Home Care In Los Angeles, CA

By Suhauna HussainStaff Writer

June 11, 2025 2:35 PM PT

Noemi Ciau visited Westchester Hand Wash on Sunday to drop off a pizza to her husband, who works there as a cleaner. It was around noon when they met and chatted a few minutes.

Ciau was taking their daughter shopping for a dress and shoes to wear to her 8th grade graduation later that week, she told him.

“If you need money or anything else, call me,” she recalls him telling her.

Ciau wouldn’t see her husband again, because 52-year-old Jesus Cruz was taken mere hours later by federal immigration agents who raided the car wash.

The business was among at least five car washes in Los Angeles and Orange counties that have been targeted in recent days, according to CLEAN Carwash Worker Center, a labor advocacy nonprofit that has been able to verify these raids through community reports and footage on social media.

CLEAN has determined that at least 26 people were taken by immigration enforcement agents at these locations — some in unmarked vehicles.

The vast majority were workers, although one customer was also picked up at Culver City Express Hand Car Wash and Detail during a Sunday raid.

Ciau, an Inglewood resident, spoke alongside other family members of detained workers at a news conference held by CLEAN on Wednesday morning at the Culver City car wash. She said that she relied on her husband to take care of their children in the evenings because she works mornings at LAX.

“He was my backbone,” she said “Who’s going to pick up my kids. Who’s going to take them to music class?”

“Now her father can’t even be there for her graduation,” Ciau said.

Flor Melendrez, executive director of CLEAN, said her organization has been scrambling to identify people detained and keep up with new car wash raids in real time.

“The agents are armed. They are grabbing people and putting them in vehicles, which is why we are calling them ‘kidnappings’ — because they are not identifying themselves,” Melendrez said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Besides Westchester Hand Wash and Culver City Express Hand Car Wash and Detail, Crenshaw Imperial Car Wash, Touch and Glow Car Wash in Whittier and Magnolia Car Wash in Orange County were also targeted, Melendrez said.

Both Westchester Hand Wash and the Culver City car wash were hit twice, on consecutive days.

In Westchester, several workers who had run on Sunday managed to escape, but four were arrested and taken by the agents, according to the car wash’s owner, Mehmet Aydogan. Two other workers were taken when agents returned the next day, Aydogan said.

Aydogan said in an interview that he told the agents he could answer any of their questions, that he had documents for his workers, but they were uninterested.

Video footage obtained and reviewed by The Times shows Aydogan speaking calmly to an agent as another arrests a worker named Miguel.

Aydogan tells the agents they had already visited the car wash the previous day. One agent joked about whether the agents from the day before had gotten a car wash.

The manager replied, “No. You guys didn’t get anything. You’re just taking our people who’s working really hard.”

“We just work here, we’re not criminals,” Aydogan says in the video.

Westchester Hand Wash is now closed, after being hit two days in a row. The business needs at least 14 workers to function, and with six workers taken and others scared to work, they were forced to close, Aydogan said.

Some of the workers taken had been employed at the car wash for more than two decades, he said.

A video clip posted to social media of the Magnolia Car Wash immigration action shows what appears to be the business manager arguing with agents.

At the Culver City car wash, federal agents blocked both exits with their vehicles, said 15-year-old Brian Vasquez in an interview.

Video footage shows Brian shouting at agents as his 11-year-old brother sobs. Another video clip posted to social media shows his father, Arturo Vasquez, who had panicked and run, sitting on the sidewalk across the street, being yanked up by the collar of his shirt by a uniformed agent.

Arturo had come to the car wash with his family as a customer.

Family members said they did not hear from Arturo and did not know where he had been taken until Tuesday, when he called from an El Paso, Texas, number and told them he had been taken to a detention facility in Texas.

“Right now his sons are very traumatized, the younger one hasn’t been able to sleep,” said Lizeth Garcia, who is Arturo’s niece. “I feel very heartbroken, and basically useless. We are seeing our family member being mistreated and there’s nothing we can do about it. There is a lot of confusion and all of us are scared.”

Brian said he’s been unsettled and angered after reading hateful, anti-immigrant comments on social media under the clips that have been posted of his father’s arrest.

“I just want my dad back,” he said.

Concert takes place at Peacock Theater on November 14

Composer Hiroyuki Sawano will hold his first Los Angeles solo concert at the Peacock Theater on November 14. "Hiroyuki Sawano Live in Los Angeles 2025" will include his music from Attack on Titan, Solo Leveling, The Seven Deadly Sins, and 86. Guest vocalists include Eliana, mpi, XAI, SennaRin, mizuki, and Laco.

Tickets will go on sale on Thursday at 1:00 p.m., EDT, and general sales will begin on Friday at 1:00 p.m. EDT.

Sawano has also worked on themes for Attack on Titan, Solo Leveling, Kingdom, The Seven Deadly Sins, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, Aldnoah.Zero, 86, Juni Taisen: Zodiac War, Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga, Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign, The Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These, and Thunderbolt Fantasy.

Source: Email correpsondence

News homepage / archives

The Justice Department might be stretched a little thin these days in President Donald Trump’s second term. In its court filing opposing California’s request for a temporary restraining order against the military deployment in Los Angeles, the government left the second page’s table of contents blank, and the third page’s table of authorities only says “[INSERT],” seemingly an unresolved note to fill out the page with legal authorities that would normally signal what’s ahead.

To be sure, the DOJ did cite various legal authorities within the filing Wednesday, but it’s not a great way to start an important argument to the judge handling this crucial litigation. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer (brother of the retired Supreme Court justice) is set to hold a hearing Thursday afternoon on the state’s restraining order request.

Getting to what the DOJ did include in the filing, its lawyers wrote that the president “has every right under the Constitution and by statute to call forth the National Guard and Marines to quell lawless violence directed against enforcement of federal law.” They complained that “instead of working to bring order to Los Angeles, California and its Governor filed a lawsuit in San Francisco seeking a court order limiting the federal government’s ability to protect its property and officials.”

Notably, the state’s motion said that’s what it’s not trying to do.

“This motion does not seek to prevent any of those forces from protecting the safety of federal buildings or other real property owned or leased by the federal government, or federal personnel on such property,” it said. California’s lawyers said they’re seeking “narrow relief tailored to avoid irreparable harm to our communities and the rule of law that is likely to result if [federal government] Defendants are allowed to proceed with their plans to use Marines and federalized National Guard to enforce immigration laws and other civil laws on the streets of our cities.”

They said the state wants to “prevent the use of federalized National Guard and active duty Marines for law enforcement purposes on the streets of a civilian city.”

Whether California can prevail should become clearer at Thursday’s hearing.

Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MSNBC, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

Hundreds of eighth-graders in freshly ironed button-down shirts and flowing dresses filed into Andrew Carnegie Middle School with their families Tuesday morning in high spirits.

But the graduation festivities at the school in Carson had an ominous undertone, as word had spread ahead of the event that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement might make an unwanted appearance.

Nervous parents and educators browsed apps dedicated to tracking ICE activity, refreshed their social media feeds and conferred with one another about the latest rumors. Some students who had been expected to attend the event did not come to the stage when their names were called. They had chosen to stay home out of fear that they or their loved ones would be detained.

Similar scenes have played out repeatedly across Los Angeles County in recent days, with the Trump administration deploying swarms of federal agents to detain immigrants.

In neighborhoods with large populations of foreign-born people across the region, every commute, trip to the grocery store or school drop-off has come to represent another potential final moment in lives built in this country.

In the span of just a few hours Tuesday, unverified messages posted online rapidly spread warnings about ICE agents being spotted near schools, hotels and hardware stores, leading to panic and disruption.

At Carnegie, the prospect of a raid was all anyone could talk about.

The school had sent out a message ahead of the event informing parents and students that “all guests will be admitted onto campus immediately — no waiting outside — due to ongoing concerns in our community related to the Department of Homeland Security (ICE).”

Mekeisha Madden Toby, 48, was there Tuesday morning to celebrate the graduation of her 14-year-old daughter, Zoe.

“It’s bittersweet because it’s supposed to be a celebration moment and it kind of got overshadowed by fear,” the mother said. “Your friend or your friend’s abuela could get snatched. You have to be aware, and you can’t even fully celebrate a graduation without thinking about it.”

Federal agents — often in plainclothes and unmarked vehicles — have raided L.A. County businesses, homes and even an underground nightclub in recent weeks, detaining scores of people in the process, including children.

Earlier this month, ICE detained a Torrance Elementary School fourth-grader, who was transferred to an immigration facility in Texas. Federal officials have since deported the 9-year-old and his father to Honduras.

Multiple recent incidents captured on video showed ICE agents in L.A. County confronting people on the streets — seemingly at random in some cases — and quickly whisking them away, offering no explanation to shocked loved ones and onlookers. Footage reviewed by The Times showed a Sunday raid in which unidentified law enforcement agents detained a fruit vendor in Westchester.

“They had him pressed down on the ground, they had weapons drawn so no one could get near to help him. It just looked like he had been kidnapped,” said witness Yuliza Barraza, 45. “Everyone was in shock and awe.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing Wednesday that 330 people had been arrested since Friday in the immigration sweeps in ICE’s Los Angeles Area of Responsibility, which stretches from San Luis Obispo to San Diego.

ICE shared photos on social media Tuesday showing armed members of the military accompanying immigration agents on L.A. raids. In recent days, Trump announced that he was sending a total of 700 U.S. Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops to L.A. to respond to protests and support federal operations.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have demanded a detente, but to no avail. Bass called on Trump to “stop the raids” during a news conference Tuesday.

“We never know when, we never know how long” they will be, she said. “But that very notion creates such a terrible sense of fear in our city, and it’s just not right to do that to a population who’s trying to survive.”

Two Times journalists spent most of the day criss-crossing L.A. County’s southern reaches to document the disruption and trauma caused by the omnipresent specter of ICE. Following alerts shared on an assortment of online platforms, the journalists visited communities with significant foreign-born populations, such as Carson, Torrance, Gardena, Compton, Bell Gardens, and Long Beach, and nearby neighborhoods in the city of L.A.

Many people were on edge, even U.S. citizens not at risk of being deported. At a care facility for disabled adults in Torrance, one staffer — who declined to give her name out of fear of retaliation — said she had not seen an alert about a reported ICE sighting outside the facility that had been posted on Ice Block, one of the apps that circulates user-generated reports of federal actions.

But she said in a half-whisper that a friend had spotted U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on a residential street a few blocks away. It was unclear whether anyone had been detained in the area.

“It’s so scary what they’re doing,” she said.

Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Human Rights of Los Angeles characterized the sweeps as an unprecedented “enforcement blitz” in which people are being “indiscriminately” targeted. Her organization, she said, has received 3,000 calls for service since Thursday.

In Signal Hill, the mood among a handful of day laborers who were posted up on a patch of grass near a Home Depot on Tuesday afternoon was jovial and almost defiant.

“I’m not worried,” one of the men said as pickup trucks laden with heavy lumber rumbled past. But he declined to give his name, not wanting to risk immigration agents tracking him down.

Andrew Carnegie Middle’s graduation in Carson ultimately went off without any interruptions by law enforcement. But attendees said they were asked at the last minute to show up at 7:30 a.m. instead of the previously planned 8:00 a.m. in an effort to avoid confrontations with ICE outside the school.

“They changed the graduation time because they were worried about people getting snatched up and taken,” said Zoe Toby, who wore a black Class of 2025 sash and blue lei over her gray-blue dress to celebrate her final day at Carnegie. “It’s scary because you never know when it’s going to happen.”

During the ceremony, some parents received notifications via the Ice Block app and social media warning that immigration enforcement officers were seen near the school. There was no confirmation of anyone being detained.

Zoe said some of her friends worry every day about being taken away by federal agents. Many of them have received red cards from the school explaining their rights, she added, pulling a picture up on her phone of one of the many posters emblazoned with the words “This classroom is a safe space for immigrants” that she said have been posted on the middle school’s walls.

“I’m on the Nextdoor app,” Zoe’s mother added, “and every day there’s neighbors warning each other” about ICE activity.

Later Tuesday, hundreds of teenagers in caps and gowns spilled out onto the street next to Gardena High School to revel in their first moments as high school graduates. Like in Carson, people were smiling and embracing one another as roadside vendors sold snacks and flower bouquets.

Chris Alvarez, a junior, was there to celebrate his 18-year-old cousin Anthony Garcia’s graduation. In between jokes with his friends and relatives, Chris, 17, said he’s “not really worried” about ICE, but he was dismayed by online warnings that agents had been spotted near his school earlier Tuesday.

“It’s not fair for these kids to put all this time and effort into school only to have to be concerned about their safety and the safety of their family and their friends,” he said. “This should be a celebration.”

For Orlando Johnson, principal of Susan Miller Dorsey Senior High School in South Los Angeles, safety is paramount amid the ongoing threat posed by the immigration crackdown.

“The focus is just on protecting our families and protecting our students. We don’t know what information’s real and not real,” he said Tuesday. “I think everybody’s concerned.”

Times staff writers Andrea Castillo and Rachel Uranga and L.A. Times Studio senior producer Karen Foshay contributed to this report.

As federal agents rushed to arrest immigrants across Los Angeles, they confined detainees – including families with small children – in a stuffy office basement for days without sufficient food and water, according to immigration lawyers.

One family with three children were held inside a Los Angeles-area administrative building for 48 hours after being arrested on Thursday immediately after an immigration court hearing, according to lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), which is providing non-profit legal services in the region.

The children, the youngest of whom is three years old, were provided a bag of chips, a box of animal crackers and a mini carton of milk as their sole rations for a day. Agents told the family they did not have any water to provide during the family’s first day in detention; on the second day, all five were given a single bottle to share. The one fan in the room was pointed directly towards a guard, rather than towards the families in confinement, they told lawyers.

“Because it was primarily men held in these facilities, they didn’t have separate quarters for families or for women,” said Yliana Johansen-Méndez, chief program officer at ImmDef. Clients explained that “eventually they set up a makeshift tent in an outside area to house the women and children. But clearly, there were no beds, no showers.”

They have since been transferred to a “family detention” center in Dilley, Texas, a large-scale holding facility retrofitted to hold children with their parents that was reopened under the Trump administration. Lawyers, who had been largely blocked from communicating with immigrants arrested amid the ramped-up raids in LA, said family members were able to recount the ordeal only after they were moved out of state.

The harrowing details are the first to emerge about the conditions that people are being held in following the immigration raids targeting LA-area businesses and neighborhoods.

To quell the widespread protests that followed, Donald Trump sent in military troops despite opposition from California leaders. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that it arrested 118 immigrants on Friday and over the weekend. Others were arrested at immigration offices and courthouses in the days prior. ImmDef and other local advocacy groups had compiled a separate list of more than 80 people who were apprehended – though many of them still do not appear in the agency’s online databases of detainees.

Many of the people arrested were jailed ad hoc, in LA-area courthouses and administrative offices. Over the past several days, attorneys have taken shifts waiting outside federal immigration offices, attempting to speak to the immigrants, but federal agents and national guard troops have largely blocked lawyers and family members from visiting with those who were arrested, citing safety concerns amid widespread protests in the city. On Tuesday, the immigration court in downtown Los Angles had been shut down – and blocked off.

DHS did not immediately respond to multiple Guardian queries about where it was holding people arrested in LA, and whether local offices had been given instruction to prepare supplies and facilities to hold immigrants prior to the large-scale raids in the region.

Deteriorating conditions in detention

Legal aid groups were also largely denied access to immigrants who were transferred to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) processing center and detention center in Adelanto, in the high desert east of LA. “Ice’s excuse was, they’re still processing all the new people,” said Johansen-Méndez. Over the weekend and on Monday, her colleagues were only permitted to visit with a handful of clients at the Adelanto detention center, even though they had called ahead to confirm that at least 40 people referred to the organization had been sent there.

Several people have already been deported. Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, a deportation defense attorney supporting the affected families in LA, said at least one person who was bused to Mexico almost immediately after his arrest was not provided any paperwork or opportunity to contest his deportation. At least two others who were arrested at LA-area carwashes were deported to Tijuana, according to Flor Melendrez, executive director of the Clean Carwash Worker Center.

Another person was told by agents to sign a paper if he wanted to visit an attorney, Johansen-Méndez said – but believes he was tricked into signing some sort of voluntary departure paperwork. “Within hours, he was across the border to Mexico,” she said.

Meanwhile, the family members of workers arrested at a clothing factory in downtown LA, in the parking lot at a Home Depot in the suburb of Paramount, and at a carwash in Culver City were desperately seeking answers about their loved ones’ whereabouts.

Landi, whose husband was arrested on Friday while he worked a shift at the Ambiance Apparel warehouse, said he had reported to work that day as normal. “We never imagined he will be kidnapped by immigration,” she said at a news conference on Monday, outside the business’s gates. The Guardian is not using her surname to protect her family’s privacy and safety.

“The day he was kidnapped, my family went to request information about his abduction, but Ice told us he wasn’t at the center,” she said. “However, after much effort and struggle from our lawyer, Ice simply confirmed that he was there.”

Families were not allowed to bring their loved ones jackets or medications, lawyers said.

Those who were able to confer with attorneys reported that as holding facilities in the city became crowded with immigrants, families were rushed out to detention centers in California’s high desert or in Texas. Agents confiscated belongings and provided little food or water, explaining to immigrants that the facilities had not prepared for the influx of detainees.

Conditions in Adelanto were deteriorating as well, lawyers said. One of ImmDef’s clients reported that meals were provided late, blankets and clothing were scarce, and some people were sleeping on the floor of a day-use recreational room as beds filled up. One client said he witnessed an older man’s health dramatically decline after being denied medication for three days.

On Sunday, Democratic US representatives Gilbert R Cisneros Jr, Judy Chu and Derek Tran said they were blocked from entering Adelanto.

DHS did not respond to a query asking why lawyers and lawmakers have been denied access.

Making sense of the raids

With limited access to immigrants in detention, attorneys are also scrambling to understand the scope of the raids, and the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security has violated immigrants’ rights.

One of the more unusual aspects of the large-scale militarized raids that began last week was that agents from Ice were joined by Customs and Border Protection officers, who are empowered to conduct warrantless stops – but only within 100 miles (160km) of the US border.

Johansen-Méndez believes that the government has justified their presence in Los Angeles – which is more than 100 miles from the US-Mexico border – because the city touches the Pacific Ocean, which the administration could be considering as a “border”.

“They’re counting the entire coastline as a port of entry,” said Johansen-Méndez. “It felt almost like an urban legend that it could be done. But at this point, it’s just they’re everywhere, literally.”

Lawyers from ImmDef and other legal aid and advocacy groups have also been trying to piece together testimonies to better understand how and why immigration agents chose to sweep certain businesses and neighborhoods, and what justifications officers provided when stopping and apprehending people.

“How do they decide who they’re going to ask for their papers and arrest, other than racially profiling?” Johansen-Méndez said. “Did they just ask everyone in the room for their papers or just some people? Did they skip certain people that didn’t fit the profile? We can’t get that information because we can’t talk to everyone.”

Explore more on these topics

Share

Reuse this content