How ICE Operates in the Shadows

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. The black vehicles with tinted windows converged on the bus stop just after 5:30 a.m. It was June 18, 2025, and Pedro Vasquez Perdomo and his co-workers were drinking coffee, waiting for a ride to a construction job in Pasadena, California. Masked, armed men poured from the vehicles and charged at them. Vasquez Perdomo thought they were probably immigration agents, but he couldn’t be sure. The agents wore plain clothes with no visible badges and didn’t identify themselves. They seized the 54-year-old Vasquez Perdomo, handcuffed him, chained his feet, waist and hands, and hauled him away. No one showed him a warrant or told him why they were arresting him, he later wrote in a declaration. “It felt like a kidnapping,” he wrote. The agents drove Vasquez Perdomo and his coworkers to B-18, an immigration processing site in the basement of a federal building in downtown Los Angeles. Some lawyers had dubbed the facility a “black hole,” because detainees could be hard to locate or reach there. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Attorneys often can’t figure out where ICE is detaining people—and can’t see the evidence against them. Eleven days earlier, about 20 miles away, another confrontation with immigration agents had ended in handcuffs. Brayan Ramos-Brito, a 29-year-old US citizen, was protesting outside a Department of Homeland Security office in Paramount when federal authorities accused him of assaulting a Border Patrol agent. Because he was at the anti-ICE protest, Ramos-Brito wasn’t confused about who was arresting him, his lawyer said. He was arrested on a Saturday and taken south to Santa Ana City Jail in Orange County. By Monday, he had entered the federal criminal system with a case, an assigned public defender and a judge preparing to review his detention. Vasquez Perdomo and Ramos-Brito, both arrested by federal agents in the same metro area in the same month, entered two very different legal systems. The federal criminal system that Ramos-Brito experienced, despite its faults, is open and transparent, with the rights and protections that Americans have come to expect. In contrast, the immigration system that swallowed Vasquez Perdomo is secretive and unpredictable, one in which people are moved between detention facilities with little to no warning, struggle to reach a lawyer or let their families know where they are, and are deported to countries they have no ties to as a result of shadowy deals with foreign governments. A federal agent with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) exits his vehicle near Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, as a large group of federal law enforcement agents gathered in the area, July 7, 2025.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty In a criminal case, the process is public almost immediately. A judge oversees the proceedings, hearings are often held in open court, and defendants have access to lawyers—in fact, the government provides an attorney if someone doesn’t have a lawyer or can’t afford one. In addition, court records show what the government is alleging, where the person is being held, and where their next court appearance will be. Immigration cases are much harder to follow, attorneys say. Officers have to clear a lower legal threshold to make an arrest, people arrested often can’t get a lawyer, and attorneys often can’t figure out where people are detained and can’t see the evidence against them. Ramos-Brito is a US citizen, while Vasquez Perdomo is not. Their experiences weren’t a function of their status in the country, but rather the features of the systems they encountered. When immigrants face criminal charges, they have more protections than they would in ICE custody, immigration attorneys say. And in the rare instances when US citizens have gone into immigration detention, they too confront more secrecy and fewer guardrails. That’s because the government has historically handled immigration cases as civil, administrative matters that don’t require the same safeguards as criminal cases. “It is baked into the design of the immigration detention system that…there is very little oversight that the courts can impose, in part because of the civil nature of detention,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an Ohio State University law professor who studies the intersection of criminal and immigration law. Since the 1890s, the Supreme Court has interpreted immigration proceedings as a civil process in which the outcome is not supposed to be punitive, but “in reality it’s experienced very differently,” García Hernández said. The immigration system has increasingly functioned more like the criminal justice system, attorneys say, with widespread arrests and harsher and longer detentions. Vasquez Perdomo eventually became one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit, Vasquez Perdomo v. Mullin, challenging both how immigration agents were stopping and arresting people in the Los Angeles area, and the lack of access to lawyers for people inside the B-18 facility. “There could be damaging information that only the government knows, but they’re not telling you.” The differences between the immigration and criminal systems actually begin before an arrest. Vasquez Perdomo and Ramos-Brito were caught up in the same immigration enforcement surge, dubbed “Operation at Large,” that began in June 2025. US Customs and Border Protection agents had joined ICE officers and were turning up at places like Home Depots and car washes without always looking for a particular person, said Carl Bergquist, an attorney with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, one of several organizations that joined the lawsuit. Agents were relying on broad clues, like where someone was, what language they spoke or the clothes they wore, to decide whom to stop, he said. The lawsuit argues those clues amounted to unconstitutional racial profiling, Bergquist said. Vasquez Perdomo, who is Hispanic, believed his own arrest fit that pattern. “I think that I was arrested that day at the bus stop because of how I look,” he wrote in his declaration. Both federal immigration and law enforcement officers can make arrests without warrants. Law enforcement can do so if they are in a public place and witness a crime, or have reason to believe someone committed a crime. Immigration officers can do so if they have reason to believe someone is in the country unlawfully and is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. But warrantless arrests are supposed to be the exception, not the rule, said Lauren Wilfong, with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who’s one of the attorneys representing Vasquez Perdomo and others in the case. The default, Wilfong said, is an investigation that establishes probable cause and leads to a warrant. But agents flipped the order of operations during the immigration enforcement surge in summer 2025, Wilfong said. “They’ve sort of inverted that logic to say, ‘OK, well, we’ll grab them now. We’ll justify it later,’” Wilfong said. The lawsuit argued that ICE was ignoring the escape-risk requirement, and that the agency’s practices in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable stops and arrests. Vasquez Perdomo’s account follows that inverted sequence. Agents had already surrounded and handcuffed him before one asked him for identification, he said. Attorneys also said that getting an immigration warrant is easier. In a criminal case, an arresting officer typically needs a warrant signed by a judge. But immigration officers can rely on administrative warrants that the agency produces and signs itself, Bergquist said. “The level of evidence is lower” to get an administrative warrant, he added. An Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputy walks into the Intake and Release center at the the Orange County Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana, California.Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times/Getty Ramos-Brito had also been arrested on the spot, without a warrant, but once federal authorities accused him of a crime, his lawyer could get to him quickly. Two days after the arrest, Bo Griffith, a deputy federal public defender, had been assigned to Ramos-Brito’s case and saw him before the first hearing. Ramos-Brito was still wearing the clothes from the protest. His shirt was ripped, and Griffith could see bruises and scrapes on his body. He looked “beat up,” Griffith recalled. Griffith also had the criminal complaint, which a federal agent had written and federal prosecutors had filed. It was only a few pages, accusing Ramos-Brito of interfering with an agent trying to arrest someone else, and of threatening to kill an officer, Griffith said. “There was no real evidence in it,” Griffith said. “It was just kind of a synopsis of what the agents were alleging had happened.” But Griffith could compare that account with what his client told him and begin trying to disprove it. He called Ramos-Brito’s family and began gathering bystander videos from the protest. “What the videos showed immediately was that the complaint was wrong,” Griffith said. One clip, he said, showed an officer shove Ramos-Brito, while others revealed officers taking him to the ground and dragging him across the pavement. Getting such a level of clarity early on about the government’s allegations is rare in the immigration system. When ICE detains someone, the agency prepares a form that shows why agents arrested the person and whether they deemed the person might escape before a warrant could be obtained. The document shows whether an arrest was lawful, Wilfong said. But lawyers often don’t see the agents’ account of an arrest until the case is well underway, if at all. In the meantime, lawyers may have only their client’s account to work from. The lack of information can extend to someone’s immigration history. Attorneys sometimes have to file slow-moving public records requests to get a client’s full file, all while the immigration case keeps moving forward, Bergquist said. Lawyers often don’t see ICE agents’ account of an arrest until the case is well underway, if at all. “There could be damaging information that only the government knows, but they’re not telling you,” he said. At B-18, there was a more fundamental information problem: Lawyers and families sometimes didn’t even know whether their client or relative was at the facility. B-18 was meant to be a temporary holding place where ICE could process people before releasing them or moving them to longer-term detention. It had no beds, showers or medical facilities. During the June 2025 raids, ICE was bringing people to B-18 faster than they could be processed, at times holding more than 300 people there, according to court records. When Vasquez Perdomo arrived at B-18 after his arrest, he shared a room with 52 people, he wrote in his declaration. They had no mattresses and were forced to sleep on cement benches or on the floor. There was only one working toilet. He was held at B-18 for a day and a half before ICE transferred him to another detention center. “I was lucky,” he wrote, “I met people who had been there for three days and counting.” At times, staff would require lawyers to provide a detainee’s immigration ID number, known as the A-number, to allow visits, even when people hadn’t yet been assigned one, said Lindsay Toczylowski, an immigration lawyer and co-founder of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Other people took days to appear in ICE’s online locator, or their information was incorrect. By the time the information was updated, ICE had already transferred some people to other facilities, Toczylowski said. The limited access to clients became the other major constitutional fight in the Vasquez Perdomo lawsuit, which argued that ICE was denying people their due process under the Fifth Amendment. When ICE’s online locator failed, Toczylowski said, lawyers often had no choice but to show up at the facility, hope their clients were still there and, if so, hope they’d be allowed to see them. “You had to go to B-18 and argue” to “try to find out if who you’re looking for was there,” she said. A protester in front of a large banner depicting people detained by ICE during a protest in front of a federal courthouse in Los Angeles, July 17, 2025.Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/Getty Later that June, Martha Vasquez went to B-18 to search for a family friend. Federal agents had arrested A.G., a 40-year-old construction worker who is identified by initials in court records, on June 23, while he was parked outside a Home Depot in Marina del Rey, in Los Angeles County. “We had no idea where AG was taken after his arrest,” Vasquez, who’s not related to Vasquez Perdomo, wrote in a declaration. For a day, his family searched ICE’s detainee locator in vain. Emails and calls to ICE got no response. Finally, Vasquez went downtown to B-18. She waited in line for hours with many other people. Officers speaking through an intercom would tell her, “Hold on, we’ll let you know if you can come in or not,” and then not return with an answer. Staff also told her that because they had so many detainees, they could not tell her exactly who was there. Vasquez finally said she had paperwork from a lawyer that needed A.G.’s signature. They let her inside, but they brought out the wrong detainee. When A.G. finally appeared, he was still wearing the clothes he had been arrested in over 24 hours earlier. Vasquez wrote that he looked “sad, concerned, dirty, scared, and very tired.” She saw him for about two minutes. The trouble Vasquez had locating and then speaking with her family friend exposes another difference between the two systems. In a criminal case, if someone can’t afford or access a lawyer, the court will appoint one. That right comes from the Sixth Amendment, which applies to criminal prosecutions. Because immigration cases are civil, the government generally doesn’t provide a lawyer. Finding one often falls to family or friends, said García Hernández, the Ohio State law professor. “It’s kind of useless having an attorney if you can’t talk to him,” Griffith said. ICE’s 2025 detention standards require facilities to post a current list of pro bono legal-service providers and allow detainees to call them for free. But that doesn’t guarantee that someone will get a lawyer, García Hernández said. The organizations listed may be hours away from the detention center and have limited capacity to take new cases, he said. Vasquez Perdomo happened to have an outside network that moved quickly. In the first hour after his arrest, community members, volunteers and staff were talking to witnesses, Wilfong said. That evening, organizers held a vigil at the bus stop and asked anyone who had seen the arrests or knew the men to come forward. People did, helping organizers identify Vasquez Perdomo and his coworkers, find their families and connect them with attorneys, Wilfong said. “That’s how I think we were able to get around some of those incredibly challenging issues that are systemic to the way that immigration enforcement was operating,” Wilfong said. Days after his arrest, Vasquez Perdomo’s lawyers filed a habeas petition in court challenging his detention. ICE later transferred him to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, an immigrant detention camp roughly 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, where an immigration judge granted him bond on July 3, 2025. He was released on July 8, nearly three weeks after his arrest. Vasquez Perdomo had lived in Pasadena for decades, working as a day laborer. About two months after his arrest, he said in an updated declaration that he still intended to return to the same bus stop for work. But he was also avoiding leaving home unless necessary because he feared being stopped again. Ramos-Brito, by contrast, didn’t need an outside network to assemble around him. “We knew where he was,” Griffith said. “His family could visit him…It wasn’t like he just disappeared.” Having access to his client gave Griffith a way to challenge what was happening to Ramos-Brito while the important decisions in his case were being made. The defense could put evidence contradicting the government’s account before the court and document Ramos-Brito’s injuries. And when a magistrate judge denied bond, Griffith said, lawyers could file a written challenge with a district judge. At the Santa Ana Jail, Griffith could walk over, show his identification and usually speak with Ramos-Brito that day. “It’s kind of useless having an attorney if you can’t talk to him,” Griffith said. Prosecutors eventually reduced Ramos-Brito’s felony charge to a misdemeanor. After deliberating for a little more than an hour, a jury acquitted him in September 2025. In immigration detention, not having a lawyer, or struggling to communicate with one, can leave people making decisions that shape the course of their case before they understand the consequences, attorneys say. Even when a lawyer reaches someone in time, access to their client can disappear overnight. “I’ve met with someone and said, ‘OK, we’re going to file your petition tomorrow, and let’s just finalize your declaration,’” Wilfong said. “And then they’re transferred that night out of state, and I can’t file anymore.” “If you look at the system side by side, our civil immigration detention looks a lot more like criminal custody than it ever has before.” Criminal defendants generally have to remain close to where they are charged, so they can be brought back to court, said García Hernández. ICE faces no comparable geographic limit in its detention network, he added. More than a year later, the Vasquez Perdomo lawsuit has produced court orders addressing both issues at the center of the case. In September, a federal judge’s ruling put new restrictions on ICE’s use of warrantless arrests across Los Angeles and surrounding counties, ordering agents to document why they believe someone might get away before a warrant could be obtained. The judge had not yet ruled on the lawsuit’s allegation that ICE’s stops can amount to racial profiling. A separate order requires ICE to grant people who are arrested and taken to B-18 regular, private access to lawyers. The government is appealing that order, and the broader case continues. For all the procedural differences between them, the stakes in both the immigration and criminal systems can be enormous. Immigration detention is legally classified as civil, but it can involve the same loss of freedom as criminal incarceration, except without the oversight and openness of a criminal case, attorneys say. “They look the same. They feel the same, and they are as harmful to the people inside them as any federal prison I’ve ever been inside of,” Toczylowski said of immigration detention centers. Under the current administration, she said, their use has become “so blatantly punitive” that “the law and the reality don’t match.” Deportation can add layers of harm, like separating someone permanently from their family and community, or returning them to a country where they face persecution, torture or even death, Toczylowski said. “If you look at the system side by side,” she said, “our civil immigration detention looks a lot more like criminal custody than it ever has before.” This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project. a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.