About a month after a series of immigration sweeps took place in Los Angeles earlier this summer, a video posted to social media July 9 showed federal agents conducting an operation near a Home Depot between Madison Street and Indiana Avenue in Riverside.
In the video, masked U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations agents were seen detaining multiple individuals and placing them in the back of unmarked vehicles.
Riverside Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, who is currently running for State Assembly, denounced the raid in a social media post later that day and announced plans to create a resolution requiring immigration agents to provide identification while conducting operations within the city.
“It really felt like that was a situation that was giving the kidnapping kind of essence,” Cervantes told The Riverside Record. “No one knew who these people were. They refused to say what agency they were with.”
Since then, Cervantes and her team have been working with local immigration rights groups to finalize the draft resolution, with plans to bring it to the city council early next month.
Natalia Saka, the Inland Empire’s regional policy advocate for the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), spoke in support of the proposed resolution at the August 5 meeting.
“By not placing this item on the agenda, the council misses a chance to strengthen public safety and trust,” Saka said. “When immigration agents don’t identify themselves, it undermines trust between residents and local police.”
In an email to The Record, CHIRLA Executive Director Angelica Salas said that requiring clear identifications of agents “prevents vigilantes or those working outside the law from usurping the role of federal agents,” and would alleviate one of the community’s biggest concerns.
The current draft, Cervantes said, contains language reaffirming the city’s commitment to its immigrant community and provides statistics on the impacts of immigration enforcement operations on its residents before offering a variety of actions that the council could take, including condemning masked federal agents using with unmarked vehicles and requiring them to provide badge numbers and names.
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Other city and state lawmakers across Southern California have taken a similar approach. State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena) announced in late June the “No Vigilantes Act,” a bill aimed at requiring agents to provide identification. Days after her announcement, the city of Huntington Park passed a similar resolution after local police arrested an individual impersonating a Border Patrol agent.
Cervantes said her resolution would also direct the city attorney’s office to document instances in which immigration agents might have violated a person’s civil rights while detaining them and asks the city council to consider creating a legal aid fund meant to support residents impacted by immigration operations.
Cervantes also said she planned to ask the city council, during closed session, to discuss joining other municipalities in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
In July, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order as part of the suit that blocked immigration agents from conducting raids in several California counties, including Riverside, unless there was reasonable suspicion other than factors like ethnicity or presence in certain locations.
“Our hope is to really make it clear, again, where we are as a city and our values,” Cervantes said. “But also that, if people are concerned about who is showing up and arresting, that [the Riverside Police Department] will respond and they will do, to the best of their ability, to identify the agents.”
The department declined to comment on the potential resolution.
Cervantes said she previously attempted to get the draft resolution on a council agenda earlier this month, but received pushback from Councilmember Chuck Conder.
“It’s challenging if you have someone who is trying to block you from being able to get something done that I have legally every right to bring to the council,” Cervantes said.
Conder declined a request for comment.
Cervantes said she now plans to submit the final draft to Riverside’s Human Relations Commission by the end of the month with the hope that the commission will recommend it be placed on a city council agenda in September.
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