Two people arrested by ICE in Santa Rosa after video shows man’s encounter

Federal immigration agents operating Wednesday and Thursday in Santa Rosa arrested two people in what a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency described as a pair of “routine, targeted” operations.

Richard Rocha, the ICE spokesman, said he was unable to provide additional information about the enforcement action, including answers about who was arrested and where the detentions occurred in the city. Both of the arrests occurred Thursday.

Santa Rosa police said they were notified of a planned surveillance operation in Roseland at 4:17 a.m. Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. But the police department had no additional knowledge of the operation or any part in carrying it out, said Lt. Mike Lazzarini. No request was made for police assistance, he said.

The address given by Homeland Security officials for their planned action on Wednesday was the property of a Roseland resident who recorded his encounter with unidentified officers standing in the driveway that morning.

The resident, Erick Reynoso, characterized the encounter as troubling. He said he began recording the meeting with his cellphone after he said the officers would not explain their presence on the property.

His roughly 2-minute video, posted Wednesday on Facebook, shows the officers’ vehicles, including a white sedan with covered license plates, parked in the driveway of his Stony Point Road home.

At least three male officers are shown in the video. They wore black vests labeled with the word “POLICE.” They did not identify themselves to Reynoso or say what they were doing in the area. None of their vehicles had visible license plates or markings identifying them clearly as belonging to law enforcement, he said.

“I was trying to be cooperative (but) they didn’t answer,” Reynoso said. “They just wanted me to get out of the way.”

The video shows him repeatedly asking the men who they were looking for and what they were doing. Reynoso said he suspected the men were immigration agents.

“Only American citizens live here,” he tells them in the recorded encounter.

“That’s what we’re here to find out, that’s all” one of the agents said in response.

The officers eventually asked Reynoso to move his truck from the driveway because it was blocking them from leaving. The video ends shortly before Reynoso leaves to back out his car to the street, he said. The Facebook post had about 60,000 views by Thursday evening.

Rocha, the ICE spokesman, confirmed that ICE officers were present at the Roseland property on Wednesday.

“ICE officers were conducting routine, targeted enforcement operations,” he said in a written statement. “The intended target was not located, no arrests were made and the person blocking our officers and filming was not associated with the case.”

A spokesman for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said it had not received any notification Wednesday or Thursday from federal authorities about a local immigration-related operation.

The arrests are the first publicly reported ICE actions in Sonoma County since a series of nationwide sweeps in mid-?January targeted 7-Eleven stores, including a trio of franchises in Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Sebastopol. No arrests were made then in Sonoma County or at any of the other affected Northern California locations.

Sonoma County last year took an early step to limit jail officials’ cooperation with federal authorities, before similar curbs were mandated by state law. Federal authorities since then have publicly called out Sonoma County for its policy shift, demanding related documents under threat of subpoena. In early January, the then-acting head of ICE also took aim at the Sheriff’s Office in a nationally televised Fox News interview where he blasted the county’s jail policy limiting cooperation with federal agents.

A representative for the Sonoma County-based group that seeks to mobilize help for people targeted or detained by federal immigration agents said her organization learned of one arrest Thursday morning.

Susan Shaw, co-director of the North Bay Organizing Project and the affiliated North Bay Rapid Response Network, would not provide additional information about the person arrested or the name of an attorney involved in the case, saying she wanted to protect the detainee’s privacy because so little was known about the situation.

The network’s legal observers were first deployed Wednesday after someone reported seeing ICE agents pounding on a door at a home in Santa Rosa, according to Shaw. The observers reported seeing similar vehicles to the ones shown in Reynoso’s video, all unmarked and with covered license plates.

Reynoso, 38, said he saw a similar group of cars in his driveway less than an hour before he encountered the officers Wednesday morning. They drove away shortly after he came out to see what they were doing, he said. His brother, who also lives on the property in a separate house, tried to approach them but was ignored by the group.

“The first time I had no idea who they were,” Reynoso said. “They didn’t look like law enforcement at all.”

Sonoma County Deputy Public Defender Bernice Espinoza said she received a phone call about 7:45 a.m. Thursday alerting her that someone had been taken into custody by immigration agents. Espinoza said she had no additional information about the person arrested, and she provided the caller with a contact for Rep. Mike Thompson’s office because the North Bay lawmaker has access to federal immigration detention records.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com and Staff Writer Julie Johnson at 707-521-5220 or julie.johnson@pressdemocrat.com.