Three Inland Empire immigrant rights organizations called on Riverside officials to take action to protect workers without permanent legal status after a viral video showed a person at a hair salon threatening to call immigration enforcement agents on people standing under the shade of a tree.
Stay up to date with the latest from The Record. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter today!
“We want justice, and that means justice for the workers here, that means justice for the people that were recording, and that means justice for all undocumented workers in Riverside,” Eddie Torres, policy director for the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, said at the Thursday rally. “They need to step in and actually figure out what they can do. We need accountability for this owner.”
The nonprofit organizations held the press conference in front of a Magnolia Avenue hair salon two days after the video was posted to social media. Torres said they wanted to use the incident to call attention to the targeted harassment faced by workers who live in the city.
The video, which spread widely across social media networks this week, started at what appeared to be in the middle of an encounter between two bystanders in a car and a person at the Hair Artist Salon.
The Hair Artist Salon could not be reached for comment.
At the start of the recording, while the cellphone was still facing down, a voice says, “I’m calling ICE next.”
The video then pans up to show a person walking into the business and later locking the door. The person recording the video then turns around to show several people standing next to a red truck under the shade of a nearby tree.
“There’s a group of Hispanics sitting there, minding their own business, getting water and she had the nerve of calling the police on them,” one of the bystanders said in the video. “She just told us right now that she’s gonna call ICE on all of us.”
In a follow-up video, the bystander said she was told the truck had broken down and they were waiting to see if someone could come fix it.
Torres said his organization, which operates an immigration enforcement sighting hotline, did not receive any calls following the encounter.
Det. Steven Espinosa, Riverside Police Department’s public information officer, told The Record that a call was made to the location on Tuesday and a report was taken.
Torres said this incident was just one of several examples of workers’ livelihoods being threatened in Riverside, adding that an internal investigation by the city recently revealed members of the code enforcement department had been harassing street vendors for years.
“They need to build a reparation fund for all of the victims of code enforcement over the last three years by those two agents,” Torres said. “The city needs to step up and do something yesterday.”
Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson’s office, in a document sent to the city council and shared with The Record in June, said the city would take several steps to reform its Community and Economic Development Department after calling its work environment “toxic.” Those reforms included conducting a review of the department, continuing to implement corrective actions within the code division, standardizing best management practices and establishing clear protocols for sharing personnel investigations.
The city did not immediately respond to The Record’s request for comment about this week’s incident.
Laura Moreno, immigrant rights director for the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, said at the press conference that her organization had seen several similar incidents of local business owners and employees threatening to call federal officers on day laborers.
She called on the community to pressure the city to establish a day laborer center, which would not only document the incidents, but also advocate for those impacted.
“Sometimes we can’t control what’s going to happen to the day laborer, but we can control our reaction to it,” Moreno told The Record. “Similarly, we would have done this same call to action, make them apologize, and if they really are sorry for what they did, then they should also be funding part of the legal support for the landscapers and the street vendors.”
The Riverside Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet providing Riverside County with high-quality journalism free of charge. We’re able to do this because of the generous donations of supporters like you!