These are the Inland Empire faces of the nation’s stepped-up immigration enforcement.
A gardener from Honduras was chased into an Ontario surgery center and arrested while he cried and gasped for breath.
A Rancho Cucamonga resident’s brother – a straight-A student – is detained and taken to a detention center.
A Pomona woman’s father, who has lived in the U.S. nearly decades, was plucked from a job by the U.S. Border Patrol.
These are a few cases, as documented by families in social media posts, of local people who have become part of President Donald Trump‘s promised “mass deportation” efforts.
Representatives for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could not be reached for comment.
Those working to support undocumented immigrants decry ICE’s actions.
“This is the reality our families are going through (and) our kids,” said Luz Gallegos, executive director of the TODEC Legal Center, a Perris-based nonprofit group that helping the immigrant community. “There’s so much trauma.”
Others said such enforcement is overdue and blame former President Joe Biden‘s and previous administrations for letting the problem spin out of control.
“We’ve had illegal immigration for many years but all of a sudden we had this huge eruption,” said Bob Kowell, past president of the Murrieta-Temecula California Republican Assembly.
The ICE enforcement is necessary, he said, because letting undocumented immigrants into the country is allowing them to work in slave-like conditions and be exploited by the system and cartels.
“Those things just have to happen to make a statement that we don’t want this,” Kowell said. “This can’t be a part of our lives. We can’t have slavery.”
Others blast immigration officers’ intrusion into public settings and everyday life and an alleged targeting of undocumented immigrants who they say are not violent criminals. Some families have turned to GoFundMe, a public crowdfunding platform, to seek donations for legal help.
One of the highest-profile cases in the Inland Empire came earlier this week and was captured on video.
The Honduran landscaper fled into the Ontario Advanced Surgery Center, where an altercation erupted between federal officers and staff clad in blue scrubs. Employees are heard telling an armed officer to let go of the man, who is crying and gasping for breath, The Associated Press reported.
“Get your hands off of him. You don’t even have a warrant,” one staff member said in the video, trying to shield the man. “Let him go. You need to get out.”
In a social media post, a family member, who declined to comment, called the arrest of the man identified only as Dennis, “so heartbreaking for everyone.”
“He is a hard-working, kind person who was just trying to provide for his mom back home in Honduras, who depends on him for her dialysis,” the family member wrote.
Federal officials, in a social media post, said the 30-year-old ran away as officers moved to arrest him. The surgery center’s staff “assaulted law enforcement,” the post states, and tried to obstruct the arrest by “locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping.’”
In the student’s case, ICE officers detained the 25-year-old June 22, a family member’s post states. Relatives said they didn’t know where he was and were told that there was nothing that could be done.
According to the post, he was in the U.S. on a legal work permit, carried straight A’s student and had no criminal record.
“My brother is innocent,” a relative, who declined to comment, wrote in the post. “This isn’t just about him — it’s about a broken system. We need a miracle. This is wrong.”
The Pomona woman’s case began in late June when her father was detained, she wrote in a post. She called him an honest, hard-working man who was being kept “under inhumane conditions, with little access to food or clean water, cold and hungry in an overcrowded room.”
The family got an attorney for their father, who was moved to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center.
“It’s very painful to know someone so kind and loving is being treated this way,” she wrote. “Our family is hoping he will be processed soon and given a fair court date.”
Despite the online donations and protests, supporters of immigration enforcement point out that those being detained and arrest have committed crimes.
“People have entered our country illegally, which is a federal crime,” Lori Stone, chairwoman of the Republican Party of Riverside County, said in a statement. “The current remedy for that crime is deportation. Immigration reform has been discussed for a very long time and until we have different laws, we need to follow the ones we have.”
Gallegos, who runs the center in Perris, where this week Mayor Michael Vargas urged residents to stay inside after reported ICE activity in town, is not sure what the future will bring.
“We’re only six months in, seven months in,” Gallegos said. “Imagine what we’re going to look like for years as a state, as a county, as a country and we don’t have a strong immigrant workforce.”
Staff writers Jeff Horseman and Madison Hart contributed to this report.
