ICE sweeps California to terrorize families before the vote

By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso · October 10, 2026

Federal agents target essential workers across California in a cruel pre-election surge, tearing parents from their children and proving that cruelty is the point.

The cruelty is the point of Operation Safe California

Let us stop pretending this is about public safety. When masked federal agents swarm the Central Valley and south Sacramento to haul away fathers on their way to drop off a four-year-old daughter, they are not hunting the worst of the worst. They are hunting headlines. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is running a 45-day dragnet across California called Operation Safe California. The Washington Examiner reports that this directive orders agents to arrest every undocumented immigrant they encounter, regardless of criminal history. That is not law enforcement. That is a state-sponsored terror campaign timed precisely for the November midterm elections.

The administration wants photographs of people in handcuffs to wave before the electorate. They are using the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act to buy the boots and the badges. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Senator Adam Schiff warned that this administration is pushing a destructive immigration agenda backed by racial profiling and agents armed to the teeth by taxpayer dollars to deter Latino citizens from voting. The people doing the country's hardest work are once again being used as political piñatas. When Pablo was detained while working at an almond orchard outside Kerman, as documented by ABC30 Fresno, nobody asked if he had a record. They just needed a body to feed the machine.

We have seen this military playbook before in the valleys and the barrios

This is Operation Wetback all over again. In the summer of 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell and INS commissioner Joseph May Swing unleashed military-style mass sweeps of Mexican laborers, deporting citizens and immigrants alike under a banner of open intimidation. The shared mechanism is plain. The state uses military-style mass sweeps of essential laborers to terrorize immigrant communities regardless of legal status. Today, ICE deploys roving patrols at gas stations, construction sites, and mini marts, just as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle. They cast a wide net because the terror is the harvest.

Look at what they leave behind in the Fresno dust. Cipriano Lopez and Noelia Bautista have lived in Fresno for more than 26 years, cleaning homes and landscaping the valley. Federal agents arrested them on their way to work, according to KMPH Fox 26. Now, their son Gary Lopez and his oldest sister had to travel from Oakland to Fresno to become the sole providers for their younger siblings. It mirrors the trauma of children witnessing their parents' arrest in Sacramento, where a father cried out to Delma Vidal, "quiero mi bebé," as agents dragged him away to Bakersfield, leaving a four-year-old screaming for her dad, as KCRA reported.

Local leaders must hold the line against federal overreach

The defenders of this cruelty will argue that federal law must be enforced without exception, and that any violation demands immediate removal to preserve national sovereignty. But that defense collapses against the reality on the ground. When you arrest farmworkers before dawn, as noted by ABC30 Fresno, you are not securing the border. You are breaking the people who put food on American dinner tables. Congressman Jim Costa rightly noted that these are the hardest-working people you will ever meet, up before sunrise with our farmers. You cannot starve the agricultural economy of the Central Valley of its lifeblood and call it security.

Cities are fighting back because they have to. In Sacramento, Council Member Mai Vang is working to make sure local bans on federal agents using city properties do not die in implementation, standing against an agency that has earned over 15,000 judicial rebukes for illegality, unconstitutionality, incompetence, and cruelty. When Mayor Jerry Dyer talks about surgically removing violent criminals instead of casting a wide net, he describes a rational world that this administration has deliberately abandoned.

We must demand full accountability from every official who greenlights these raids and fund rapid-response networks that keep our neighbors safe. Sacramento and Fresno are not staging grounds for political theater. They are our homes, and no amount of federal intimidation will ever erase our people from the land we water with our sweat.

ICE sweeps California to terrorize families before the vote

The cruelty is the point of Operation Safe California

We have seen this military playbook before in the valleys and the barrios

Local leaders must hold the line against federal overreach

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