By Noemi Orozco, May 6, 2025
Ten day laborers were arrested during an 8:30 a.m. raid conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection April 22 outside a Pomona Home Depot, just 7 miles from Cal Poly Pomona’s campus. Federal agents also took 58-year-old Martin Majin-Leon into custody at gunpoint outside his barbershop in Pomona that same day.
Majin-Leon has since been released in a decision by a Riverside County judge that cited his lack of criminal history, consistent tax filings, two property holdings totaling more than $1.5 million and longstanding community ties to the city, according to The South Pasadenan.
His next court appearance is scheduled for May 29.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement to The Los Angeles Times that the operation at the Home Depot on South Towne Avenue initially targeted one individual with an active arrest warrant. There, agents met nine other individuals who were detained unwarranted.
“During the operation, nine additional illegal aliens were encountered and taken into custody,” the DHS official said.“Several of those apprehended had prior charges, including child abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, immigration violations and DUI.”
According to Alexis Teodoro, a worker rights director at the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, two of the ten day laborers arrested have been deported.
The PEOC works with day laborers and domestic workers within the region as part of its Day Laborers Program, helping those in search of safe employment at a proper wage and employers finding immediate assistance.
The program was created after Border Patrol agents pulled over Eddie Cortez, Pomona’s first Latino mayor, and questioned his legal status while visiting a well-known day laborer site in 1993.
“Looking for work at a public sidewalk or public space is a constitutional right protected by the United States Constitution of America,” Teodoro said. “The day laborers who were just looking for work outside of Home Depot or near the sidewalks of Home Depot were just exercising their right to do so. They were taken just because of how they were talking or what they looked like, basically.”
The center also offers free legal services and advocacy initiatives for Pomona, San Bernardino County and Riverside County immigrant workers. Teodoro and his team at PEOC are currently campaigning for the release of Jesus Domingo Ross, an active member of their hiring program who was arrested during the Home Depot operation. According to CalMatters,Ross is being held at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico.
Ross, along with two other Guatemalan day laborers, is awaiting their bonding set for May 6, according to Teodoro.
“We hope to get a positive result, so we can bond out the day laborers and bring them back to Pomona where they’re dearly missed,” Teodoro said.
Francisco Beltrán, a history professor at CPP, said day laborers have played an essential part in the industrialization of the U.S. since the late 19th century. Soon after the Immigration Act of 1965, the composition of migrants shifted from mostly white and of European background to primarily Latino and Asian.
Today, day laborers of color are the backbone of many rebuilding efforts across the country. Earlier this year, migrant workers led cleanup and construction efforts following the Eaton and Palisades fires, a task that involved numerous health risks.
However, the push for their mass removal is a paradox for Beltrán.
“They’re always the first to face the wrath whenever things go south, whenever the economy sours, whenever something happens and no fear, anxiety becomes channeled through a very racial lens at individual groups of people,” Beltrán said.
Cities like Pomona, which have a large immigrant and Latino population, will face both economic and social effects if these communities choose to stay home because of deportation worries. According to a press release by the American Immigration Council, undocumented immigrant households paid $89.8 billion in federal, state and local taxes and held $299 billion in spending power in 2023. They are also key to fixing labor shortages, as almost 1 in 4 are entrepreneurs.
“People will not feel safe going to a local grocery store, an ethnic store to buy their products, as they may feel fearful of going there because then that might be a location that might get targeted by immigration officers,” Beltrán said. “That may end up hurting a lot of businesses, many of them owned by Latino communities themselves.”
As a professor who teaches topics related to immigration and borderlands, Beltrán has had to alter his curriculum throughout the semester due to the rise in ICE sightings and arrests within a few miles of CPP. He hopes by acknowledging these events in the classroom, students will become more willing to engage in worthwhile conversations about class content and personal experiences.
“Sometimes the conversation can be a little bit difficult, but what I’ve noticed is that it often leads to some students to participate when they haven’t participated before because it’s something that relates directly to them,” Beltrán said.
Students have also joined in on these dialogues by founding their own activism clubs. Samantha Rios, a first-generation english student, is the creator and president of Students Standing for Freedom, a group dedicated to supporting undocumented rights and allyship.
Rios was encouraged to build the club after the university confirmed ICE presence was allowed on campus following Trump’s decision to authorize federal agents near “sensitive” areas late January.
“I thought about the climate at Cal Poly Pomona and how we’ve stayed slightly dormant throughout a lot of different times of trouble, and I didn’t want this to be one of those moments,” Rios said. “I knew that we had the ability to stand up and say that this wasn’t right and stand up for the people who need it.”
The Poly Post has since confirmed the deportation of an enrolled computer science and engineering student at CPP.
Students and faculty unaware of what to do if approached by an immigration officer should contact Jason Rodriguez, the university’s chief of staff and the associate vice president of Administrative Services, via phone or email if asked for confidential records and should inform officers they lack the authority to cooperate with their instructions.
For additional resources, students and faculty should check out CPP’s immigration enforcement website. There, they can find immigration preparedness toolkits, who to contact for information, mental health support services and printable red cards. The cards include specific rights and protections for anyone on U.S. soil, regardless of immigration status, to defend themselves from ICE, and they are available in both English and Spanish.
Feature image courtesy of Max Conrad
