Pedro, right near the California State Route 47 on-ramp, which feeds the 110. From its address, 777 Miraflores, came its name. That’s also where it gets its famous deal: the $7 express wash.

It was a normal weekend day in October, normal crowd. “Dare to Enter Haunted Car Wash,” read its sign, Halloween-themed, garnished with some pumpkin-print decorations and fake spiderwebs. And so Gina sat there, in her car, facing the highway on-ramp, a crane from the port peeking over the horizon, as people dared to do just that. The sun shone.

Gina had been to Lucky 7 before. Just a week ago, she had come by with another woman from the Long Beach Rapid Response group, doing outreach.

They spoke to the management of Lucky 7 and warned them: Tell your workers what to do in case of an ICE raid, to compile contacts of family members if you can, just in case. Because the ICE agents rarely had warrants these days, the guidance was simple, really. If you could make it to a bathroom, or a supply closet, or lock yourself behind any sort of barrier, you would be fine. Even locking oneself in a car might work. If you could not make it to such a defensible position, running would backfire, as ICE was now taking that as probable cause. If you were brown, and you ran, well, the Supreme Court saw no problem with detaining that sort of person: These were Kavanaugh stops. If you did not run, they wouldn’t take you. The management had seemed amenable; it was no guarantee that they would care.

For 45, 50 minutes, Gina sat and sat. This was a long time for a routine safety stakeout.

It was quiet at first, but then the group chats began lighting up. Reports began to hit Icealert.net. Word came in that the Home Depot in Hawthorne got hit, one person taken, 15 miles north. There was some grainy video of the man being hauled off, too blurry to make out the plates.

Then Lakewood Car Wash got hit. Three to four people taken. That was also 15 miles away, northeast of San Pedro. All of the cars, based on footage now making the rounds, had been Terminal Island cars: familiar makes, familiar plates. Still, that was far enough away that it seemed like a good sign.

So Gina logged Lucky 7 all safe and began to head home.

Then came word that a scout car had been seen at the Home Depot in Carson. Then word came of ICE being spotted at WildWater car wash in San Pedro, just up the street, where I was told to arrive as soon as possible. When I got there, I spoke in Spanish to one bewildered attendant, who had seen no ICE, who thought that perhaps I was ICE. It turned out to be a false alarm.

And then, when Gina was at the red light up the hill, not even halfway home, just a few minutes away, three unmarked cars descended on Lucky 7. All of them had out-of-state plates. They blocked the street from both sides, from Miraflores, from Gaffey. Out jumped men in beige uniforms and green vests, and they began sprinting.

Some vulnerable employees of Lucky 7 bolted for a supply closet. They made it, locking themselves in. They were OK. One man, a 55-year-old employee, ran. He was not OK. ICE arrested him, threw him in one of the cars, and screeched out, onto the freeway, gone.

Someone at the car wash alerted the rapid-response group, and they came quickly. San Pedro was not large, they told me, and they could get there in just a few minutes. One member, Jay, rode on a motorcycle, allowing him to cut traffic—he had been stationed at nearby Miami Auto Detailing when word came down. They came from other locations, from home, from a nearby Home Depot, from other patrols.

I floored it down from WildWater and found a number of them already gathered there.

“It used to be we had about 20 minutes,” said Merci, one member who had come from home. “Now it’s down to two to five.”

When we got there, ICE was already gone, in and out in two minutes, according to observers. But there were multiple pressing concerns. For one, the family of the disappeared person had to be found and contacted. For another, there were still workers from the car wash hiding in the closet, who needed to be escorted out of there.

And now there was fear that ICE would return. The remaining car wash employees blocked off the driveways. The volunteer group had scrambled there quickly enough, it seemed, to keep it from being a full-blown raid. A few minutes later, a man showed up and asked if the car wash was still open. It had been determined he was a scout. “We’re worried about a double tap, for lack of a better term,” Jay said.

Meanwhile, a customer fumed that she was going to be late for work at the port: Her car key was in the pocket of the man ICE had taken away. She had dropped it off to get washed.

The group analyzed photos and videos taken by the workers. Sure enough, one of the cars had familiar plates: a Terminal Island vehicle, the same one that had been involved in the Lakewood job earlier.

Gina stood on the sidewalk with a blank expression. She looked off into the distance. “I thought it was all clear,” she told me. “That just pisses me off. It’s so fucking frustrating.”

She spoke with the management, trying to sort it all out. After Gina had left Lucky 7 that first time, it turned out, when they had first reached out to the operation there, two other women had come around soon after. The employees had noticed them and thought something was strange. The women looked around, took photos, and sped off.

Then again on Wednesday, just three days prior, two women had again appeared at Lucky 7. This time, the manager’s wife spotted them. They had parked in the back of the facility, and they had walkie-talkies. Again they took photos and asked to look around the place before eventually being asked to leave. Now, it seemed obvious they were ICE. They, and their cars, might have been captured on the security footage, the woman suggested. “We gotta get that security footage,” Merci said. “That would be golden if we could get the scout cars and the scouts.”

A retinue assembled to escort the workers out of the closet, into their cars, and back home, without being tailed, without being detained. The car wash closed for the day.

“You learn from your mistakes, and you get better next time,” Merci said. “It sucks that it’s something we have to get better at. I hate it.”

“They did the same thing—hit Home Depot right after Vic left last week,” Jay said.

Was ICE following them? Were they leading ICE to these people? I wondered too. Jay told me he didn’t think so. ICE knew where the car washes were; they knew where the Home Depots were; they had guns and unlimited money and no rules. One woman in a car with a whistle was not going to stop them. “Gina’s gonna beat herself up for it,” he told me. “But when it’s 20 guys with assault rifles, there’s no way one person on standby is deterring that.”

So some of the members stayed in front of the car wash and kept watch. The vulnerable workers got into their cars. Jay revved his motorcycle and they merged into traffic, anonymous. No one followed, it seemed.

Other members looked out across the street, at Super Star Car Wash. They had tried to do outreach there recently, and it had not been well received. It seemed certain that they would get hit next, maybe later today.

“This is not for everybody. You gotta make sure that your personal life is in order. If it’s too emotional for you, it’s probably not for you,” Merci said. Gina lingered.

In fact, Jay later told me, the Lucky 7 response was a best-case scenario. They had implemented a plan, they had gotten people out, they had only lost one. Still, he said, “they’re beating themselves up a bit.”

It was hard not to be paranoid. When Jay and I staked out the Home Depot parking lot in nearby Signal Hill the next afternoon, we were promptly reported as potential ICE by another member of the group chat, Soybean, who was also staking it out.

The next days went the same. On Sunday, one of the ICE cars, a familiar white SUV from Terminal Island, was spotted with a new decal on its door: a bright-yellow “$8 Wash and Wax” sticker. “Assholes,” Vic said when he saw it.

“I’m prepared to be doing this work for three-plus years,” Jay told me as we sat in the Signal Hill Home Depot lot on a blazing Sunday, scanning and scanning. Still, he said, “we’re not gonna win—we’re just trying to slow the bleeding.”

Three days later, that Home Depot was raided, midday. It wasn’t immediately clear how many were taken.