Riverside’s Latino Neighborhoods Most Impacted By Year Of Immigration Enforcement, Advocates Say

Guadalupe Flores has spent the last year responding to reports of federal immigration enforcement actions across the Inland Empire. 

“I have vulnerable family members and, just unfortunately, my family got caught in the crossfire,” she said. “It’s just not something that I could allow to happen to other families after it happened to mine.”

Flores, a Riverside resident, is part of a small volunteer network of IE-based legal observers tasked with watching immigration enforcement activities, patrolling neighborhoods and reuniting families with items left behind following an arrest. The rapid responders began mobilizing last year after the Trump administration first ramped up its immigration enforcement operations across Southern California.

The activists, a majority of whom have been trained to identify and document federal immigration enforcement actions, also work with community members to gather photo and video evidence of agents in the area. That information is then shared with local organizations and posted to advocacy social media pages like Riverside Migra Watch, which Flores co-founded.

Although the work brings a new set of challenges every day, Flores said federal officers have been consistent when it comes to the communities they choose to target. 

“They’re absolutely targeting immigrant neighborhoods,” she said. “Their [modus operandi (M.O.)] has been the traffic stop, the people that are walking down the street, people on bikes.” 

“They’ve taken people with work permits, they’ve taken [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)] recipients, they’ve taken just whoever they can,” she continued.

Approximately 319,000 residents live in Riverside, according to the city’s data dashboard, about 56% of whom identify as Hispanic or Latino. A breakdown of 2020 ward demographic data, created for the city by the company Redistricting Partners, showed that Wards 1, 5, 6 and 7 each had a population of Latino residents greater than 60%.

Last October, the Riverside City Council passed a resolution requiring the city to collect immigration enforcement data. Since then, the city said federal agents have voluntarily filed 20 notices regarding local activity.

The resolution also mandated city staff to track reports made through the city’s 311 non-emergency service but that has only led to four alleged immigration enforcement sightings total. Documents obtained by The Record showed that the four alleged sightings were reported in Wards 1, 3 and 5.

Councilmember Clarissa Cervantes, who championed the resolution, said she and other volunteer groups have mostly seen federal agents in predominantly-Latino areas, calling the Arlanza and Casablanca neighborhoods hotspots. 

However, she also recognized the city-collected data had “watered down” the true number of sightings.

“We need to incorporate verified accounts, whether it was through photo or video that were documented from these groups that are legitimate groups that are doing the work, and we need to have those added in,” Cervantes said. “The data isn’t matching and mirroring what’s happening in the community, and I do think we need to make sure that we clean that up.”

The Riverside Record reviewed social media posts shared over the last year by several pages dedicated to documenting sightings and was able to map 29 instances where the post contained digital evidence of both the verified presence of federal immigration agents and their approximate location. When compared with U.S. Census Bureau data, the map shows  documented enforcement activity was more heavily concentrated in communities with higher numbers of Latino residents.

According to The Record’s mapping, there have been at least seven reports of federal officers spotted in Wards 5 and 6. Agents have also conducted at least eight operations in the Arlanza neighborhood, which is split between Wards 6 and 7. In the city’s Casablanca neighborhood, there were at least five digitally documented sightings shared online — including two large-scale raids conducted in the parking lot of a Home Depot.

People Over Papers, a newsletter dedicated to tracking immigration enforcement actions, created a map using crowd-sourced reports from January 2025 to April of this year that showed dozens of other sightings across the seven wards, also primarily concentrated in the city’s Latino enclaves.

Elsa Hernandez, a rapid response coordinator with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice (IC4IJ), said the nonprofit organization has operated a hotline for residents to report federal agent sightings since 2008. Those reports are then shared with a network of about 400 trained volunteers who go out to verify the information. 

She said that at one point the hotline was getting up to 60 calls a day, with reports from Riverside outpacing other communities in the region.

When asked whether the increased sightings in predominantly Latino communities could be attributed to the number of volunteers patrolling those communities, Hernandez said it had less to do with the volunteer patrols and more to do with the goals of the Trump administration.

“Whenever [immigration enforcement agents] see that there’s people that are going early in the morning to work, they’re being racially profiled,” Hernandez said.

“They probably saw that in that area, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of people with work trucks, so that is the best target for us to go to,’” she continued. “So it’s not really about them knowing that there’s people watching over the community, it’s mostly about just them targeting our Latino community.” 

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Luis Alani said in an email to The Record that allegations of racial profiling were “disgusting, reckless and categorically false.”

“What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S. — not their skin color, race or ethnicity,” Alani said. “Law enforcement officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” 

Newly-released federal court documents, filed as part of a lawsuit alleging agents used racial profiling to target Latino people, included video and text message evidence showing that immigration agents used racial slurs when discussing people to target, CalMatters reported this week. The court filing also included a deposition in which an immigration agent said the suspicious appearance they look for is “older Hispanic male.”

According to CalMatters, attorneys for the plaintiff have argued the new evidence undercuts the government’s argument that agents were relying on specific intelligence instead of race when deciding who to stop. The attorneys also argue that the actions of the agents were condoned and directed from the top.

According to data from ICE and shared by the White House, there were 110 arrests in Riverside between January 2025 and May of this year. The data showed nearby cities like Jurupa Valley, Moreno Valley and Corona saw fewer than 50 arrests each.

That website, shared with The Record by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, refers to undocumented immigrants not as people, but as “aliens,” immigration as an “invasion” and arrests as “alien abductions.” 

“If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed,” the page says. “The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.”

Eddie Torres, a policy director with IC4IJ, said that type of language used to refer to Latinos, especially by government entities, has made it easier to degrade an entire group. 

“If the highest authority in the land is telling you that it’s okay to call somebody an alien, to dehumanize them, to shoot them on the street, you’ll see people stand up and do that,” Torres said. “I think that [it’s] really important to just focus on and remember that we’re all part of the working class here, and we’re standing up to oppression in all of its encapsulations.” 

Flores said that she doesn’t expect immigration agents to ease up their operations in the city anytime soon. She added that the most impacted neighborhoods need more volunteers familiar with the community to organize patrols or provide administrative support. 

“You can warn the community with very little risk to yourself, and that is even less risky if you have support,” Flores said. “You can manage your own risk and you can manage what you’re willing to do and not do, but opting out shouldn’t be the default.”