After asking to see the warrant for her husband’s arrest, a woman in Santa Maria was handed an insurance claim for the car window ICE agents broke to apprehend him, 805 UndocuFund volunteer Michelle Ambriz-Quintero told the Sun.
A member of 805 UndocuFund’s rapid response team, Ambriz-Quintero was alerted on Nov. 16 about an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation in the parking lot outside of Goodwill on South Broadway.
“When I got there, the person had already been detained and taken, but I was able to talk to the family,” Ambriz-Quintero said. “What I gathered was they were being followed on their way to the grocery store, and the driver—who was the person detained—tried to go into that plaza just to try to drive off and lose them.”
After the car was cornered by a few different unmarked vehicles, ICE agents approached and knocked on the driver’s window, according to Ambriz-Quintero.
“The family was not responding. They were not opening up,” she said.
Based on watching videos from some bystanders and what she heard from the family, Ambriz-Quintero said that ICE agents broke the driver’s seat window to unlock the door and pull the driver out.
“I asked them, ‘Did they show you a warrant for this person’s arrest?’ And his wife said, ‘No, … all they gave me after the incident was an insurance claim.’ And she showed it to me,” Ambriz-Quintero said.
Santa Maria Police Department officers were also on the scene that day, “in an effort to keep the peace” when a crowd of bystanders gathered, according to a Nov. 16 statement from the department. ICE didn’t respond to the Sun’s request for more information about the arrest.
A volunteer with 805 UndocuFund since June, Ambriz-Quintero was also alerted about a larger ICE enforcement operation on Nov. 13 at a property on the corner of Telephone Road and Cambridge Way in the Santa Maria Valley.
By the time she arrived around 9 a.m., a crowd of protesters and other volunteers from her team were on-site. Santa Maria resident Cesar Vasquez, who arrived just before 8 a.m., was among them.
At the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors’ Nov. 18 meeting, Vasquez called on the county to condemn the operation, which ICE disclosed as including the arrests of four individuals.
“On that day, ICE agents took a baby and a pregnant mother but refused to report on that, because they knew it wouldn’t fit their narrative,” Vasquez said during public comment. “They also took 10 other individuals that they failed to report.”
The Sun reached out to ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for information on the Nov. 13 enforcement action. DHS responded with a Nov. 17 statement that described the operation as targeting a worker exploitation scheme.
Among those arrested was labor recruiter Jorge Vasquez of JBB Farms, who allegedly recruited workers in Mexico to apply for an H-2A visa to work in the U.S., while demanding that they pay thousands of dollars in extra fees for the opportunity—much of it through deductions from their farmworker wages, according to ICE.
“Some critics have described such practices as a form of modern-day slavery,” ICE stated.
This article appears in Nov 20 – Nov 27, 2025.