“We suspect the last big tip came from one of their own,” Ron Gochez tells me from the driver’s seat of his SUV, patrolling Central Avenue block by block. “Her words were deliberate, clear, and calm—unlike the distressed, scared, or angry calls we usually get. She had no local L.A. accent.”
Gochez is heading north from Florence to Martin Luther King Boulevard, weaving through every street while looking for signs of ICE agents and talking to me.
That past Sunday morning, Union del Barrio’s Instagram posted a photo to its nearly 100,000 followers, exposing 200 ICE agents staged in an industrial area of Bell.
“We think that an ICE agent leaked their meet-up to us, where they set up a depot to plan their day,” Gochez says, a hint of pride in his voice. “We disrupted their operation, and they retreated to their main depot in Terminal Island, San Pedro. Our eyes are on their stations day and night, tracking when they leave and return.”
Gochez founded L.A.’s Union del Barrio chapter in 2004. Amid recent ICE raids across Southern California, his organization's page has become the top source for real-time, verified ICE sightings in Los Angeles.