ICE disputes the account as California officials call for a full investigation
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained 20-year-old U.S. citizen Erik Zepeda on October 21 as he walked to his high school in Santa Maria, California, The Guardian reported. Zepeda has disabilities that affect his physical reflexes and ability to communicate verbally. The agricultural city, known for its strawberry harvest, is 79% Latino.
After agents pinned Zepeda face down, handcuffed him and drove him away, he was released with a black eye and severe wrist pain. Zepeda walked the remaining half mile to school, where staff called an ambulance.
In a written account to The Guardian, Zepeda said he was “walking to school the same way I do every day” when agents “tackled me and handcuffed me (and) hurt me.” He wrote: “I thought they were going to kill me.” Zepeda added: “I did not do anything wrong, and they should never have done that. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
An ICE-watch observer who witnessed the encounter told The Guardian that masked agents approached Zepeda from behind, pinned him face-down on the ground, put him in a car and drove around for a while before releasing him. The observer, who volunteers with a local rapid-response network and requested anonymity because of fears of retaliation from federal officials, supplied dashcam and phone videos.
The Guardian said it independently reviewed the recordings, which do not show the entire encounter. In the dashcam footage, two masked agents quickly approach Zepeda from behind. He appears to notice one when the officer touches his arm, then shakes the arm loose as the frame shifts away.
The observer estimated that phone recording began 10 to 20 seconds later. It shows Zepeda lying face-down on grass while two officers restrain him. Three additional officers arrive and appear to help handcuff him, and a voice shouts, “You’re hurting me.” The officers load him into a second government vehicle and drive away. The observer said Zepeda did not appear to resist during the roughly 10 to 20 seconds not captured on video. “He looked like he was just astonished,” the observer said.
ICE gave a different account. In response to Guardian questions, a spokesperson said officers were conducting “a targeted enforcement operation” when they encountered Zepeda and that they believed he matched the description of a criminal illegal alien target. The spokesperson said, “When the individual resisted officers, refused lawful commands, and assumed a fighting stance with clenched fists, they relied on their training to safely control the situation until they could confirm his identity, whereupon he was released.” The agency added: “Claims that the individual suffered broken bones are FALSE. He never requested medical assistance.”
Zepeda’s lawyers, JP Cooney and Molly Gaston, former federal prosecutors who are now senior attorneys at Democracy Forward, said his hospital discharge records confirmed surgery for his fractured wrist. They said: “ICE agents illegally assaulted Mr Zepeda and then issued a false public statement to cover it up.”
The observer’s videos also cast doubt on ICE’s description of the encounter. In the 20 minutes before agents detained Zepeda, they had pulled over two other drivers whom the observer described as dark-skinned and released them. The first stop occurred around 7:08 a.m., when two ICE vehicles stopped beside a road and questioned a driver. In the video, the driver, whom the observer identified as Hispanic, can be heard saying, “I’m a US citizen.”
About 10 minutes later, one of the same ICE vehicles stopped a truck carrying two people and released them; the observer said they appeared to be Latino. After the vehicles passed Zepeda, they stopped suddenly. The Guardian reported that the actions preceding the detention pointed to spontaneous immigration stops rather than a targeted operation.
California’s Democratic U.S. senator Adam Schiff said, “ICE’s assault and wrongful detainment of Erik Zepeda was grotesque and heartbreaking.” He added: “There must be accountability for what happened to Erik.” Salud Carbajal, a Democratic U.S. representative whose Central Coast district includes Santa Maria, said at a press conference that he was “outraged,” called the agents’ conduct “thuggish” and described racial profiling as “rampant.” In an October 29 letter to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, Carbajal called for “a full, transparent investigation.”
Santa Maria police chief Christopher Williams said a police investigation was “ongoing” and confirmed that he reported the incident to the Santa Barbara County district attorney, the California Department of Justice and DHS. District attorney John Savrnoch called the incident “deeply troubling” and said his office was “coordinating with the appropriate authorities to gather information and determine the appropriate next steps.” Cooney and Gaston said they “look forward to vindicating Mr Zepeda’s rights in court.”
Glenn Goldin, a retired special-education teacher who formerly taught Zepeda and remains a close mentor, described him as quiet, sensitive and a caring housemate in a group home for adults with disabilities. Goldin said Zepeda loves the Golden State Warriors and spends time scrolling TikTok. After the detention, Goldin said Zepeda remained shaken and did not plan to return to school for at least several weeks. Zepeda had worked up the courage to walk to school by himself in the previous year. “He’s felt very proud of himself, you know, he’s independent,” Goldin said. “I feel like they took that away from him.”
The encounter came during an ICE surge that rapid-response groups first reported in early October, with arrests reported as far north as Sacramento and as far south as San Diego. The Guardian reported multiple hospitalizations connected to the activity. Days earlier, agents broke the arm of Ricardo Gonzalez, also a U.S. citizen, in Long Beach; video appears to show him face-down in a gutter and crying for help while officers knelt on his back. In the Bay Area, two separate ICE arrests also led to hospitalizations and sparked anti-ICE protests outside an Oakland hospital.
Two days after Zepeda’s detention, a federal judge blocked immigration agents from stopping people solely because they appeared to be “low-income or working-class and Latino” across the Central District of California. The district spans seven counties and includes Santa Maria. The preliminary injunction arose from a class-action lawsuit alleging racial profiling during immigration stops. The judge cited ICE body-camera footage and text messages in which federal agents used racial slurs to identify people to target. The Trump administration appealed the injunction.
Lauren Michel Wilfong, a staff attorney with National Day Laborer Organizing Network and part of a legal coalition representing plaintiffs, has tracked reports of alleged racial profiling by ICE in Southern California. She said Zepeda’s detention appeared to match several patterns: masked agents quickly surround a person in public, use force to put the person in a vehicle before asking questions, and later claim the person matched a target.
“It’s part of an approach of ‘grab first, justify later’,” Wilfong said. “[They] detain people because they appear ‘suspicious’ – and here ‘suspicious’ just means Latino.”
The 805 UndocuFund, which coordinates a rapid-response network across three Central Coast counties, tracked more than 280 arrests in October, up from roughly 150 arrests per month on average during the previous nine months. More than 100 occurred in Santa Maria. Executive director Primitiva Hernández said the network had received numerous reports of ICE stopping Latino drivers. “We knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened,” Hernández said of Zepeda’s experience. “Any brown person regardless of their legal status is at risk of being pulled over, stopped and questioned.”
Because the detention occurred half a mile from Santa Maria High School, parents and students were on edge regardless of immigration status, Santa Maria City Council member Gloria Soto said. Hundreds of students from Santa Maria High and nearby Lompoc High organized a walkout to protest what happened to Zepeda, some wearing Halloween costumes. Participants chanted “Chinga la migra” and held signs reading “ICE out of 805,” a reference to the local area code. “Their actions send a powerful message,” Soto said. “Our students do not want to live in fear.”