You're listening to a stage talk titled Monitoring US Immigration Raids. This week, we were joined by my colleague, Bellingcat researcher Kalina Koltai, and our long -standing publishing partners, Kevin Clancy, co -founder of Evident Media, and Sergio Olmos, an investigator from CalMatters.
Together, we discuss the latest investigations from our collective, which focused on identifying the scale of immigration raid operations in the states, sharing advice for other researchers on what to look out for in bystander videos, and what, from patterns identified, could emerge over the next few months in other regions. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Moore, on Thursday the 17th of July 2025 in the Bellingcat Discord server. Welcome all to this week's Stage Talk.
Since January 23rd, there's been an uptick in United States immigration and customs enforcement operations throughout the U .S. But the scale of these deportation raids have hit global headlines over the past few months. There's horror stories of people being picked up off the streets in unmarked cars, taken from places of work, and
court hearings emerged. The latest statistics from ICE as of June 29th shows that there are 57 ,861 people currently detained, with 41 ,495 of those, 71 .7%, with no prior criminal convictions. Within this server, many of you have been monitoring the scale of these operations, looking into individual incidents and highlighting the latest news. Our speakers today have all been covering this for
a few months. first looking at events in Vegas field, California, where border patrol agents were operating more than 300 miles from the U .S. southern border, and then to the recent June raids in Los Angeles, where patterns of arrest began to emerge. Kalina Koltay, a former Los Angeles local and a colleague of mine is here to speak on that recent work and how individual researchers could take some of the lessons we learned from that observation to other raids
across the states. I want to also extend a warm welcome to our partners on these stories. Kevin Clancy, co -founder of Evident, and Sergio Olmas, investigative reporter for California -based CalMatters. After we've heard a breakdown of the two investigations, we'll be taking audience questions. As I've just mentioned, as we talk, please make sure to add your questions in the chat box, which is the right -hand side of your
screen, via the message bubble icon. And please note within your question if you do not want me to read your username out, because as I mentioned, this is being audio recorded. I have already popped the two investigations in the chat, so have a read of those. And I'm going to pass it over to you now, Kalina, to run us through all this. Thanks, Charlie, for the wonderful introduction. And if any of my co -speakers want to chime in,
please feel free to do so. So the two stories there, which is one that focus on Bakersfield, that's from a few months ago, which is a lot of agricultural and farmland, a little bit more towards like central California, if you're familiar with the state how it's like very long. And then the second story, which is focused on are the most recent like raids over the past month in June, but mostly within the Los Angeles area, but also within sort of like wider Southern California.
So one of our colleagues, Carlos, who worked with, sorry, Joe and Kevin on our first piece here, we really should because we are, as Trump coming into office and there's all these talks about more and more immigration rates, we really didn't see border patrol stepping up the rates. And so one thing that was particularly interesting is that for our border patrol, their jurisdiction typically is when 100 miles of border, and it's of any border, so it could even be of the water
dispenser had to be the U .S.-Mexico border. But that's typically where they are, sort of, their jurisdiction is. That is where they are during the patrolling. And so one thing that ended up becoming an interesting part and focus of this piece is that we noticed it's in Bakersfield or in areas that are much further with the border, over 300 miles away from the border. So something
that was not within their area. So we decided to look at from our point of view, we went and found social media footage, video recordings from bystanders, people around these raids occurring in particular. One thing I thought was interesting that was one of the great bits about having the partnership is that Sergio did a variety of interviews, including talking with Chief Pavino, who said they weren't doing raids on farmlands, if I'm correct, remembering that. But we did find evidence
of a raid occurring on farmland. And in particular, when they picked up a variety of agricultural workers, I believe our numbers are that they obtained 78 people. And of the 78 people, 77 of them had no criminal history. They were not aware. They were not on Martin Schulz radar. And so I think what this really highlighted was sort of like the beginning of what we end up seeing later on happening in Los Angeles, and of course, possibly like across the US, is that
there is these sort of like wordless. So without a war without sort of a sort of like judicial piece of paper so you can go and pick up this person, sort of these indiscriminate raids that are going on in areas where they suspect people who might be undocumented migrants might be working. So this is something that border patrols should not be doing. They don't necessarily have the authorization to be doing that. And they might say that they actually do have the authority.
Because seemingly, in their mind, your level of criminality is as soon as you're entering into the US, you're essentially already a criminal. which I think sort of counters to what probably most people consider what they want in terms of immigration enforcement. So from our standpoint, we were able to, from BellyCast, we know we focus a lot on open source investigations. So we look at the social media. We rely on the social media
content that's put out there. We're able to geolocate that content and also show that the footage that we're finding is of the appropriate time. It's not really old footage. that's being repurposed as a new footage. And then in some of those cases, we will find the original post of the person who recorded that footage and be able to get that eyewitness testimony that sometimes we don't
always get to do from afar. So I think that's one of the wonderful things about our partnerships, is that we're able to couple with people on the ground and go talk to the people who are being affected, people who are recording the footage. But we do that by also being able to find the footage. And of course, with evidence, it's if...
If you haven't already watched it, I really do recommend watching these videos because sometimes even when I send these stuff to my parents or friends, I know not everyone's going to read the article, but everyone will watch a video. So the video and the visual component, because I think that's what makes this so compelling in these investigations is being able to see, yeah, it's one thing to say 300 miles, but to see how far away 300 miles is another thing.
So I think there's a really huge... important critical component in company visual stuff or being able to visually see people being chased. It puts a different sort of level of humanity into the story. And so from that investigation, ACLU was able to put an injunction on the type of rates that the El Centro Border Patrol unit was doing in Bakersfield. But as maybe no surprise to anyone that Chief Pavino, who is leading that
District NED became the head of all of DHS. In Los Angeles, sort of right as like protests and raids were picking up within the Los Angeles area. And DHS, for those of you who are not in the U .S., is Department of Homeland Security, which includes things like what we call ICE or like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It includes sort of TSA. It includes Border Patrol.
It includes a wide, very, very, very wide swath of departmental agencies to be like the head of DHS in a such a large city like Los Angeles. So now if you like fast forward a few months into the summer, raids in Los Angeles were kicking up a lot more and really kind of like hit a I would say a boiling point but definitely sort of exploded in tension around June 6th, 7th,
8th that weekend. But the series of protests happening in Los Angeles in the Paramount area because raids were happening in places like Home Depots, which is not a place you you saw it happening in Vegas filled with car washes, farm workers, things where you imagine people who might be undocumented work in looking for employment or having some sort of form of employment. And so people in Los Angeles, which is a very strong immigrant community, really were not fans of
this. So a lot of protesting started happening. but raids did not stop. So we, again, teamed up with Evidence and CalMatters and began collecting footage alongside with them. We started geolocating, archiving, trying to track down sort of voices in those pieces of people who are like the original posters, businesses in which these are happening. And I think one of the really highlighting things about this is that they're one, there is just,
an overwhelming amount of footage. I think these are raised happening in a very densely populated area. Everyone has cell phones. These weren't things happening in the secret dead of night in a completely rural area where you don't see it, in places that seemingly felt very much warrantless in that way, that these agents would show up. According to the footage, what we have is they would just show up, go and try to round people up, and then leave without showing identification.
without showing boards, without even not always clearly identifying who they are, so having unmarked vehicles. And so some of our interesting bits being able to take sort of like a wide macro view lens of the raids that were happening is that what we saw home depots, car washes, food stand workers, people who are hardworking members of society trying, who are the ones who are being
targeted around them. And even with the car washes, we saw like locations being hit, car washes are being hit multiple times, so agents will come back on multiple days and go to the same location. And in some cases, we suspect customers also being rounded up with that, not just workers, which I think also really highlights that these were very indiscriminate rates. They're just going showing up to locations and seeing who they can pick up. These were without a warrant.
And so very targeted and very racially profiled. I think the other kind of component about this is that agents were not very clearly marked. In some videos, we didn't see like a clear border patrol vehicle or a vehicle that had some sort of like, lately, a lot of them did not. In some cases, there were no license plates at all. So unmarked vehicle, no license plates, everyone's mask, not everyone's always wearing a clear, it might just say police, but you don't know
what. a agency they're with, anyway can go and buy a vest that says police on it. And then also like an overwhelming I think show of like force and particularly with this play of like weapons from rifles to handguns to less than lethal in a way that says felt very inappropriate. It felt like if they were maybe maybe a Canada versus like in Los Angeles. So I think that it was something that was particularly stark in this footage.
I think and even looking forward to it I also say like we don't have even a cut there was so much footage out there so many sightings I would say that I wouldn't even see like our map is Comprehensive of everything that's happened. There's probably things that were definitely missing So I don't want to say that that's just sort of the amount of footage we had I think a team of like four people on our side looking at footage and even then it was just so much.
And even if any of the Discord members here were in any of the threads, you would just see those threads here on the channel. People share content all the time. So I think one thing that I also found particularly useful is that a lot of our bystanders were very thorough in terms of saying this is the exact time, this is the exact date, this is where we are, this is where it's happening. They would try to pan around. And so I think the public has a strong vested interests in being
able to document this is happening. You know, a lot of this work can't happen without the public's work participation in it. And so that was what made this job or the particular work on this piece, I don't want to say easy, but it made it a lot more helpful versus just like footage being uploaded with no information along and try to say, guys, is this old? Is this new? Where is this? Is this Los Angeles? Is this New York?
So I think that's a wonderful thing. And looking forward on this, I would say the work is certainly not stopped. I would say like, one thing that's nice is that there is an injunction currently in place that they shouldn't be doing any indiscriminate raids. So I will say it's been a little bit quieter this week. I haven't seen a raid in Los Angeles that's like out of Home Depot in a car wash.
There's still arrests that are happening. But I think fortunately, this reporting and the work of lots of people on the ground has at least given a judge enough confidence to say, like, we're going to put an injunction in place right now for LA. But given that we've just had the big, beautiful bill here in the US that has allocated billions of more funding to ICE, I unfortunately don't anticipate this stopping anytime soon in Los Angeles, nor possibly nationwide. We do see
rates nationwide as well. And I think that is only going to amp up. And I think if you go to Chief Favino's Instagram account, he says that we're still here. We're still doing rest in LA. He's not planning on leaving any time soon. So I think the work will continue. And I don't know if Kevin and Sergey want to pop in or add anything else to that. Otherwise, I will keep gapping. Kalina is right. No one reads the articles. Your parents won't. They'll see the video. Everyone
does see the videos. That's on Kevin's part. But on the open source stuff, Los Angeles is the second biggest market. There's so much press here. I run a group chat of like 50 photographers here of all the major outlets. We caught maybe a handful, less than five actual rates. Everything was from just regular people on their cell phones. And without the open source stuff, there'd be no map. The open source thing is so important, especially if this goes to other cities where
there's even less press. I mean, no, like, you know, having those hundred videos on there, like that blew my mind. And I've been watching this every day, you know, cause everything's so scattered. There's right here, right here. But even seeing those 15 separate home depots, I was telling Kevin like, Jesus, I like that blew my mind. And I see this every day. Yeah. Yeah, and I'll just I'll just chime in and say that, you know, Queen is right in thinking about the way that
this could expand in the future. I think that, you know, the Big Beautiful bill is something that's going to continue. I mean, not only is ICE the now the single largest funded, you know, Department of Homeland Security, you know, the worst that we have in the United States. You know, the way that we have the ability to kind of combat some of these unconstitutional actions
is basically a game of whack -a -mole. They will move to another city, another jurisdiction, another sector of the border patrol, and quite potentially just use these same tactics until somebody tells them to stop. They've basically already done that in California, moving from the Eastern District of California to the Central District, where they didn't have an injunction in place and used very similar tactics, as we saw in the video. One could assume that they would continue to
do this across the US as well. ice as a shot in the arm from a funding perspective. The video itself, we would not have been able to produce something as compelling had we not had such a great partnership with everybody that's here, but we're really proud of where it went. It made it to the front page of our law on Reddit and it got over 4 million views or whatever it may
have been. We have such a great product to put out there that people have the ability to kind of, you know, you know, resonates with audiences. But at the same time, like it really does make a difference to see it rather than just read it. Page of Reddit, the people's page, the real fun page. That's the real A1. Yeah, and I think it just it does highlight that. This work is, it's important. I think sometimes it like, I will say on our end, it's like, man, we're just
like looking at footage all day. Is this going to mean anything? Is this going to help for anyone? There's a lot of like, I think what's nice is that there's a lot of like local reporting that's also coupled along with this. So like, like one of the local outlets in Los Angeles is called KTLA. They do a lot of like, we'll see a piece
that happens social media. uh, pisco spiral someone's arrest and we're then we're there we're trying to like figure out victim's information our local reports we go and they'll actually go and like get to speak to uh the person who is detained like family members and so now we're like yes we are verified this is a nice thing like one thing I think um can sometimes make this uh piece difficult and other feature piece is that now people are so keen on reporting which is great
but there'll be a lot of things that might be just like regular police activity that's not necessarily immigration related and so I think that's one thing that's also like a tricky component is that like which of these pieces, what bits of incidents are we going to include? Is this just like a traffic stop? Like that's just the right way someone ran a red light or is this a sort of a target detention that's using excessive
force? And so the local reporting, I think it's like a great coupling to that because it gives us another sort of like check on it. And not every single piece we include has local reporting. And so, you know, we are relying on, you know, the video footage that we have, you know, there's some nice footage we don't include because we're just like unsure. And, you know, that's why we want to have also a high level of like transparency, a high level of trust. We want to verify it itself.
She'll get all those sort of checks that you kind of expect with the bell and cat name. We're not just sort of adding everything into it. But I do think that it is very much a community effort because I will say that I even was looking at our press here as like instances that were added from community members in Discord. And I was like, oh great, I had missed that. Or there's aggregator Instagram accounts that would go and get stuff in the public. And it's, I think it's
a community effort by far. I don't think this kind of work and the work going forward is on one person or one agency or anything like that. I think it's the work of thousands of people collectively together looking for accountability.
um and uh history and i think that's that's why we do some of this is that it's not just to say like oh here's the thing we want like uh you know to like say like these guys are bad guys we want people to be held accountable for their actions and i think that is done through group efforts from our legal sense from um the open source sense from our reporting sense it's it's everyone has a piece of play and i feel like giving people the sense of power and agency and
being able to make a change is like really important because i think Uh, and for myself or for others, if you feel that way, sometimes you feel very powerless, like there's all this bad stuff that's happening in the world and you made it feel like I can't do anything to do it. Like I'm just one person. I have my job. I have all these other things. And I feel like even being able to be like, Hey, here's the video that I found someone there and sharing that, um, I think actually
adds to it. It's you still making a small piece and feeling like you're being some sort of agents of change and agent accountability and giving yourself, um, a bit of sort of control over that situation, because that is a help. So don't feel completely powerless. Like a lot of this work cannot be done without people like you. I feel like this is the perfect time for me to come
back in. Thanks so much, Kalina, for the overview of basically what's been unraveling over the last few months in the States and what we've been witnessing here, not only in the server, but on all of our national news as well across the world. There's a lot of love for the video
format as well in the chats. As I was reading some of the comments, it made me think actually, Kevin, that maybe we should bring you back for another stage talk or just about covering open source matters via video because I know a lot of people in here are quite passionate about open source and even do that in work. It might be of interest to how you approach that medium
through. But going back to what we're speaking about today, I wanted to quickly throw to Sergio because I wanted to ask, at CalMatters, you've been covering the rates, particularly in Bakersfield, since January when Trump first kind of escalated these immigration rates. Were there any early signs, early warning signs looking back now at the cases of the surprise raids of farm workers back in January in Bakersfield that you may not have picked up on back then, but kind of can
see clearly now? At the time, when I was in Bakersfield on January 7th, I was there for court records, completely unrelated. And then uncle gets a call in Spanish and he's like, and he hangs up and I was like, what's that? And he's like, well, someone said... Ice was at Costco. Then I go to Costco. And then we spent the whole next couple of days chasing like what ended up being border patrol. And later I go back with Kevin. We do this documentary. We find all the patterns, right?
We find out kind of where they went, Bellingcat verified stuff. And we did that. And then when the raids happened in Los Angeles, it was like the exact same thing, but like ramped up to, you know, times 10, you know, home depots. They also went to farmland, started going to car washes. And, you know, in the court filings, it actually Right here in Los Angeles, there's a temporary restraining order that was granted Friday, like at 6 p .m. That means they put a pause on the
raids, right? In the different core district where the Bakersfield is, there's a preliminary injunction saying, you know, no raids while this case is going on. In the filings, it actually says that what they saw in Los Angeles, you know, bears a striking similarity to what they saw in Bakersfield, Operation Return Descender, because they were doing the exact same things. I mean, it's not just... It wasn't, it's not just us
finding those patterns, right? Like I think the YouTube video is called, there's a pattern here. You know, the court agreed, like they saw that that's, Hey, there's an injunction here and you're doing the same thing here. Just going up to workplaces, going to people who appear Latino and asking them for their papers, you know, and a judge in the Eastern district actually said in court, you can't just go to people with brown skin and say, you know, showing your papers. I mean, this
is stuff that's pretty basic. It's actually, you know, like in terms of law, like it's, it's pretty basic, but, uh, seeing the scale of it. is important. You see how many home depots you see, exactly which places they're hitting. And then the other thing to remember is I think like with Bakersfield, if you go back in time and you see what was said, like on our side, on the media, we had to echo what, what border patrol gave us. It was the only information we had.
And they were saying they went after criminals. They had a list of criminals. And so everybody was saying they went after, you know, child molesters and stuff. Cause that's what border patrol said. Later we discovered that wasn't true at all. Right. 77 of the 78 people they arrested in Bakersfield. They had no knowledge of criminal immigration history prior to encountering them. Here in Los Angeles, they're saying the same thing, but we all know now that they don't tell the truth,
right? They're not telling the truth to the public. So all this work is very important. It takes time, but it's so important, I think. Absolutely. Just related to that, Opti Storm in the comments has just said, why don't we hear more from personnel? Border Patrol, ICE, DHS, is there peer pressure to kind of not speak out about some of the atrocities? Has anyone got any insight on that? Like why
we're not hearing more whistleblowers? Well, Nick Miroff just did an incredible article for the Atlantic on, he talked to a dozen current and former ICE agents about how demoralized they are. And that's a great article for the Atlantic. I'll pop it in the chat. But if Colleen or Kevin, I mean, Kevin spent time with Border Patrol guys when we did the documentary. I mean, But we haven't published anything from the inside since then.
We have, and we have seen, you know, visual evidence of some of those people that we spend time with in El Centro engaged in operations in Los Angeles. You know, some of the same people that we had met and spent time with and, you know, got to know who were genuine, like genuinely like kind and, you know, didn't necessarily give, you know, kind of the. the kind of the impression that they really wanted to go out and engage in some
of these activities. I mean, I think it's just more or less like this is their job or they've been asked to do this by their chief. But with that being said, I mean, we saw them, you know, with masks on, you know, in Los Angeles, you know, engaged in some of this activity. And it just kind of shows, you know, the human side of it in a lot of ways. I mean, we knew they were we knew who they were when they weren't doing that. And then now we've seen them, you
know, out and engaging in this activity. And it's just kind of Um, it's hard to see all these people with all these masks and think that there is going to be even side to that as well. Uh, kinder says that we've been, we look, we seem like good people. That's cause you haven't met Kevin in person. He's awful. He's a terrible person. Uh, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, what I was going to say, uh, What I was going to say is one thing that's been under -reported as an unintended side effect probably with the masking component and being unmarked vehicles and all that, which I think is just egregious and something that we expect
better from law enforcement. But I think because they're hiding their identities and they're masking, there's been bad actors and opportunists who have taken advantage of that, who are pretending to be ICE enforcement officers or border patrol to commit crimes. And I think that's also what
makes it really difficult. It's like you really don't know, like if, if you did want to kidnap someone or wanted to carjack someone, just pretend you're an ICE member, because like, you're kind of under this guise of like, you know, yeah, that's the same sort of activity that they're doing. So I think, unfortunately, there is like, in a sense, it's given the opportunity to create more crime versus like preventing crime. Absolutely.
By using unmarked vehicles. Yeah, and I think in the gender -based violence and misogyny channel yesterday, someone was sharing a case of that. I don't know if Settle Knife can maybe share that link in the chat for anyone who's not in that channel. But there was a thing about women, I think, being stalked and harassed by people pretending to be ICE agents, which is terrifying. I also wanted to ask, because we actually asked ISM Border Control about these unlocked offices
that we saw in videos in LA. What was their response to that? I can take that. It was about as boilerplate as you could expect. I guess I could pull it up, but there really wasn't a whole lot actually. mentioned about what we asked about. It was more or less talking about the ICE agents that are conducting these raids are under threat and that there's been an increase in instances in which they've been targeted for their actions and they're brave. When asked about specific incidents, they
just deflected. They didn't really give us anything that was kind of a concrete answer to any of the questions that we've asked them. seems to be kind of a common, you know, retort that, you know, the administration will, you know, give people, which is more or less just, you know, everything is fantastic. And, you know, the brave members of our Department of Homeland Security
are the ones that are under under fire. I was going to say, I actually just pulled up one of their responses, which I feel like is fair because they send it to us. I don't mind sharing their response, which I was right, they. I feel like they didn't actually read our questions and just kind of like sent us stuff because they responded to things that we didn't even ask about. But one of the things they said, and this is quoting from their official quotes here, a lot of members
of ERO slash HSI are working undercover. And by the way, critics have clearly never been on an ICE operation because they would see, one, they verbally identify themselves as ICE or Homeland Security. Two, they wear vests that say ICE slash ERO. or Homeland Security, and three, they are flanked by vehicles that also say the name of the apartment. These arguments are getting a
little desperate, end quotes. So that's what they said, which I feel confident saying that is false because we have one, plenty of video evidence of people showing up with unmarked vehicles, not flanked by, unless the vehicles are way far back, nowhere anywhere near visual. We have videos of people being completely, in plain clothes,
so not wearing vests. And they might say, I will say identifying themselves as ICE and Homeland Security, but I feel like that's pretty low bar just to say that you're ICE with no badge, no badge number, no last name, masked in plain clothes, or just like ballistic armor and unmarked vehicles. So I would say, They say they're quote, these arguments are getting a little desperate. I feel like they're probably a little bit more of a desperate response to address it. And let's just
I would add to that. Sorry, it's not like there's a good faith. It's not like you're getting on the phone with DHS and they're talking. They're just emailing the same thing they tweet out. Like whoever that edge lord is, is tweeting out the DHS Twitter stuff. It's the same exact thing they post on there. They just email it to you and to everyone else. It, there is no good faith discussion of like, what's going on here. And they try to sit down and explain it. That's not
happy. They literally sometimes some stuff is in all caps like that. It's literally the stuff they post on Twitter. Yeah. I've got to admit when I read the response, um, before we went to publish, uh, I did say it's a bit Trump -esque in terms of the language use. Uh, and as you say, the capitalization as well in spaces, um,
Interesting, very interesting. I wanted to play Devil's Advocate for a second and ask you whether you had come across any false flag videos where people were claiming that immigration rates were taking place in their area, but you found, you geolocated or chronolocated that that wasn't the case. Let's just play, I don't know, I don't want to support ISO or suggest that that's happening, but is any of that the case? We had a comment in the... chat about not really wanting to verify
in case they came across AI videos. I haven't come across any claims of that, but I have seen claims that people have been making false claims about deportations. I've seen every single video in our data sets, plus ones that we haven't published on yet. I would say for the AI one, because it's interesting, especially because I do a lot of
the AI stuff normally. I have not seen a single AI generated video of like someone being arrested and I think that is very telling because you'll see this happen for like conflict or for other events and I think maybe because there's just so much genuine footage that no one feels the need to AI generate something, or maybe it just
doesn't even go anywhere. I would say the only AI generate thing is that sometimes these like Instagram news accounts, and I use news very loosely, that'll use like an AI generated image, but then they'll have like a real description of like what happened, but the image is meant mostly as a chase holder, because you have to post like an image. But then so like the story of the accurate images were just like, dramaticized for like people clicking on it, you know, it's
very clearly AI. Um, as far as things that are, uh, uh, people saying it's a nice rate, it's not, I think there are some things that are hard, um, that we may not include because, um, like it's, there's some things you just don't know. Like, if we just see someone being like, um, like, okay, there are some things that we may not determine. So I think, I think yesterday in Watsonville, there was a raid, um, at a farm
that's a cannabis farm. And so this local sheriff said, this is not immigration related, it's just here. But a bunch of users who are posting video footage say like, ICE is here, ICE is here. And so like the question is like, okay, was this really an immigration thing, an ICE thing, because we didn't see border patrol, or is that what do we take the sheriff, local sheriff saying that this is not immigration related, it was really due to cannabis, although cannabis is
legal in the state of California. So I think that is like there are questions like that. I think, you know, we sometimes see there are cases where we don't have very much context for what's happening. So it might be like, we saw one video that was like, very sort of like aggressive, there was scuffling happening. A woman's photo sort of taken and like dropped to the ground. We don't see it like we barely we get maybe a
glimpse of a badge might say like ice. And then that's it and then we can't find anything else in there. And so we're like, is this immigration related? Is this something other like we don't sometimes we just don't know or another case in which uh someone there's so many instances so there's uh someone who's driving uh ice individuals came over and like ran their vehicle um hit the this this man who was going to take it he was
um i believe he is a u .s citizen he was just at a protest and he was recording so we had like video footage uh and so they wanted to arrest him because of of whatever he did at the protest but for footage it seemed like he didn't really do very much um but like they ran his vehicle um his kids and his partner were in the car um as well And so you're like, is this immigration related? You might say it's ICE, but then it's probably due to an apprentice. So then it's like,
where do we try to draw the line? Is it really just arrest or deportations? Or is it any sort of activity that Border Patrol is doing? It's ones that I was unsure because everyone is playing close. So someone might be saying, this is ICE, this is ICE, they're playing close, and then I do more research, and then I do find out it's ICE. Because sometimes I'm like, I just don't know. This is someone being kidnapped off the street. You literally don't know if people are
in plain clothes. So I think there are a variety of instances, if that answers the question, that we sometimes have to leave a bit of doubt. Like every instance, we take a bit of doubt. Like I don't even say for sure that something is an arrest until I can say. that's clearly an arrest happening versus like people just showing up and talking to people. Yeah. And then sometimes it comes out later that like, oh, yes, that was for sure an immigration arrest. And the anonymous.
Sorry, go ahead. Can I add to that? In Los Angeles, people got very quickly like the general public are very smart about figuring out what's ice and what's. like just regular police and the sheriff here for Los Angeles actually tweeted out a video identifying their uniforms because they were like just so you know this is what we are and we always dress this way we always have our badge out. The sheriff did that for
Los Angeles County. I also say like California like when you guys are verifying stuff in other states as this spreads nationwide like California's we're lucky in the sense that there's this law here that police like the SB 54 police sheriffs the state police the California patrol and then we're actually by law allowed to go on immigration rates so. What's great here is, you know, LAPD and sheriffs will never be involved in immigration rates here. And so it's they always are identified.
They always wear their badges out. They don't dress like they're contractors in a foreign war, unlike Border Patrol and ICE to dress like they're just like in a war zone. Right. And so it's it's kind of it's interesting that like now when I see someone in fatigues, I'm like, OK, that that's going to be immigration related because LAPD does not show in fatigues to calls. Right. Like the sheriff's doesn't do that. They're not going
to go on immigration rates. So That's not going to be the case in other like Texas or Colorado, whatever, where police can assist immigration rates. That's the really cool thing to hear about California in that sense. I will say it did became apparent really quickly. Oh, I can see people's faces in this video. That must be, if you see someone who's masked, who doesn't make circular, I'm like, oh, that's better. I just, this is related and maybe this is again, a Kalina question.
But for anybody who's listening, who might not be as familiar with open source, how important is the bystanders role in this, like to film and to capture that footage? And what kind of information are you looking for in the footage when trying to de -locate or chrono -locate these scenes? I cannot emphasize this enough. The work
cannot happen without bystanders. There is no way for this kind of reporting and these kind of investigations to happen without the very brave people who decide to turn on their camera, record, and then post it online. And then there's some people who, of course, share it to a different account because they don't want to be associated
because any people will post. There's footage we decided not to share because people are recording from their homes, and then it's easy enough to geoco -locate who is at that home and that apartment building. And we want to make sure we protect the public. So I think that's an important component of this. But I do think this work cannot happen without bystanders. There's a lot we're also missing. We just don't have, because maybe they're just not posted online. People are afraid of
blowbacks. So I do think that is a very brave and important bit of this. I think one thing we found very helpful that people found really quickly was to try to get photos of faces, even though there are masks. identifying components of the people and of the vehicles. So we saw a lot of people going out of the way to make sure they were reporting license plates of vehicles, asking people for their names, for their badge numbers, trying to basically get as much information.
People will say in the video, it is this date at this time, at this location, which I think is an extra level of verification because it's one thing to write it in a post, but people are saying it on camera as well. which is a little bit harder to think. So I do think that the public has taken... One thing I kind of personally wish is that we also got VIN numbers from vehicles.
By the way, that's a lot harder, it's a bigger ask, only because we've now seen evidence of federal officers switching license plates on vehicles to mass, which is kind of a pain in the ass that someone was trying to track those vehicles. So that's probably the one big ask, I think. It's such a different type of video
than what we've seen. If you think about like conflict related videos, you typically don't have one as much footage and also footage from like multiple angles to verify that this did happen at this time. Some people bring up, say like, yes, I took this footage. Here it is. This is what happened. Even like inside, I saw footage from that was in like Albuquerque of a man being tased and detained by orange hole. and the manager coming and asking the woman filming to leave
because it's private property. And she's like, what? And she's like, from far enough. And she's like, she's not allowed to be there because she's built to film even with private property for Walmart. But Orbit told her there's a lot to go in and like pay as a customer. And that's fine. But I think like, you know, she posted that video and she put it out there and she's like, this is what happened to me. And I think
that is. like we can't tell that story that that won't get like the local news coverage and additional follow -up happens if she didn't ever post that. So I think it is everyone has lots of bits and pieces to play and I'm very thankful for all the work people do in sort of holding people accountable, license plates, photos, names, times, dates, locations. It makes it much, much easier
to geolocate. There probably would have been very hard to geolocate the inside of a Walmart if this woman didn't say in her pose, too, I was at this Walmart at this time, this is me in it. It would have been much, much harder to try to figure out exactly which one, where it was. You asked me to give me my VIN number right now. I couldn't. I couldn't give you my VIN number. The VIN number is great. There was a whole discussion
about it, too, in our thread. So I recommend if you're interested in this, go check out our threads here about it. So it's a very hard piece of information to get, but they'll have it at the top of the vehicle. I also used to work at an auto repair shop, so we had to always do the VINs. So in theory, you could get the VIN. That way, that was a unique number that's always specifically that vehicle that someone would have to like, weld and remove out of like, or even like it's
on the glass. So like, you would have to do a whole bunch of stuff to remove a change of in number versus just like a little dinky metal plate on the back of a vehicle or in some cases, they just have no place at all. So. I haven't seen them masking the bit numbers yet. You heard it here first. That's the thing to be collecting. Not that we're encouraging anyone to go out in the streets and risk their lives or safety filming this, but yeah, these are the things that are
missing. I want to ask you a question about missing data in a second, but Edvin has asked, has any crowdsourcing platform been created or do you solely rely on social media? Are you aware of any movements to collate videos and evidence of immigration rates in one place. People Over Papers has a pretty good map, but it's not reportable,
but it's a pretty good map. You guys can... Oh, by the way, when you said all that, I just pictured the next Bellingham investigation was just like a Maxar satellite investigation of all the parked cars and you just zoomed in on all the VINs and you got them that way. Like in my head, that's the fantasy that you guys are so good that you can see VIN numbers from Maxar footage. But People Over Papers has a really good map and there's been less... sightings of immigration officers
since the TRO in Los Angeles. I was going to second people over papers. The one thing about people over papers is that it is not historical. So it's just day by day. So I like check it like every day. And that's a good place, I think. And there's a couple other subreddits. So I think like So I've read it like our ice underscore raids and then ice eyes on ice are also good options. And then there's also really good aggregator
local accounts. So there's like a few are specifically Los Angeles, but then they'll be like really specific ones. Like I think actually El Monte means which is normally a meme channel actually does a lot of videos and footage that are specifically in El Monte. So there's like really specific hyper localized. And I know people say Facebook is dead. But I think Facebook is dead. But Facebook, the one thing they still thrive on is local, because people want to let information know that
it was on Instagram. So I think there's a lot of local groups and a lot of original footage that come from Facebook that I'll find. So I'll look keywords. I found stuff from an incident and arrest in Denver on Colfax. Familiar with
Denver. But that I found through Facebook, through keyword searching for posts from the recent so I think you can sometimes the old school like what's nice is that like normally for a lot of the work we do we have to go to more like niche alt like platforms like maybe a telegram or a gab or something like that here it's all mainstream main sort of like social media platforms and then one's like yeah people are papers but again it's not stores like one of those you have to
check every day and they don't have like the source of office so it's a little bit of headache because it If people find something social media posted on there, they don't always post a link. So there's like imperfect components to it, but it is kind of giving you a sort of wide map overview of incidents, sightings, arrests, all sorts of stuff across the US. Super useful. And people have put in the comments as well, a couple of
other sources. Someone shouted out Mr. Timothy Times, who's tracking them and publishing reports on TikTok and Substack. There's quite a few other spaces people are following developments. I wanted to ask about data before going to some more comments
in the chat. You mentioned VIN numbers. In regards to data, we got praised for our investigation, and well done everybody here, for showing the scale, because a lot of reports have been focused on individual incidents rather than being able to show the scale of what's going on in a single region. kind of data is missing. Where are the data gaps when it comes to monitoring rates? What would you advise people start looking at that isn't being reported on enough, in your
opinion? That's a Kalina question, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, Kalina, take it. OK, so I'm trying to eat like my daily vitamin gummy, hopefully, at the same time. OK, I think for us, it's like I... I'm trying to say what is under -reported. For me, I think the social media footage is obviously incredibly helpful because we have vehicles, we have license plates, we have some sort of sense of people generally. I think obviously there's a lot of work to be
done if you want to focus on unmasking. There's been a handful of guys, particularly those who haven't been masked, that we could find their identity. Um, so I think like accountability on that, because I think it's sort of like, it's, it's kind of bad to say, but I think essentially like shaming people, uh, who are actively participating in these, in these raids, I think, um, could be a useful, uh, component. Uh, it's something
we didn't focus on for, for this piece. Um, but it's something that could be in, in the future, like hearing people that are conducting this, because some of these are, um, they're obviously trying to protect their identities for, for. a doxing component, but also because they know that they are violating laws. I think this came out this week that in legal proceedings, they're also choosing not to name some ICE officials, if I'm correct. I might have to look at the source
on that. I'm trying to say other data gaps. I think it'd be great. We don't know where people are ending up. I think that's a big component is that some people are being sent to their home country. Like just like there would be hard stories people like were picked up and then like few days later they're just dropped off on the street in Mexico. Some people they not heard from and they have no idea where they are. Some people
are being held in detention facilities. So I think there's a lot of sort of gaps when I say gaps in data that sounds it's imperfect because it's really gaps of where people are ending up. What's happening after they get detained? And I think we just don't know for a lot of that. And I think that's like hard thing to do. by open source and that requires probably collaboration with other people. That's sort of my question.
Just on that, in the Bakersfield investigation, we mentioned that the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit had actually revealed that 40 people were deported after the Operation Return to Syndrome in Bakersfield, right? So some within days of being arrested. There is ways to find out, but it requires legal processes. And there is, as you said, quite a data gap there in terms of how long people are waiting in detention versus how many individuals are actually deported quite
immediately. I think that data would be super useful. Can I add on the holes there? One on the mass thing. I was in court on Thursday last week when the federal The federal, like the attorney for the federal government was defending against this lawsuit, argued that when the judge was saying, yeah, these agents clearly aren't identifiable. They are wearing masks. And the government attorney was like, well, you know, since COVID -19, I think it's not uncommon for people to wear masks.
And the judge actually cited that in her TRO. Like she actually put that as a footnote. Like the government speculated that COVID was one of the reasons. It was kind of, it was really absurd that they actually flouted that as the reason they're masked up because of COVID -19. Just want to put that out there. That actually happened in court. But on the data hole, you know, what's interesting now is there is a TRO in Los Angeles. There's an injunction in the
Eastern District. And it's clear that the lawsuit after this TRO, you know, because it's temporary, they're going to argue for a preliminary injunction as well. Now, I think, you know, I think Bellingcat showed the scale and scope of this 15 different home depots and 100, you know. locations. But now you can actually see if if the government's violating those court orders. Right. Like now it's different if they're going up to people at car washes or they're going to people because
they speak broken English. These videos now I think become important because hey look a federal judge says you can't do this. And if they're still doing it that's huge. Right. That's that's that's violating a court order. So I think there's a new data gap now like are they. using warrants or are they violating what the court said? That to me is interesting. And as this spreads to different parts of the country, it's going to
be repeated. But right now in Los Angeles, to me, are they abiding by these orders or are they disregarding them? Yes, really good point. The one thing that I'll build on in that is the fact that as this continues to spread, one thing to note is that the ACLU or the way that these legal proceedings go forward is that they need plaintiffs to be able to try and bring a case. It's been really crucial to have footage of a snapshot
of time of individuals being detained. Because there's this black box of where they go afterwards, basically, the lawyers are trying to follow up with any of the family members who are associated with people who have been taken to try and see if they can find them and learn about what happened to them so that they can build a case. Basically, what they're doing is because Border Patrol and ICE and these other entities know that once they're taken in these vans, no one really knows what
happens, so do lawyers. Lawyers know that they have to work even harder to try and build what happens after that incident so that they can try and bring that to light and argue that in court. I think that's what makes these disappearances even more scary is that kind of lack of knowledge about where a lot of these people end up. I know we had a question earlier, I think we've got time for about two questions more. We had a question
earlier about alligator alcatraz. Have you seen much footage coming out of detention facilities at all? And is there a data gap there in terms of knowing what's going on behind the scenes there? I know a lot of media houses are currently looking at that particular facility. Yeah, I mean there I work for Cal matters anything inside of California Doesn't exist I guess for me Yeah,
no, it's once again. It's kind of it's kind of a bit of an unknown I haven't really seen anything in particular out of Florida or out of one time today or any of the other facilities It's yeah, I've no I've no real window into that. Maybe Kalina. I'm not sure Before just for people outside of the US. I just wanted The lawsuit is by these activist groups and ACLU is nonpartisan, American Civil Liberties Union. But you know who all signed
on to that? The city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles, the city of Pasadena, multiple cities around Los Angeles, and then the state of California. I have never in my life seen activists and local governments all signing on to the same thing. So it's not like the county or the city are against this. They're all on the same lawsuit against the federal government. So just to give a picture there. I don't think we've ever seen
that. Or it's been years, you know, dozens of years since local governments and activists were all literally on the same page arguing the same thing. Yeah, I think like there's been a lot of media attention also with the detention center in Florida. I really hate the name Alligator Alcatraz. I'm going to call it Alligator Auschwitz.
But I think that the because there's been such a media flurry I mean they even have merch available so they've had like people come in and show there's been like a decent amount of footage from inside not with like I think I have some people like but people actually there are people actually being held there um I haven't seen footage with the people in there so they'll send plenty of footage from inside if you go from outside because there's something to pay attention on it but
I do think that um there might be more investigation to happen that'll come with other like current detention holding facilities because I think one of the big questions is basically how overcrowded are these because there's been such an uptick in detentions that have happened. It's like how many people are actually being held there? Are there like over capacity? What are the conditions from the reports that we've gotten from like people who've called like the student people
have called 911 from detention facilities? It seems that it's pretty grim. And another big data why I just thought about it as we were talking is that like, you know, I think one of the big things that stuff hinges on is like, do these officials have award? And there's no really great way for us to look up award. And I think overwhelmingly,
no, they do not have a warrant. And so I think that is one of these these big bits is that like, what we don't always know what agencies pick them up because you'll sometimes see people wearing an ice bat or an ice vest or they'll say, border security might just say police, it might say FBI, it might say HSI, which so it's like who are the people, where are the people going with? There's also contracting companies and so you'll see people being taken by contracting companies
that are contracted through ICE. Maybe ICE picks them up and then just hands them off to the contracting company. I think there is a lot of stuff we don't know and you know from who's and also I think there's also this video footage I recently came out of like what appeared to be like children in chains and shackles. And we're like, so what's happening to minors that are being detained? And I think there's just like a lot of questions.
So we've talked about the data gaps. I think a lot of the data gaps are things that may not always be available through open source means. And that's what makes it difficult. There's no open source, like look up for warts that I know of. So we just don't, we just don't know. I wish
there was. I wish I was, you know, and so like, there's also like, we currently don't have to love that level of transparency of like being like, you can eventually get like information award, you can do like a FOIA request, which is Freedom of Information Act, or try to get it through some other means. But I think there is obviously a big issue also, and a big disconnect from what is being officially said, versus what the reality of things that are happening. And
so it's about like, poking holes in that. And sometimes we just don't have the ability to poke holes. So they say like, oh, like if we have video footage or something, they're saying like, I think it might, um, the, the Pico Rivera case, uh, that they said like, oh, he did this assault thing. But if you look at all the footage, like he didn't assault anyone. So, you know, people might say like, oh, this person did this awful thing. And then when, if they want to put a charge,
is that like awful thing? They said it's not actually like in a charge. Um, and so we, I think we need to continue to give pressure to see where we can Poking the holes in the data gap is where we're going to see pushing where those like gaps are is I think that they're really going to be the important components because pushing to see like where our people are pushing for those forms, push the things that we don't know because those are the holes. Those are the things I think being
intentionally kept from us most often. So that's where we should be looking for is what information we are currently missing. Thanks so much. We're currently over time, so I don't want to keep us too long. I just wanted one word or one sentence response from everybody in terms of where you think people should be looking for next, in terms of what kind of states are you expecting these raids to hit next. We had a question similar to this earlier on, so I just wanted to address
it and then we'll wrap. Kevin, maybe you can start. There's been an increase in funding to ICE very recently. So I think that ultimately, no matter what state they start to increase their operations, you're going to see a lot of the same tactics that have been used in California. So I wouldn't be surprised if Chicago and New York are starting to see similar raids in scale in the coming weeks and months. It's not that
these places have not had. Uh, you know, significant activity, but, you know, now with this increased funding, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something the likes of what we saw in Los Angeles. And so, you know, I'm just going to keep my eyes there. Um, and just to, just to piggyback off of what everybody was saying about the kind of gaps, um, you know, we still don't know if there are people being taken to as well. I mean, ever since, um, the, uh, Brigo Garcia case, you know,
everybody was pretty, you know. plugged into seeing, you know, the first kind of waves of people being taken to El Salvador, but it's kind of dropped off in attention. But there's some indication that, you know, there are still flights going there, and we don't know how many people are on those flights. So, you know, that's something I think I'll try and take a look at as well. I think it's going to get worse. The funding suggests, I mean, the funding is clear that there's
going to be more of this in other cities. The poll just came out. This is wildly unpopular. Support for immigration is at its highest that they've ever measured it. To me, it's not about immigration so much as about power. bringing a city like Los Angeles to heel. I mean, Trump literally tweeted he's going to take this to other Democrat run cities like Chicago and New
York. I think the show force ahead of MacArthur Park is exactly what they want to do is, you know, the treating it like it's a forward operating base. And they're in this is occupied territory and Stephen Miller calls Los Angeles occupied territory. So I think it's about power and less about immigration. I think it's it'll get worse in that sense. And I just before we go. Huge
respect for fucking Bellingcat. Like, I cannot tell you the amount of times I have talked and I'm like, oh, we just did something that we commented as an evident. And Bellingcat literally didn't hear what I said before. They're like, Bellingcat? The amount of respect people have for Bellingcat is well -deserved. And every time Bellingcat does something, so feed me out. Let's do what Bellingcat does. So just, I have huge respect. Everybody in my newsroom is in awe of Bellingcat.
Like, love Bellingcat. So you're just going to make me blush. Now I have to say some nice stuff about everyone else. Of course, we love being able to work with CalMatters and Evident because I think it's what makes the pieces strong. I think it's, you know, I think it is every like open source is just a part of the puzzle. And, you know, we need everything from visuals to people on the ground to our experts that, you know, Like, I don't have the level of calphery
expertise that Sergio has. I don't have, I couldn't do a video at all like Kevin the cat. Like, I don't have those skills. So it's all about working together. It's all the different pieces of the pie. You can't just have, like, sugar. You need all the ingredients. I would say that Sergio took my Instagram, just saying, like, I just looked at what Trump tweeted. He literally gave out the list of cities he wants to hit next.
So I think that's where we can look at. So I would say there's this question of where, right? Even though rates, I have seen over in Nebraska and some more red cities and states, I think he's going to focus still on Democratic strongholds, because of course he is. Um, so I think that is something we'll see. I don't think, I think it'll still happen across, but I think it'll be disproportionate to, um, sort of like what
you would imagine blue city. So, um, yeah, I would say, yeah, you can look to, to New York, to, to Boston, to Chicago. You might even see Seattle where I am. Um, I think like Washington has tried to like prevent, but we've seen raids happening in Washington where I am too. Um, and I think there was just like a protest at, uh, I'm always mispronounced about Planter, Planter, the data company, there was a big protest here, just like this week. So I think like, because
they're supplying, I think data to ICE. And so I think it's, you know, what we might even happen, like, I don't know if they're going to do, so I feel like LA was definitely the sort of like testing, I don't say testing grant, but like, essentially, they're like, can we do this on scale at a large scale? Like LA is one of the largest cities in the US. Can we basically do this? And are they going to basically scale?
And I don't know if they're going to try to hit all the cities at once and overwhelm, or if they're just going to go from the focus of the city, then we're going to focus on this city, and then we're going to focus on the city. So that's, for me, the big question. It's not like which cities or when is whether or not they're going to do it all at once, or are they just going to be very targeted and put a lot of overwhelming force onto one and then go from city to city.
That's my question. I think we'll see. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better, unfortunately. Well, as you just said, collaboration is key here. Working together to combat this huge and overwhelming problem is really important, and I couldn't have said it better. Working with all of you here has been fantastic on these two pieces. I encourage anyone in the audience, if you want to get involved with this kind of work. You can do so in this Discord server with each
other and also with Bellingcat. You can look at the threads that I posted earlier in the chat. I'll also include them in the description of this podcast. And also, of course, check out the fantastic work that Evident and CalMatters are doing at the moment. It is absolutely groundbreaking and really important. And we'll pop the links to those in the description of this podcast and in the chat here. Thank you everybody for joining and we'll be back in two weeks time with another
stage talk. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Thank you for listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bell and Cat Discord server by visiting www .discord .com. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.