As two masked men dragged her into an unmarked SUV, Andrea Velez tried to focus on details she might later remember – one man’s red shirt, the car’s leather seats, a black backpack inside.
At 9.20am on 24 June in downtown Los Angeles, the 32-year-old was heading into work at a footwear company when the men in gator masks jumped out of their car and started chasing vendors and other people on the street, she recalled. As people fled, Velez froze and held onto her bag.
Suddenly, she recalled, one of the men slammed her to the ground and placed her into his car. The men had “Police” vests, but otherwise were in plainclothes and didn’t identify themselves. She didn’t know why they had taken her.
The men, it turned out, were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) deportation officers. They were looking to question people about “whether they were lawfully present” in the US, an agent later wrote. Velez is a US citizen who grew up in downtown, not far from the incident.
“They just came out ready to attack anyone,” said Velez, in her first interview since her arrest. “I thought they were kidnapping me.”
A day after her arrest, the Department of Justice (DoJ) charged Velez with assaulting an officer, which could carry a 20-year sentence. The claim was shocking to Velez, who is 4ft 11in and said she had not laid hands on anyone.
She is one of many southern California residents swept up as the Trump administration has aggressively jailed and prosecuted protesters, as well as civilians who film and object to Ice arrests and bystanders caught up in haphazard raids.
Ice detained more than 2,000 immigrants in the region in June. Bill Essayli, the Trump-appointed US attorney for the region, has prosecuted at least 18 people on claims they interfered with immigration arrests, with most defendants accused of assault. Prosecutors have been forced to dismiss at least five of those felony cases, including the one against Velez. The Guardian revealed last week that the justice department also dropped felony assault cases against four anti-Ice demonstrators after officers made false and misleading statements about events captured on film.
‘She was just standing there’
Before her arrest, Velez was not protesting Ice – she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, she said. The graduate of the local Cal Poly Pomona university and lifelong LA resident said her mother and sister had dropped her off by her office just as Ice officers arrived at the intersection.
After she was forced into the Ice agents’ car, she spotted Los Angeles police department (LAPD) officers, left the vehicle and ran toward them, she said: “I thought they would help me.”
She told an LAPD officer she thought the men were kidnapping her: “If I did something wrong, I’d rather have you arrest me. I trust people with uniforms.”
Bystander footage taken from a nearby building shows what happened next: an LAPD officer holds on to Velez as one of the Ice agents runs up and handcuffs her. She does not appear to resist, but the Ice officer picks her up and carries her off the ground across the street. In another clip, a witness is heard saying, “This girl was just standing there … they are causing chaos.”
A third video shows LAPD shielding the Ice officers from civilians filming and protesting her arrest. Velez is seen trying to give her mother’s phone number to a bystander.
She later learned her mother and 17-year-old sister had witnessed the incident, but felt powerless to intervene.
Back in the Ice agents’ car, Velez said the officer driving appeared furious about how the incident had played out: “He was screaming in rage.”
She overheard him on the phone discussing “how many bodies they had gotten”, she said, and referring to her as an “alleged US citizen”.
‘They make it seem like we’re … criminals’
Velez and Luis Hipolito, a 23-year-old man later charged as her co-defendant, were taken to a parking structure. Video of Hipolito’s arrest later published by the LA Times showed four agents had aggressively detained him by piling on top of him and using pepper spray. As the two waited to be processed, Velez said she saw his face was swollen, he was having trouble seeing, his shirt was bloody and he appeared to be convulsing and hyperventilating.
His requests for medical attention were initially denied, she said: “He was in pain, but they were like: ‘It’s no big deal, you will get over it.’” Even as he struggled, he tried to comfort her: “He was making me feel safe.” Eventually, he was taken away in an ambulance, she said. Meanwhile, she saw ambulances going in and out of the federal jail nearby, which frightened her.
She said officers later forced her to pose for a photo where several of them stood in a line holding her with their backs to the camera, an unusual mugshot setup that has since become commonplace for DHS press releases and X.com posts: “They make it seem like we’re really bad criminals, the worst of the worst, when we’re just regular people.”
Velez was placed in the Metropolitan detention center, the downtown federal jail that has become the site of protests. There, other incarcerated women took care of her.
Staff did not give her water and she learned from other residents that she had to buy a cup, but having been detained just hours before, she had no money on her account. She also couldn’t buy utensils to eat. One woman on her way out donated her cup and spork to Velez.
After two nights in jail, she was brought to court on assault charges.
In an affidavit filed by the justice department, Joseph Arko, an agent working for a homeland security taskforce investigating “immigration crimes”, said the Ice officers had stopped in downtown to “question two individuals about whether they were lawfully present” in the US. As one individual fled, one of the officers alleged Velez “stepp[ed] into his path and extend[ed] one of her arms in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male”, Arko summarized. The officer claimed she was so “abrupt”, “he could not stop his momentum” and her arm “struck” him in the face.
Velez was stunned to read the allegations: “I never hit anyone. I’ve never hurt anybody, ever. Everyone who knows me knows the kind of person I am. I’m quiet, reserved, always doing the right thing, always following rules.”
Sixteen days after her arrest, the DoJ moved to dismiss the charges against her.
Velez’s lawyer, Diane Bass, said she had requested body-worn footage and witness statements before the dismissal: “I never got them. That tells me they did not have the evidence they needed and this was a false and unlawful arrest. It is a shocking and disgusting travesty of justice, and no human, never mind an American citizen, should ever be treated like that.”
The DoJ, US attorney’s office, Ice and DHS did not respond to detailed inquiries about Velez’s case. A spokesperson for the bureau of prisons, which runs the jail, did not respond to questions about her account, saying in an email its mission is to “operate facilities that are safe, secure, and humane”.
LAPD said in a statement after Velez’s arrest that officers initially responded to the area due to 911 calls about a “possible kidnapping” and that it was “not involved” in her detention. The department said its role on scene was “maintaining order”, and a spokesperson last week declined to comment further on her case, pointing to an earlier statement saying LAPD is “not involved in civil immigration enforcement”.
Other detained citizens are still fighting their charges, including Hipolito, whose attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
‘What they were doing was wrong’
Adrian Martinez, 20, was jailed on 17 June while immigration officers were conducting “roving patrol duties” in Pico Rivera, a 90% Latino city in south-east LA. On break outside his job at Walmart, he saw border patrol agents moving to detain an older janitor. The agents, records showed, targeted the custodial worker after he started running away from them.
Witness footage shows a masked, plainclothes officer with an assault rifle shoving Martinez, who is heard saying the man they are detaining is a “hard worker”. At least five officers end up pushing Martinez to the ground and grabbing him by the neck as they force him into their car, the footage shows. Essayli, the US attorney, posted Martinez’s photo on social media the following day, saying he was arrested for “punching a border patrol agent in the face”. The footage does not show him punching an officer.
Essayli’s office did not, however, charge Martinez with assault, but rather “conspiracy to impede a federal officer”. The justice department complaint included no reference to punching. Still, Greg Bovino, border patrol chief for parts of southern California, falsely claimed on X.com that Martinez “caught a federal case for assault”.
Essayli’s office did not respond to inquiries about Martinez’s case.
“I just wanted to speak up for that guy, it was not right, it was like they were kidnapping him,” Martinez told the Guardian. “What they were doing was wrong. They were bothering a poor old man who was just working … I was just using words and they started attacking me.”
Martinez was taken to a parking structure by the federal jail where, he said, he was held for hours. Officers would not let him call his mother, he said. “They were not believing me when I said I was a US citizen.” He said he was most worried about his family not knowing his whereabouts and anxious about his father’s car, which he left at work.
When officers interrogated him at the parking structure, they tried to get him to admit to assault, he said. “I never put my hands on anybody. Why is my own government lying saying I tried to assault someone? It’s scary.”
Martinez’s knee, shoulders and back were injured and bruised from the arrest, made worse by sleeping on a metal bed in jail for three days, he added.
Weeks after the incident, KCAL News reported that one of the border patrol agents involved in Martinez’s arrest, Isaiah Hodgson, had himself been arrested. The LA district attorney said on 7 July that Hodgson, 29, was off-duty and intoxicated at a restaurant when he entered a woman’s bathroom and then refused to leave the business when security told him guns were not allowed on the property. He was charged with several crimes, including resisting arrest, felony battery of an officer and exhibiting a firearm in public.
Martinez’s attorneys said they were still investigating Hodgson’s exact involvement in Martinez’s arrest.
“I don’t wish bad on him and I pray for his family,” Martinez said of the border patrol agent’s arrest. “But it just shows their abuse of power. He felt like he had a right to have his firearm in a restaurant while he’s not even on duty.”
Jaime Ruiz, a border patrol spokesperson, said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. Hodgson’s attorneys did not respond to inquiries.
Ciaran McEvoy, a US attorney’s office spokesperson, pointed to an X.com post from Essayli defending the “great work being done by our amazing federal prosecutors”. His office has filed more than 50 criminal complaints since early June against people accused of assaulting or interfering with immigration officers, and nine of those people have since been indicted by grand juries, Essayli wrote. McEvoy declined to provide a full list of the cases.
Essayli’s post added: “When there are reactive arrests, like we had during the riots, it’s not uncommon for a complaint to be dismissed so that law enforcement can conduct additional investigation and collect more evidence.”
The US attorney general Pam Bondi defended Essayli in a statement, calling him a “friend” and “champion for law and order who has done superlative work to prosecute rioters” in LA. And Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary, added in an email: “Our agents, officers, and prosecutors will continue to work together to keep Americans safe, and we will follow the facts, evidence, and law.”
‘I don’t feel safe’
Even though Martinez never faced assault charges, Walmart terminated him after his arrest, citing “gross misconduct”, records show. He has remained out of work and anxious about his future while the charges loom. Walmart declined to comment.
He had hoped to get his truck driving license, but now is unsure if he can.
Garrett Miller, one of his attorneys, condemned the US attorney and border patrol officials for making false punching allegations about Martinez and never correcting them: “They used their platforms for political gain, at Adrian’s expense, and he lost his job because of it.”
Injuries sustained during his arrest forced Martinez to wear a leg brace for weeks after and he still has pain when he walks, he says. Despite the government crackdown, he said he hoped people continue to “speak out when something is not right”.
After her charges were dismissed, Velez felt some relief, but she said she was still riddled with fear that Ice could target her. She was also shaken by images of the vendors and workers who she saw being detained for deportation: “These were people just heading into work, going about their days. We don’t know where they were being taken, and it just broke my heart that they may never see their families again.”
Velez has been working remotely since her arrest, terrified of returning to downtown.
She does virtual therapy, no longer goes on morning runs and never leaves home by herself: “I don’t feel safe knowing they can randomly attack and take you.”
