12 arrested by masked federal immigration agents at south Sacramento Home Depot
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Federal agents detained several people at a Sacramento Home Depot lot.
- Border Patrol, not ICE, led the immigration operation without local involvement.
- Confusion and panic followed as a woman said her husband, a U.S. citizen, was taken.
Masked federal immigration agents arrested 12 people, including at least one U.S. citizen, Thursday morning from the parking lot of a Home Depot store in south Sacramento — marking the first high-profile enforcement raid in the county.
The incident, which was led by the U.S. Border Patrol and featured a Fox News camera crew, was reported about 8 a.m. at the Home Depot at 4641 Florin Rd., just west of Highway 99. Masked agents from the Border Patrol El Centro Sector arrived at the parking lot and began “grabbing people and putting them into vehicles,” according to the radio traffic from Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.
David Kim, assistant chief patrol agent of the U.S. Border Patrol El Centro Sector, confirmed in a written statement to The Bee that the morning operation led to the arrests of 11 undocumented immigrants and one U.S. citizen. He alleged that the U.S. citizen was “obstructing/impeding federal officers and vandalism of government property.”
Agents from El Centro Sector, near the Mexico border, carried out a three-day operation earlier this year in Kern County and have made headlines in recent months for numerous arrests in the Los Angeles area. In January, the Border Patrol El Centro Sector said it was “planning operations for other locals such as Fresno and especially Sacramento” in a Facebook comment.
Kim said on Thursday enforcement “should be expected” when asked if operations would continue in Sacramento.
“Enforcement anywhere in the state is ongoing,” Kim said.
Andrea Castillo said her husband, Jose, was the U.S. citizen taken into federal custody Thursday morning.
She told The Bee she got a call from her husband at roughly 7:50 a.m. that he saw masked men in the parking lot. He had arrived at the store that day to pick up materials for work. He works for a heating and air conditioning company in Sacramento, Castillo said. His company van titled “Authority HVAC” remains in the parking lot.
“He was just on his way to work. That’s all he was doing,” Castillo told The Bee. “He wasn’t breaking the law.”
She lives nearby and drove to the Home Depot around 8 a.m. When she arrived, Castillo said she saw a group of immigration agents chasing her husband across the parking lot.
She used her cellphone to record video of the incident while the agents brought her husband to the ground and detained him, Castillo said. She kept telling the federal agents that he was a U.S. citizen, but she said the immigration agents took him away.
At one point, while asking for the agents’ names, Castillo said one agent told her “Google me.” She said the agents took her husband away in a van without saying anything else.
After the federal agents left, Castillo remained at the Home Depot parking lot fighting back tears as she used her cellphone to call family and friends to tell them what happened to her husband.
Day laborers, including a Mexican man whose name is being withheld because he is undocumented, said people in the parking lot immediately began running in different directions when the agents arrived.
The man said many workers had been going to the Home Depot parking lot for years in search of work.
“They don’t have a right to take people,” he told The Sacramento Bee.
Fox News in Sacramento
Bill Melugin, a correspondent for Fox News, was seen alongside the agents in videos recorded by Castillo and a bystander. In a written post on X, Melugin said the outlet rode along with the Border Patrol for the immigration operation.
He said, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Patrol Agent Gregory K. Bovino told him that agents chose to target Sacramento as a message that the “federal government can and will go wherever they want in the sanctuary state.”
Sgt. Amar Gandhi, a spokesperson for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, said deputies received a call from Home Depot employees about a report of masked people in the store’s parking lot. He said deputies responded to the call and found a woman who waved them down and told them her husband had been taken.
Shortly after, the Sheriff’s Office was notified by federal officials who confirmed immigration agents were in the Home Depot parking lot earlier Thursday morning and had since left the area, Gandhi said.
Initially, the agents seen in the store parking lot were believed to be from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE. Gandhi later said he’s received confirmation that the agents at the Home Depot were from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, also known as Border Patrol.
The sheriff’s spokesperson said deputies “did not assist in any way” the federal agents in this apparent immigration enforcement operation. The deputies stayed in the parking lot to speak to the woman reporting her husband was taken.
The Sheriff’s Office on Thursday received another call for help from a resident in a neighborhood on A Parkway, a residential street just a few blocks south of the Home Depot. Gandhi said the resident told sheriff’s officials they were asked to call 911 after a masked man reportedly went into their neighbor’s house.
The Sheriff’s Office said that another 911 call was made to dispatchers at 7:57 a.m. from the 4500 block of A Parkway, two blocks south of Home Depot for a burglary call. Sheriff’s officials said the caller stated that armed individuals were “burglarizing” a neighbor’s home, and deputies said that those suspected intruders were federal agents.
What we know
The Bee reviewed publicly available radio traffic that revealed additional details about the incident as it unfolded Thursday in the Home Depot parking lot:
▪ At 7:49 a.m., a Sacramento sheriff’s dispatcher said a caller reported seeing 15 people, masked and armed with guns, who were “grabbing people and putting them into vehicles,” according to the radio traffic. The Sheriff’s Office confirmed a 911 call was placed from the Home Depot two minutes before.
▪ At 7:51 a.m., the dispatcher said the Sheriff’s Office had received a call from Border Patrol, notifying deputies about enforcement action at the Home Depot on Florin Road. A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office confirmed federal law enforcement officials notified them of the action at that time.
▪ Shortly after 8 a.m., the dispatcher said a caller reported seeing two federal agents walking a handcuffed person outside of a house.
▪ Minutes later, a man on the radio — apparently a sheriff’s deputy at the scene — said a woman whose spouse had been “taken by ICE” was “demanding a supervisor.”
Officer Anthony Gamble, a spokesperson for the Sacramento Police Department, said they are aware of a federal immigration that happened Thursday morning in the 7500 block of Titan Parkway in Sacramento where agents were looking for one specific person. He said the department was informed of the ICE raid about 5:40 a.m. Thursday, and they did not assist or participate in the raid.
He said Sacramento police officers do not “engage in immigration enforcement,” which is prohibited by California law. He said the department’s commitment “remains focused on public safety and serving all members of our community equally, regardless of immigration status.”
In a written statement released Thursday afternoon, Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty said these immigration raids are a violation of civil rights and “an affront to democracy.”
“There’s a difference between deporting criminals and targeting people at Home Depot looking for work to feed their families,” McCarty said. “These raids are immoral and inhumane. They are intended to instill fear and chaos and cannot be tolerated in our city.”
Jessie Mabry, the chief executive officer of Opening Doors, an organization that supports immigrants and refugees, said she wasn’t surprised after hearing of the Sacramento immigration raid. Mabry was at a news conference Thursday announcing the creation of a regional initiative to coordinate legal help, education and other support for immigrants in the face of more aggressive enforcement.
“We’ve known this is coming,” said Mabry. “We’ve seen this play out in other communities and we’ve been working hard to get prepared and be ready to support our community.”
By 9:30 a.m. Thursday, the anonymous day laborer and others seeking work had returned to Home Depot parking lot after the immigration agents left. They said it was out of necessity.
“I need to find work to get keep getting ahead,” he said.
This story was originally published July 17, 2025 at 10:50 AM with the headline "12 arrested by masked federal immigration agents at south Sacramento Home Depot."
