“You guys should be ashamed of your fucking selves,” said Daisy Araujo.
“We’re making money,” a masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Operations agent replied in the middle of a detention in Escondido, California, last week.
As Araujo explains, around 8:00 a.m. on October 9, 2026, in the city that lies just over 30 miles northeast of downtown San Diego, a group of men sat on a swath of land across from the California Super Gas Station on Center City and Fifth Avenue.
The men were familiar to her; she often saw them sitting there under the trees.
On this day, Araujo was driving down the street to put gas in her car when she saw the men and decided to pull over and start recording as they detained a man who identified himself as “Roberto” in video footage reviewed by L.A. TACO.
Araujo asked the man for the phone number of someone she could alert about his detainment.
He gave her a number and the name of the woman she believed was his wife. When Araujo called the number, the woman confirmed her name but didn’t seem to know a “Roberto” and sounded confused.
She then texted Araujo and asked for a picture of the man who had been taken. Araujo sent her the picture and asked the woman if it was her husband. She never received a response.
The man detained in the video died this past weekend under ICE Custody at the Otay Mesa Detention Center—the first death at the facility since the beginning of Trump’s second presidential term.
The man's wife, who spoke with L.A. TACO and confirmed her husband was a father of five kids, said the family had lived in Escondido for 23 years. She said her husband would normally get up around 5:30 a.m. and take whatever job he could, including landscaping, often referring to her husband in present tense during the phone call.
It was clear she had not come to terms with the fact that her husband had died.
The man initially identified by ICE in a press release as “Roberto Jimenez Gutierrez,” a 43-year-old from Guatemala, was misidentified, according to reporting by KPBS. San Diego County has also confirmed that the name released by ICE is not the same as the man who died.
The family of the man in the video, who spoke with KPBS, is unsure why their loved one identified themselves as “Roberto” at the time of his detention, and told us his actual name is Guillermo Pascual Vergansa. The family confirmed that his age and country of origin, as stated in the ICE press release, are correct.
Vergansa died at 11:31 a.m. on October 24, after staff found him unresponsive in his safety cell, and the cause of his death is under investigation, according to ICE.
KPBS reported that Vergansa’s wife claimed he did not have any medical issues prior to detention, and the family denied he had a criminal record. ICE has not updated its initial press release to reflect the name of the individual given to KPBS.
Vergansa is the 58th person to die under ICE custody since the beginning of the second term of Trump’s presidency, according to reporting by L.A. TACO.
The Otay Mesa Detention Center has long faced allegations of inhumane conditions. A detainee alleged in a note thrown over the facility’s fence that detainees had not received any fresh food in almost 300 days. A county inspection revealed that two cases of tuberculosis had gone unreported by the facility's medical staff.
“ I think it's really important for people to know that if they see something, say something,” Araujo told L.A. TACO. “You don't even have to say anything, just record. That's as much as we can do to help. Whoever is getting detained. Whoever's getting kidnapped. That is the only thing we can do at the moment. Gather information, contact information to reach out to the family, their loved ones, and let them know.”
“You don't even have to say anything, just record. That's as much as we can do to help. Whoever is getting detained. Whoever's getting kidnapped. That is the only thing we can do at the moment. Gather information, contact information to reach out to the family, their loved ones, and let them know.”
Escondido is the kind of place where, on hot summer Friday evenings, you can get kettle corn at Cruisin’ Grand then grab a torta at the swap meet.
Residents describe Escondido’s migrant working-class community as having always been under attack–weathering several waves of anti-immigrant sentiment.
One of the first viral immigration enforcement videos, which showed an ERO agent attempting to use an administrative warrant to enter a woman's home as she defended her rights to deny him entry in January 2025, would foreshadow the later immigration agent surge in Los Angeles and across the Southland.
When the raids started hitting Escondido in the summer of 2025, an undercurrent of fear started running beneath the town's normally sleepy streets. The vibrant swap meet was quieter – a stall owner said she was struggling because the foot traffic was low. The children who normally played outside no longer did, with growing uneasiness quietly blanketing the streets.
It seemed as if federal immigration agents were always in Escondido–reports of a truck left abandoned, or ICE detaining people at the Home Depot on East Valley Parkway or staging in the public parking lot across from the police department.
Escondido has become one of the top three epicenters for ICE detentions in San Diego County, with 179 ICE apprehensions since January of 2025, according to the Deportation Data Project.
In February, L.A. TACO first reported that the Escondido Police Department had a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to lease its firing range for training Homeland Security Investigation agents.
Community members organized weekly protests, high school students walked out of class, and neighbors called for the contract to be canceled and for ICE to get out of their community. Even after hours of public comment, the majority-Republican city council refused to put the contract on the agenda for a vote, leaving it in place.
Alejandra Ramos has been participating in community patrolling a few times a week in Escondido, going back to 2020. She also works with rapid response organizations when she can.
“In the past, immigrants have been targeted through checkpoints,” Ramos says. “There has been rental ordinances against our people. It's just historically almost like, ‘Yeah, come here and pick up workers, pick up the people that live here . . . We welcome this activity into town.’”
She says the latest alleged immigration enforcement surge, launched in early October. differs from past activity she’s seen in the city.
“The intensity, the way in which officers act, the aggressive manner . . . we've seen the tactical gear a lot more, rather than the undercover agents. It's more militarized,” Ramos says.
Vergansa’s death at the Otay Mesa Detention Center felt like a personal loss to many in Escondido. It lost a community member and neighbor, while earning a never-sought place in the Trump Administration's legacy of spearheading the nation's deadliest immigration enforcement campaign.
“ This government, these agencies, they see us as numbers, as bodies,” Ramos says. “They don't see us as human beings, and our lives are just disposable. They have no respect for human dignity and human life, and I think that it's a constant reminder of why we get up early in the morning and make sure that our communities are safe. Or if there's a sighting, we go and verify it because we know that any time that we can prevent a detention from happening, we are also possibly preventing the death of one of our loved ones.”
