Kids Left Alone in Car After ICE Takes Dad at Gas Station

Amid reports of increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in cities along California's coast comes a story out of Oxnard, where a witness says a child and their older sibling were left alone at a gas station when ICE agents descended upon their car and arrested their father as he got gas. The gas station attendant tells 805 UndocuFund, a nonprofit serving immigrants on California's Central Coast, that at least six cars surrounded the man as he started filling up his truck, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The agents arrested the man and took him away. "They left the children inside the truck," the worker says, per the Independent.

One of the man's kids was reportedly 19, but unable to drive, so the siblings waited at the station until their sister came to pick them up, the attendant says. The 805 UndocuFund rapid response coordinator says raids took place last week in San Luis Obispo County, Santa Barbara County, and Ventura County. She says there have been reports of agents detaining the wrong person, and that some of those arrested have reportedly held Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status. "A lot of arrests that are occurring, they don't have warrants for them," she says, hypothesizing, "The simple explanation is they are trying to meet a quota for the admiration they're now under." (More mass deportations stories.)