Community members gathered outside Santa Maria City Hall Thursday evening to reflect, grieve, and protest the rising number of federal immigration raids that have shaken the Central Coast in recent weeks. Organized by a coalition of community groups, the vigil served both as a memorial and a call to defend immigrant families they say are being targeted and erased.
The recent enforcement actions, primarily involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have led to the arrest of more than 360 individuals across Ventura and Santa Barbara countiesaccording to the Mixteco Indígena Community Organizing Project (MICOP). “From July 4 through the 10th, there have been about 361 arrests,” said a MICOP representative. “Four had prior convictions. But the other 357 had no prior conviction. They were arrested at their workplace.”
According to Fernando Martinez, Community Organizing Manager for MICOP, those arrested were largely indigenous Mexican farmworkers individuals who power the Central Coast’s agriculture economy. “When we think about farmworkers, we think about people picking strawberries, vegetables,” Martinez said. “But we’re not thinking about how that’s going to impact our pockets. We’re consumers. So when there are fewer people to pick produce, that’s going to impact us all.”
The vigil was part of a broader national day of remembrance called “Good Trouble Lives On,” commemorating the legacy of late civil rights icon Congressman John Lewis. Locally, the event also responded to immigration raids in Camarillo and Carpinteria, and the death of Jaime Alanis Garcia, which drew widespread grief and criticism.
Pam Gates of Indivisible Santa Maria helped organize the event. “We are doing what we can to correct what’s going on nationally that’s hurting so many people,” she said. “The events of last week have caused a lot of fear and pain in our community.”
The vigil, she said, took a different approachfrom more traditional protests. “This is the fifth anniversary of Congressman John Lewis’s passing. We wanted to honor him and his legacy. But it’s also about reflection. We’ve been fighting for decades and generations for equity.”
That fight, Gates emphasized, is far from over. “All people should be equal, regardless of ethnicity, race, gender identity, age, disability. And that’s not happening. So we are still fighting.”
Among the voices sharing speeches, was Ceasar Vasquez, founder of La Cultura del Mundo. Standing before Santa Maria’s mural-lined City Hall, he pointed to what was missing. “Every single individual that is supposed to make up the history of Santa Maria is white,” he said. “There is no brown person on that mural. It’s meant to show all of Santa Maria, but we’re being written out of history.”
Vasquez said the purpose of the vigil was both to mourn and to resist. “We’ve seen hundreds of lives taken. Families separated. People dying or disappearing and we have no trace of them. We have to remember the people we’re fighting for, people often forgotten in history.”
“If we don’t fight for the oppressed right now, we’re all going to become oppressed one day or another. And it’s starting to look like it’s going to come sooner than we thought.”
While the vigil centered around community voices, the response to ICE raids has not been without political division. Republican State Assembly candidate Sari Domingues shared a sharply contrasting perspective.
“I believe in law and order,” Domingues said. “We have to have law and order to create a safe environment. I’m under the assumption that they are targeting specific people that may have had criminal offenses.”
She said the surge in enforcement stems from a lack of immigration control in recent years. “There really wasn’t any vetting. People were brought in and shipped around. I support all law enforcement. It’s vital to a community. Without it, you have chaos.”
Domingues also rejected claims of racial profiling. “As far as targeting somebody the way they look, I really believe it’s nonsense,” she said. “They try to exaggerate that all these people are families just trying to do a good job. That may be true. And I do feel sorry for them. But if they came here undocumented, they knew the risk.”
Despite her own family’s Mexican heritage and roots in Central Coast agriculture, Domingues expressed frustration with what she called “fearmongering” from public officials like Congressman Salud Carbajal.
“They’re making people believe it’s horrible what’s happening. And they blow it out of proportion,” she said. “Why were all those people already there when ICE arrived? How did they know?”
Domingues says she’s running for the state assembly because she wants to make changes to the process of immigration so that people aren’t waiting for long periods of time to be granted legal pathway.
“I would love to work on our immigration laws and simplify them. It can’t take 10 years for someone’s sister to get here the right way. We’ve got to cut the bureaucracy, because there are people who truly want to come here and live the American dream.”
For those gathered at the vigil, the American dream felt under siege, but their message was one of unity and resistance.
“We want to protect our communities who are essential to our workforce,” said the Martinez. “It’s not just about one group. It’s about all of us.”
