“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.
He joined the organization—whose tagline is “committed to the complete liberation of all Raza, from Chile to Alaska, and supporting the self-determination of oppressed peoples worldwide,”—22 years ago as a college student in San Diego.
Born to a Salvadoran mother and Mexican father in Mid-City, Los Angeles, and now living in South L.A., Gochez leads a group some liken to the Brown Berets, the militant Chicano civil rights group founded in 1967 in East Los Angeles, known for advocating for Mexican-American self-determination and fighting police brutality, educational inequality, and discrimination through protests and community organizing.
Citizens Protecting Neighbors
At 5:45 a.m. on a Thursday, ten vetted volunteers—half of them women, nine of them Latino—gather outside a 7-11. They dedicate their pre-work hours to patrolling Los Angeles streets against ongoing ICE raids. Each shares their reason for being there.
“I won’t just stand by and do nothing,” one woman says.
“L.A. won’t tolerate their terrorizing our people,” a man adds.
In four groups, they fan out across Historic South-Central, covering all directions nearly every other morning.
They chant “Fuera con La Migra” and clap before heading to their cars to begin patrols, like a sports team huddling to strategize before a championship game.
During my ride-along with Gochez, he stops at any American-brand SUV with dark-tinted windows or temporary plates, tapping on windows to check for ICE agents.
“We look for heavily tinted windows, cars on red curbs—where they usually park for snatch-and-grabs—or four cars at an intersection, signaling a stakeout,” he explains.
He honks to shoo birds from the street, avoiding running them over, and pauses to monitor a cop from LAPD's infamous Newton Division as they arrest a homeless man, ensuring no brutality occurs.
Passing the high school where he teaches American history, Gochez recalls being approached by former students.
"They’re watching for ICE, too, running them out," he says. "It’s incredible—churches, workers, even day laborers with my direct line are organizing to stop ICE abductions.”
An hour into the patrol, a tip comes through their hotline about a white truck with green stripes resembling a Homeland Security vehicle at the produce market on Central and Olympic.
Gochez follows the automobile, as our hearts race, only to find a prankster’s truck wrapped to look like a Customs and Border Protection vehicle. Instead, a “Booty Patrol” decal on its side gives it away as just another false alarm, courtesy of L.A.'s decal wars.
That morning, South-Central is devoid of noticeable ICE activity. Every 20 minutes, Gochez checks in with a colleague, addressed simply as “comrade.”
“All clear today, so we live to fight another day,” he says.
Community Always Wins
As we wrap up, the hotline lights up with reports of a mass raid at a Hollywood Home Depot. Gochez opts not to go, knowing ICE will likely be gone by the time he arrives.
“We’ve got someone from our group in that area already,” he says.
Minutes later, Union del Barrio’s Instagram posts a video from a member who caught ICE in the act. The post is shared hundreds of times by noon, even airing on local news.
“ICE is getting bolder because they’re frustrated,” Gochez says. “We’re making their job a living hell, and we won’t stop until they’re out of our neighborhoods. You see the fear in their eyes up close. They’re bringing in agents from rural states to abduct our workers, and they’re nervous, outnumbered in South-Central.”
Though his morning patrol is at an end, Gochez remains on-call 24/7, a commitment unbroken since ICE raided an apparel company the first Friday of the mass-raids, where he was onsite.
"I'm ready for them any hour," he says.
Still, he balances being a present father and partner while teaching two daily “Know Your Rights Against ICE” English and Spanish workshops in his free time.
"What is happening right now is a war against our people, and we have every right to defend ourselves," said Gochez in a recent State of the Union speech on Union del Barrio's Instagram account. “Sometimes it feels like chasing ghosts, but I know for certain we’ve stopped ICE from taking people and the righteous resistance must continue."
In that same speech, Gochez compared this struggle against ICE from L.A.'s undocumented to the Palestinian resistance against Zionists in Israel.
"It's all ethnic cleansing, just like how they are going to remove them from their Indigenous homeland, ICE is trying to remove us from our indigenous homeland," he said. "In the spirit of 500 years of indigenous resistance, we don't give a damn about what white supremacists like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and what they think. This our homeland."
Unión del Barrio employs a nonviolent strategy of documenting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, communicating these observations through social media and group chats to alert communities, and running ICE out agents by mobilizing dozens or even hundreds of residents to protest their presence.
"We aren't apologizing for loving and defending our people," Gochez said in the video.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism sent Gochez a letter that purposely looked like a subpoena; a fear tactic that accuses his organization of “financing and supporting coordinated protests and riots” in Los Angeles. It demands that Gochez preserves emails, texts, and financial records or face potential criminal referral.
When asked if the cease and desist letter scared him, Gochez tells L.A. TACO, “Their allegations against us are false. They are trying to scare us and silence us, but we won't stop organizing to defend our community. If anything, we are going to double down on our work.”
As to the question on everybody's mind, we ask Gochez when the ICE raids are going to stop.
"There are not enough armed terrorists to kidnap all of us if we stick together," he says. "We must use our people power to make them retreat. Just praying and hoping is not going to work. These fascists are going to stop once we unite and tell them to stop."
