Border Patrol conducts sweep at Florin Road Home Depot, Matsui calls the action “outrageous and infuriating”
Masked federal immigration agents swept through a south Sacramento Home Depot parking lot Thursday morning, arresting several people and igniting a political firestorm that stretched from Florin Road to Capitol Hill.
According to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, deputies first received a 911 call at 7:47 a.m. reporting “armed, masked men” outside the store at 4641 Florin Road. By the time patrol cars arrived, the agents, later identified by U.S. Border Patrol, had already left the scene.
Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino posted an edited video on social media claiming the operation netted eight people “in the country illegally,” including an aggravated felon linked to fentanyl trafficking.
Eyewitness accounts offered a higher tally: day-laborers who scatter daily for work outside the store told KCRA they saw roughly ten people taken away, while a Sacramento Bee report, citing law-enforcement sources, put the number at 12.
One arrest drew particular scrutiny. Cell-phone video shows agents chasing and tackling Jose Castillo, a 31-year-old U.S. citizen who volunteers with the migrant-rights group NorCal Resist. Bovino said Castillo was booked for “impeding or assaulting” a federal officer after allegedly slashing a Border Patrol vehicle’s tire.
Castillo’s wife countered that he was merely filming the raid before being pepper-sprayed and detained. Within minutes of leaving Home Depot, the same masked unit served a warrant at a house on nearby A Parkway, prompting another frantic 911 call but no reported injuries, deputies said.
The operation drew swift condemnation from local and state officials. Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Sacramento) blasted the action as “outrageous and infuriating” in a statement Thursday afternoon. Matsui's district includes the Florin Road location.
“The Trump Administration is weaponizing ICE to spread fear and terrorize our communities,” she said. “This raid was not about effective law enforcement—it was about causing chaos and disruption… We refuse to stand by while our neighbors are cruelly targeted and torn from our community.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom echoed those concerns, arguing Border Patrol should “do their jobs at the border instead of continuing their tirade statewide of illegal racial profiling.”
Immigrant-rights advocates organized an afternoon rally outside the state Capitol and dispatched legal observers to the Stockton ICE processing center, where detainees were believed to be taken. Home Depot, asked whether it had cooperated with federal agents, said only that it was “reviewing the incident.”
As civil-rights groups demand body-camera footage and congressional Democrats press for oversight hearings, Thursday’s raid underscores how California remains a flashpoint in the Trump Administration’s stepped-up interior enforcement strategy and how, in Rep. Matsui’s words, Sacramento’s immigrant communities “will not back down in the face of authoritarianism.”
UPDATE: Mr. Castillo has been released from custody, according to KCRA.
#8647 #NoKings #ProDemocracy
Posts
Post a Comment