Pasadena immigrant advocate’s arrest sparks ire, as ICE presence in cities stirs nation
Local leaders and residents voiced outrage this week over the presence of federal immigration agents in Pasadena and Altadena, and the arrest of an immigrant labor advocate — who was on his way to an Eaton fire commemoration — which prompted accusations against local law enforcement of cooperating with federal officials.
Those accusations, denied by the city’s top elected official, come as the nation reels from the fatal shooting on Wednesday by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, captured on video. Federal immigration officers also shot and wounded two people on Thursday in a vehicle outside a hospital in Portland, Oregon.
The Minneapolis shooting, in particular, has intensified a nationwide debate over the Trump administration’s massive immigration dragnet. While operations have resulted in mass deportations — which the administration says is necessary to keep the country safe — they have also stirred fear and anger in many communities, and, because of the fatal shooting, amplified the question of whether legal protections for those who legally observe and monitor ICE actions will continue.
And in Pasadena, there are now questions about whether local police violated municipal rules against cooperating with immigration operations after officers arrested Jose Madera, the director of the Pasadena Community Job Center, after he apparently followed an ICE vehicle to City Hall on Wednesday.
Pasadena police declined to comment on the incident and to release a report during an active investigation.
But Mayor Victor Gordo denied that local police were helping ICE.
“We have a very clear policy,” he said in a Thursday interview. “We will not coordinate nor participate in ICE operations. We do not assist in any way or use municipal resources to coordinate with an ICE operation.”
On Wednesday, Madera said, he was on his way to Altadena for an Eaton fire commemoration when he got a call confirming ICE agents were in Pasadena. Community defense rapid response teams had alerted people in the community that an ICE vehicle was driving in the area of Northwest Pasadena. Such teams are composed of members in the community who track ICE actions in the city and alert people who could be at risk of detention by the agents.
Madera followed one unmarked car as it drove through town, he said. The vehicle eventually stopped at City Hall — where Madera was detained by the Pasadena Police Department. The PPD arrested Madera on suspicion of misdemeanor resisting arrest or obstructing an officer from performing his or her lawful duties, according to booking records and city spokesperson Lisa Derderian.
“I saw them do U-turns and different things they shouldn’t be doing on the road,” Madera said in a Thursday interview. “It came to a point when they went again in front of the Pasadena Police Department and there was Pasadena police waiting. Instead of stopping them and questioning them, they stopped me and questioned me.”
Madera said he wasn’t driving recklessly and didn’t break any laws. Madera cooperated with police, he said. He was cited and released about an hour after his arrest.
“They said I was running red lights, which I was not,” Madera said. “I let them know I was not doing that. I obey all traffic laws.”
Madera said he asked Pasadena police why he was being stopped and if he was being detained after they asked for his license, registration and other documentation — though the officers failed to clarify the reason for the stop before he was arrested, he added.
“The driver of the vehicle refused to cooperate,” Derderian said, “significantly delaying the investigation, and was arrested and cited.”
Madera’s arrest prompted several supporters — including members of Pasadena’s Clergy Community Coalition and Brandon Lamar, president of the Pasadena NAACP — to gather outside the Pasadena Police Department on Wednesday, within an hour of his arrest, to support his release.
Those supporters confronted Gordo, demanding answers over what they perceived to be the Police Department’s cooperation with federal authorities, which city policy prohibits when it comes to immigration arrests.
“For them to be attacked like this is disgusting,” one supporter said during the impromptu gathering at City Hall, as Gordo faced the assembled group. Another asked why the city’s Police Department was not protecting members of the migrant community in the city during ICE actions.
Gordo, in a Thursday interview, confirmed that an ICE agent in an unmarked vehicle was driving around Northwest Pasadena on Wednesday. It was not known, however, if anyone was detained or arrested by the federal agent.
“The fact that he was present in the Pasadena-Altadena community on the day we were commemorating the Eaton fire and still trying to heal from the impacts,” Gordo said, “is wrong, mean spirited and, some might say, evil.”
An ICE spokesperson did not confirm whether agents were in Pasadena or Altadena on Wednesday, the anniversary of the Eaton fire, which killed 19 people, .
“ICE conducts routine law enforcement operations across the nation daily,” said ICE spokesperson Luis Alani.
As for Madera, following the ICE vehicle does not appear to be illegal, according to Niels Frenzen, director of USC’s Immigration Clinic.
Typically, Frenzen said in a Friday, Jan. 10, interview, observers following law enforcement officers in their vehicles would not be classified as obstructing justice.
“You would have to get into the specific details,” he said. “I think if you were tailgating or preventing the immigration officers from turning into a parking lot or whatever, you’re getting into the territory of interfering, of obstructing.”
But there’s also an argument, Frenzen said, that Madera’s arrest falls outside of Pasadena’s policies to not aide in federal immigration operations.
“I think this issue that we’re talking about in terms of interference with law enforcement operations would not be something that falls within the so called sanctuary laws,” Frenzen said, “because there’s an argument that it’s not focused on the immigration status of the alleged violator.”
Pasadena, alongside other major cities in the region, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, have policies in place prohibiting the use of municipal resources to support or carry out federal immigration enforcement.
The Pasadena Police Department has long refrained from inquiring as to the immigration status of people with whom it has contact, according to city Resolution 9557, which notes the importance of establishing trust with community members and “the reality that the safety of the entire community is put at risk if people are fearful of cooperating with local law enforcement for fear of deportation.”
Over the summer, as ICE raids unfolded in earnest across the county, Pasadena police presented its policies on immigration to the city’s Community Police Oversight Commission.
Officials reiterated that the department does not enforce immigration laws. Exceptions, however, are made in cases of national security, terrorism, transnational criminal activity and valid federal criminal warrants, said Deputy Chief Art Chute. The department would also respond to provide traffic or crowd control and emergency assistance, if necessary, once an enforcement operation has started, officials said.
“I’m confident that if chief were here to speak for himself that if a law enforcement agency, whether it be federal, municipal, county, needed assistance for their safety, we would assist them,” Chute said in August. “So we do have an obligation to assist our law enforcement partners to make sure that they’re safe just like we have an obligation to assist anybody — we protect protesters — when people are out protesting whether we agree with it or not.”
But, it seems, how those exceptions are applied to cases in which citizens, like Madera, say they are simply observing ICE operations could be open to interpretation — particularly in places where immigration operations have created tensions between officials and community members.
“The way ICE and Border Patrol officers in the field are thinking right now is very different from what they were probably thinking a year ago, because we have this incitement coming from the (Trump administration) — they are just being egged on,” Frenzen said. “So they are going to be much more aggressive in their sort of interpretation of when interference is happening.”
The Pasadena incident, in fact, came on the heels of an ICE agent fatally shooting a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, Renee Nicole Good, who was observing immigration activity while in her car.
The shooting by federal agent Jonathan Ross has divided local and federal officials over the question of whether it was justified. And Good’s death has promoted protests across the nation — including in Los Angeles and Long Beach. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has, in no uncertain terms, called for federal immigration agents to leave the city.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, however, said the officer shot the woman in self-defense after she “attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle,” which Noem described as an “act of domestic terrorism,” the AP reported. Minneapolis’ police chief, Brian O’Hara, briefly described the shooting to reporters but gave no indication that the driver was trying to harm anyone.
The Trump administration’s version of the story has been swiftly rejected by many law enforcement experts, local and state authorities in Minnesota, and video evidence of the shooting. Minnesota state leaders, including Gov. Tim Walz, have called for the FBI to allow state investigators to contribute to the investigation, after the FBI denied the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension access to evidence.
Good’s death has also inflamed an already polarizing debate on the widespread presence of federal immigration agents in American cities — and raised concerns about their apparent escalation of violence against protestors and observers.
This week, for example, state Assemblymember Sasha Renee-Perez, D-Pasadena, found a similar thread between what happened in Minnesota and Pasadena.
“She was also monitoring ICE activity when she was fatally shot in cold blood by undisciplined federal agents,” Perez said of Good. “I want to make this clear: the public has the right to monitor and record law enforcement activity without threat of prosecution, as long as they do not interfere with operations.”
Gordo also encouraged residents to monitor ICE activity.
“We are absolutely monitoring the situation and would ask residents to do the same,” he said, “particularly if they see an armed individual not readily identifiable as a peace officer — please let us know.”
Still, it’s unclear who called police on Madera on Wednesday — since they were apparently waiting for the ICE agent as he arrived in front of police headquarters. The city and the Police Department, Gordo said, were not made aware of ICE agents in town on the anniversary of the Eaton fire.
But Gordo also said if an ICE agent feels threatened, they have a right to call the police — which Frenzen said is “technically right.”
“Federal law enforcement officers have the authority, independently, to arrest individuals for violation of federal laws,” Frenzen said, “and so if they think they have probable cause to make an arrest for a violation of a federal law that, you know, that prohibits interference with a federal law enforcement officer, they certainly have that legal authority, if there’s probable cause make the arrest.”
The Trump administration and DHS, meanwhile, have been calling for support and cooperation from local law enforcement agencies, Frenzen said.
“There is this long recent sort of call from the federal government for assistance specifically from local law enforcement,” Frenzen said. “(That has) played out differently in different jurisdictions.”
Gordo, for his part, said he disagrees with the approach taken by ICE and DHS agents. The federal government, he said, should inform the PPD if there is an illegal immigrant who is a criminal, or potentially violent.
“Let’s use the criminal justice system to address that,” he said. “Chasing innocent people because of the color of their skin or how they talk is as un-American as it gets.”
Pasadena itself has become accustomed to that debate — and the consequences of ICE’s presence.
Armed agents wearing face coverings arrested six men from a bus stop in front of a busy shopping center in Pasadena on June 18, setting off massive protests and legal action over alleged violations of civil liberties that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In July, immigration agents took Rosalina Vargas, a mother and longtime Pasadena resident, away from her crying children on the sidewalk of Del Mar Boulevard in central Pasadena.
Julieta Aragon, a 45-year resident of Pasadena, said Thursday that the Minneapolis shooting reminded her of driving near the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard and Los Robles Avenue on June 18 and seeing a masked ICE agent get out of his vehicle and point his gun at bystanders.
Aragon decided to follow the agent’s vehicle as it drove off. At the corner of Madison Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, the agent exited the vehicle.
“He was screaming some nonsense at me,” Aragon said in a text message. “What I saw was not a person of law, but a person full of hate and rage.”
Those ICE operations in Pasadena sparked protests and deep concerns from Gordo and many others.
As for Madera, he said he will continue to be a legal observer of any ICE or Department of Homeland Security personnel in the area.
What happened to Good, he said, can easily happen to anyone.
“We are alerting our community that ICE is here, so people can be cautious, be aware and document what’s happening,” Madera said. “It’s not a crime to be a legal observer, and for sure it’s not a death sentence to be a legal observer and to love your community. That’s sadly where we’re at in this country.”
SCNG staff writers David Wilson, Ruby Gonzales, Ryanne Mena and Kristy Hutchings contributed to this report.