When immigration agents raided a farm in California’s Ventura County last July, local deputy sheriffs came too.
In one of the largest immigration enforcement operations since President Trump took office, one farmworker died and at least 361 migrants were arrested. Despite state law prohibiting local law enforcement from collaborating with federal immigration authorities, the county refused to share records explaining why the deputies were there.
Through a lawsuit quickly settled last month, the First Amendment Coalition (FAC), representing the immigrant rights nonprofit Buen Vecino (Good Neighbor in Spanish), won release of the public records including 10 hours of body camera video footage.
As local law enforcement plays an expanding role in immigration enforcement nationwide, the Ventura County case offers a blueprint for how to reveal public data when agencies avoid disclosing it.
Video by ACOM | David Loy, Legal Director of the First Amendment Coalition, shares details of a public records request about an immigration raid in Ventura. After a lawsuit was filed, about 10 hours of footage was released.
‘Be polite, but be persistent’
“The government works for the people, the people don’t work for the government,” said David Loy, legal director of FAC, at a Friday, April 24 American Community Media virtual news briefing outlining the data disclosure tools available for reporters and the public.
“The public has an especially compelling interest in access to records about how public employees do their job, especially law enforcement officers, who have the most extreme power of any public employees,” he continued. “They have the gun and the badge, the power to use force, arrest, detain, even use lethal force in extreme situations.”
Ventura County initially denied the request, citing the California Privacy Rights Act’s “Investigatory Privilege” section, which may exempt from disclosure records of criminal investigations by law enforcement.
But FAC found an opening, Loy explained: “The sheriff himself had said they were not investigating. They were simply performing security and crowd control, which is different from investigation.”
For reporters who get stonewalled in communications with law enforcement short of a lawsuit, “I found the best strategy is to be polite, but be persistent. To the point of being obnoxious, make it clear that you’re not going to go away until you get what you’re looking for, and eventually they will comply,” said FAC Press Education Specialist Thadeus Greenson.
Last January, FAC published a reporter’s field guide — authored by former Los Angeles Times reporter Paloma Esquivel — focused specifically on collecting publicly available data in California. The guide identifies four types of records as particularly productive: oversight and inspection documents, contracts and MOUs, communications and law enforcement records.
Video by ACOM | Thadeus Greenson, Press Education Specialist, First Amendment Coalition, gives an overview of a reporter’s field guide he co-authored with former LA Times reporter Paloma Esquivel that provides information on accessing public records that would be relevant to and useful for immigration reporting.
As an example of how these types can overlap, Greenson pointed to recent reporting by CalMatters. The report documents emergency calls at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, which led to the discovery of an MOU between the San Diego Sheriff’s Department and private prison company CoreCivic. Under the MOU, the sheriff’s office delegated authority over sexual assault investigations to the detention center warden.
“Whether that’s a common practice at other private immigration detention facilities throughout the country, we don’t know,” Greenson said, “but I would certainly love to see news organizations find out by asking for those MOUs.”
Another example: The ACLU of Northern California obtained over 2,500 previously unseen public records, including emails between the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), revealing that CDCR staff transferred over 200 state prison inmates into federal immigration custody in two months.
FOIA requests and dead ends
For reporters navigating federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Elizabeth Clemons, director of training and enablement at MuckRock — a platform which allows users to file and track requests, and analyze a database of previously filed ones — warned against overly broad requests for “any and all records,” or requests without specific date ranges or locations, which are likely to be deprioritized or returned incomplete.
To improve the odds of a useful response, she urged reporters to approach FOIA as an extension of prior research: “Public records inherently mirror human activity in the real world … If you’re interested in information that has a paper trail in local reporting, data aggregators or government record disclosures, you can use these bits of public information as leverage within your FOIA request.”
She added that FOIA processing is slower than usual under the current administration, due to both staffing cuts and a growing volume of requests: “Say it’s one person who previously had one job; now they have the job of two or three people … It’s not that they’re not answering it, it’s just taking more time.”
Reporters who hit dead ends on California records can contact the free FAC Legal Hotline for guidance. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press operates a similar phone and email hotline nationwide.
For reporters unable to speak with detained people, like those under ICE custody, Clemons suggested the Marshall Project as a resource for accessing some facility-level information through channels other than FOIA.
Tracking local enforcement
Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University who has spent nearly two decades mapping immigration enforcement geographically, cautioned against over-relying on any single metric.
The most common one — formal 287(g) agreements between ICE and state or local law enforcement officers— can be misleading, he said. As of reporting, there are 1,744 such enforcement delegation agreements across 39 states and two territories, with the number exploding in recent years.
Video by ACOM | Austin Kocher, Assistant Research Professor, Syracuse University; Research Fellow, American University, discusses the data points that indicate where ICE and local law enforcement have the most active collaborations.
But a lot of this signed participation is “performative,” Kocher explained. For instance, state-level laws in Florida “and, to a lesser degree, Georgia” require many agencies to enroll in 287(g)s, including entities like community college boards of regents with no meaningful way of implementing the program.
“If you understand one 287(g) agreement, you understand one 287(g) agreement,” Kocher said. “It can look very different across jurisdictions.”
Detainer requests — where ICE requests that local jails hold someone for up to 48 additional hours — offer a less visible but numerically significant data point, he continued, as does state-level arrest data that “the more acute, spectacle-driven enforcement activity in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis” can obscure: “Texas, the Deep South and Florida is really where the systemic work is happening.”
Amid immigration enforcement operations late last year, one in four ICE arrests happened in Texas, which has the second-largest undocumented immigrant population in the country.
“Although we tend to think about enforcement as a single-agency question, is this agency participating or is that agency participating, we really need to think about immigration enforcement as a regional apparatus,” said Kocher. “Understanding how people go through the system depends on a variety of factors: where they were arrested, whether they have access to legal counsel, what circuit court the detention center or the case is in, who the immigration judge is.”
For tracking specific detention facilities, Kocher pointed to detentionreports.com, a database his team maintains aggregating current population figures, contract links and facility metadata.
“Transparency is the oxygen of accountability, and no more so than in law enforcement … People have a right to know,” said Loy. “Just never give up. Don’t stop pushing.”
