ICE agents use Penske moving van to carry out immigration raid at Home Depot in Los Angeles, August 7, 2025.
Imagine you’re an immigrant desperate to find work to feed yourself and your family. You’re waiting at a Home Depot parking lot with others like you, hoping to catch the eye of someone coming around to hire you, even just for the day. A Penske truck comes into the lot, and you and others crowd around hoping to land work. Suddenly, heavily armed masked men jump out of the truck—and you realize you’ve been caught in a trap set by La Migra…
Federal agents use Penske truck in raid outside LA Home Depot
This is exactly what happened August 6 at a Home Depot in the MacArthur Park neighborhood in Los Angeles—a center of immigrant Los Angeles. After the driver of the truck lured people in by lying that he was looking to hire workers, masked Homeland Security (DHS) agents, hidden in the back, jumped out like U.S. military commandos and began chasing and grabbing people. White unmarked vans blocked the exit to the parking lot so no one could drive out. At least 16 people were rounded up in this DHS-ICE operation, including day laborers and street vendors. A Fox fascist “News” crew “embedded” among the agents filmed the modern-day slave catchers to air to their audience.
What makes this all the more outrageous is that this ICE operation was in violation of a court order that ICE is not supposed to target people based on their nationality or occupation. But this is exactly what they did.
ICE's Targeted Repression
After leaving the Home Depot, these armed federal goons marauded through the surrounding immigrant neighborhood, making more arrests.
One particularly ominous incident: ICE arrested a U.S. citizen, Sabrina Medina, along with her undocumented mother. Medina is pregnant with twins. She and her mother were snatched up as they were leaving a clinic after Medina's pregnancy checkup. Medina has since been released, but her mom is still being detained, and further threatened. The person who filmed her arrest was also arrested.
Pregnant U.S. citizen, Sabrina Medina, detained by ICE outside health clinic, August 7, 2025.
Medina was singled out and threatened because ICE is trying to hunt down her husband. She said, "They're trying to use me as bait for my husband." And they threatened her, "We could make this go all the way." This was the fourth time that ICE has harassed her, including last month when masked agents stormed into her home with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem observing outside. On Wednesday, ICE said they were picking her up for a 12-year-old warrant for shoplifting which Medina didn't even know about. But what the fuck are the immigration authorities doing picking up a U.S. citizen on an old dusty warrant for a minor nonviolent offense?!
This is Trump's gestapo lawlessly being used for retribution and sheer terror.
Snatching Up Immigrants in Open Defiance of Court Orders
As we said above, these DHS-ICE operations in LA are being conducted in open violation of a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge—and affirmed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That court order prohibited federal agents from violating due process and constitutional rights by targeting people on the basis of the color of their skin, the language they speak and where they live or were gathered at—in other words, going after people by racially profiling them. The Trump regime filed an “emergency appeal” in this case to the fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court. Their appeal said “no one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion”—but then followed that up with lame excuses for their racial profiling tactics: “But in many situations, such factors—alone or in combination—can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are entitled to rely on these factors when ramping up enforcement of immigration laws” in the areas covered by the court’s restraining order.
In the meantime, until the Supreme Court rules, the restraining order is supposed to be in effect. But the fascist regime has now apparently decided to simply barrel forward with the anti-immigrant offensive in California.
After the August 6 Home Depot operation, the head of the Border Patrol, Gregory Bovino, posted the Fox “News” footage and compared it to the Trojan Horse in Greek mythology, used by Greek soldiers who hid inside a large wooden horse to get into the fortified city of Troy and then poured out to destroy their enemy. This cold-blooded fascist is using a war analogy, as if they are up against a dangerous enemy—when the truth is these federal agents are a bunch of heavily armed masked goons jumping out to attack people not armed with anything but their basic need to work!
National Raids Intensify... with More Promised
In addition to what's happening in LA, the Trump regime is carrying out these gestapo raids across the country. While there has been a lot of focus on the anti-immigrant attacks in LA and southern California, there have in fact been higher numbers and rates of immigrants arrested in fascist-dominated “red” states like Texas and Florida. In the first five months of Trump’s second term, there were 26,341 reported arrests in Texas—one-fourth of ICE arrests nationally—followed by 12,982 in Florida and 8,460 in California.
This fascist offensive has already crushed many lives and has created a living hell for immigrants across America—but this is just the beginning of what this fascist regime has promised. Trump’s fascist tax-and-spending bill, passed in July, funds a massive super-sizing of ICE, almost quadrupling its annual budget from $9.6 billion to $37 billion. Some of the billions will go to hiring 10,000 new stormtroopers to the current ICE force of 22,000. $45 billion has been reportedly allotted to the ICE “detention facilities” (that is, concentration camps), like the “Alligator Alcatraz” in the middle of the Florida Everglades and other immigrant prisons on military bases.
What the Fascists Are Doing Is Totally Illegitimate… and Based on a Big Lie
As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) pointed out in his @BobAvakianOfficial social media message REVOLUTION #124, “From the day he returned to power, in January of this year (2025), Trump has repeatedly violated the Constitution and due process of law, viciously trampling on what are supposed to be basic rights of the people, whether undocumented immigrant, legal resident, or citizen.” The massively repressive offensive against immigrants has been a concentration of this. And it’s justified with the claim that “Trump was elected to do this.” Bullshit!
As BA goes on to say in that message:
First of all, to repeat this crucial truth: No matter how it comes to power—whether elected or not—fascism is always illegitimate. And what actually happened, in terms of the 2024 election, is that a leading edge of Trump’s campaign was a repeat of his racist lies in his first (2016) campaign for president—slandering millions of immigrants as criminals, rapists, murderers—when the vast majority of immigrants, undocumented as well as documented, are just ordinary people who are seeking a better life for themselves and their families, and who make important contributions to society.
So, since the reality is that there are not hordes of monstrous immigrant criminals, in order to carry out his perverted campaign “promise” to persecute and mass deport immigrants, Trump’s thugs are targeting immigrants, including children, just going about their daily lives—where they work, at school, or a store, or a church, in their homes—or when they are showing up at their regularly scheduled immigration status hearings!
This is what is taking place at ground-zero Los Angeles, and across this country. And all people with conscience and heart must act to bring this to a stop, as a key part of the whole fight to drive this fascist regime out of power.