It took one text message to turn Maria Murillo’s world upside down.
It was from her husband, a gardener on a landscaping job on a balmy weekday morning in La Mirada, she said.
“I’m (expletive)ed…,” it read, but in Spanish.
A video from the scene that June 18 morning showed why, according to the family.
It appears to show federal agents parked curbside in a blue SUV, alongside a La Mirada sidewalk.
Moments later, the video showed what appears to be two agents escorting a man to a vehicle.
“Excuse me, but what’s your name, so your family can know,” someone, a civilian, asked the detained man.
“Jose Luis Zavala,” he said, before being placed inside the SUV and taken away.
It was a scene not unlike many unfolding in the hundreds of federal immigration sweeps across L.A. County in recent weeks as part of the the Trump administration’s massive immigration crackdown.
Federal immigration authorities could not be reached for comment after multiple attempts. But the raids, officials say, are to apprehend the “worst of the worst” who have entered the United States illegally — the people President Donald Trump has long pledged to deport.
But impacted in the sweeps are families such as Murillo’s, who, illegal crossing or not, say they have built honest lives in the U.S. over many years, where hard work has enabled them to pay the bills, raise families and pay taxes. Now, they find themselves waiting for word on what will happen to a family member apprehended. Deportation? Moved to a different facility? Release?
They wait.
Rushing downtown
Later that same day, Murillo had learned — through a call from the federal holding facility in L.A. — that her husband was in federal custody downtown, becoming one of many in L.A. County being processed here.
Her husband, a diabetic with a heart condition, needed his medication, she said. She needed to be there before visiting hours were over — before 4 p.m. — to deliver it.
She and her eldest daughter, Denise, grabbed the medication and rushed from their home in Pomona to the detention facility.
They found themselves in a dimly lit basement entryway, outside a heavy, locked door at the downtown Edward R. Roybal Federal Building.
Federal troops guarded the entryway to a subterranean parking structure at the adjacent Metropolitan Detention Center. Anti-ICE raffiti covered the exterior walls after days of protest over the agency’s heightened presence in L.A.. A sprinkling of protesters chirped at the troops, filling the air along with the din of honking horns driving by.
Around the corner at the federal building, the shouts of a detainee echoed through the slats of a fence.
Homeland Security officers worked crowd control as they made sure the large crowd of people who’d gathered at the big door were family or attorneys.
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Pasadena, and Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo had come earlier in the afternoon demanding to know the status of six immigrants who had been detained in that city earlier in the day. State Sen. Sasha Renee Perez, D-Pasadena, joined them, along with a smattering of immigration advocates and onlookers.
It was a glimpse of life at the hub where many people swept up in the operation are taken to be processed — and where families have come to try and connect with them.
And there, amid the line, amid the guards, was Murillo and her daughter, rushing to the scene before visiting hours closed, holding the medication her husband needed.
At the door
Getting in was a whole other matter.
Not even a member of Congress could make it inside — at least on this day.
Murillo stood in tears as Chu, through a speaker in the door, demanded to be let in to inspect the facility. A crowd of onlookers had followed her and Gordo down the basement corridor.
“Let me remind you, as a member of Congress I have a legal right to inspect these facilities,” she told the guards through an intercom.
Once. Twice. A third time…. A fifth time, to no avail, and often just silence from the other side.
Under existing law, members of Congress can make unannounced oversight visits to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.”
A new ICE policy, however, specifies that ICE field offices are not subject to those requirements. Detained immigrants have been held in some of those offices for days waiting for officials to process their cases.
“This is really sad, what they are doing,” Murillo whispered to Gordo amid Chu’s demands to get in.
Gordo, the Pasadena mayor and also an attorney, wasn’t initially there to assist Murillo. He’d gone there acting as the leader of a city that just experienced a raid outside a shopping center in town. Six men were detained in an early morning raid that involved one agent that witnesses say pulled out a gun and pointed it at a bystander who was trying to take a picture of what was happening.
He was originally working with Chu, with hopes at least she could get in.
But as an attorney, he then took to the big door’s speaker, seeking access on behalf of Murillo, to at least get the meds to Murillo’s husband for his chronic illness.
The clock was ticking. Even Chu, as the late afternoon turned to evening, decided to call it a day.
Eventually, only Gordo, Murillo and her daughter remained outside that imposing door, losing hope as the visiting hour had long passed.
A go at the U.S.
Jose Luis Zavala Ramirez — he generally goes by Luis Zavala — came to the U.S. in 2002 from Guanajuato, the capital city of the central Mexican state of the same name.
Murillo and her husband met in 2003, became friends and ultimately lovers. But he returned to Mexico and then came back to the U.S. again in 2006.
“He was looking for a better life to help his parents in Mexico,” she said of Ramirez, 38.
Early on, he worked as a forklift driver, Murillo said of her husband. Eventually, he was let go. But that led to the job he would have for more than 20 years — gardener for a landscape company.
The two would settle in Pomona, where they would have four children, three daughters and a son.
“It’s hard seeing my family cry,” when she reflected back on the moment she had to tell them about the apprehension.
Murillo acknowledged that back in the early 2000s, her husband initially crossed illegally. She also acknowledged he once had a DUI on his record, back in 2005. But even with “some” traffic infractions and the DUI, her husband was not the “worst of the worst” that the Trump administration has pledged to deport, Murillo said.
She and Gordo added that he was in the process of getting his green card — a process that required a fingerprinting process that he was going through.
“We had started the process, because we wanted to do the things right.”
Murillo said her husband worked relentlessly so Murillo could be a mom at home, and he could be the breadwinner, she said, noting her husband’s disdain for government assistance programs.
“It angers me,” she said. “He didn’t deserve that. We have missed birthdays and holidays because he was always working to provide for me and my children. Then, to tell me he’s a criminal? There’s no words for that.”
A door opens and shuts again
Outside the door, the clock kept ticking, visting hours long over. Evening was descending.
Without answers on actual crimes of detainees or an inspection, Chu left for the day. Others departed and the scene quieted.
Murillo and her daughter stayed, medication in hand, their hopes dimming with the sunlight.
Then, the door slowly opened. An officer emerged.
“Just give us a second, OK?” the guard told Murillo, as he first let Gordo in, acting as her attorney. “Right now, visits are over. They’re done.”
Murillo told the guard she’d been there long before the end of visiting hours.
“There’s been a lot of people visiting today,” the guard told her. It’s been very, very hectic,” the officer said, citing public safety reasons.
Ultimately, the guard let her in, Gordo and Murillo said.
The two would connect on either side of a barrier. They made eye contact, but only their pinkies could touch.
Murillo’s husband got some of his medicine, Gordo said.
A detention officer asked Ramirez if he had any property he wanted to give his wife.
He’d just been paid and had recently cashed the check. It was about $1,900. He gave her all of what he had, save $120, Murillo said.
“He wanted me to take that money,” Murillo said. “He was still thinking of how to provide for us.”
‘Worst of the worst’
Trump, in a social media posting on last week called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials “to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”
He added that to reach the goal officials ”must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside.”
In his presidential campaign, Trump pledged to deport millions of immigrants working in the United States illegally.
Also last week, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin declared, “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine (immigration enforcement) efforts. Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to safeguard public safety, national security and economic stability.’’
When asked if he thought the Trump administration had been too aggressive with its immigration enforcement efforts, Vice President J.D. Vance, in his visit to L.A. last week, said no.
“Anytime a mistake has been made, we’ve corrected that mistake very quickly,” Vance said.
Waiting
As of Monday, June 23, Murillo has yet to see her husband since that day last week, when Gordo helped her get in — an intervention by a local officials acting in a private capacity for which she said she was “really grateful.” She said it was because he stayed, they allowed her to go inside the building.
Gordo said he simply “acted in the moment,” sensing a “moral duty” not as a mayor but as a licensed attorney to do something to help a woman and her husband, “who had been reduced to a brown paper bag,” with the little property he had left.
“The broader question for all of us,” he said, “his how many others are in this situation, with no one to speak for them. Is that really who we are and want to be as a society, and ultimately a country?”
The family was in the process of hiring an immigration attorney, with hopes that they could get Zavala released this week.
In the meantime, Ramirez has been able to call Murillo each day. He tells her of “deplorable” conditions, with sometimes several detainees in one room. When he calls, he’s making sure the mortgage was paid, and the car insurance, Murillo said.
He is awaiting an “A-number” — short for Alien number, which the Department of Homeland Security assigns to non-citizens.
“I don’t eat. I don’t sleep,” Murillo said, adding that her husband is sounding weaker and sicker.
Even this week, she was still reflecting on that day last week when she said her husband was apprehended on his lunch break.
The short video clip didn’t end when Zavala was put in the car.
It showed a bystander approaching the situation:
“What are you guys doing?” he could be heard being asked of the federal agents. “He works with this company?”
The agent: “Hey, go back.”
Another federal law enforcement officer is shown quickly jumping out of the backseat of the SUV and pushing the bystander.
“You can’t (expletive) block us in like that,” he appeared to say.
Another pulled out and deployed his retracting baton.
“Are you impeding us,” they said, in elevated voices through their masks. “Are you impeding us?”
The bystander demands to see their IDs and licenses. The video fades out.
“They told him he better not run,” Murillo said of the lunch break moment, when he first encountered the officers.
“It’s heartbreaking.”