70 federal agents were in Sacramento. Border Patrol won’t confirm if they left
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- About 70 federal agents conducted immigration arrests across Sacramento Thursday.
- Border Patrol arrested 11 undocumented immigrants and one U.S. citizen at Home Depot.
- Agents cited surveillance and intelligence; presence in area remains unconfirmed.
About 70 federal agents descended on Sacramento Thursday as part of the county’s first high-profile immigration enforcement operation.
David Kim, assistant chief patrol agent of the U.S. Border Patrol El Centro Sector, said officers were across the region conducting targeted arrests and one large-scale operation. Among those arrested were 11 undocumented immigrants and one U.S. citizen in the parking lot of a Home Depot store in south Sacramento. That particular enforcement featured a Fox News reporter.
Kim could not confirm if the agency had arrested more than 12 people on Thursday, saying it was “still waiting on final results.”
The arrests came after months of no large-scale immigration enforcement in the Sacramento region. When asked if Border Patrol agents were still in the area on Friday, Kim said “maybe.”
“We’re somewhere in California,” Kim told The Sacramento Bee.
Agents from El Centro Sector, near the Mexico border, have arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants across California in the last seven months, according to The Bee and other media outlets.
In January, weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the agency carried out a three-day operation in Kern County that led to 78 arrests. Greg Bovino, the U.S. Border chief of the El Centro sector, has since led operations in Southern California.
Bovino recorded a video in front of the state Capitol shortly after yesterday’s operation at the Home Depot, in which he dismissed sanctuary laws that seek to protect undocumented immigrants from immigration enforcement efforts.
“Whether it’s here in Sacramento or nationwide,” Bovino said in the video posted to X. “We’re here and we’re not going anywhere.”
Kim said he would leave Bovino’s statement “to stand on its own merit,” but added that the agency had “surveillance under our belt and actionable intelligence that led us” to Sacramento. He said this included two days of surveillance, checking license plates and looking up people’s immigration history on federal databases.
“You do your due diligence, kind of see where they’re going, what they do, their patterns and where they end up,” Kim said.
Day laborers at the Home Depot parking lot on Thursday reported masked and armed agents arriving and arresting people without saying anything. These officers were “grabbing people and putting them into vehicles,” according to the radio traffic from Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office.
In April, a federal judge ruled that Border Patrol was barred from making any arrests in California’s Eastern District unless they have a warrant or suspect a person might flee before they obtain one. The ruling, applicable in Sacramento, came after a lawsuit from American Civil Liberties Union of Northern and Southern California and the United Farm Workers, who alleged the enforcement operation in Kern County violated constitutional rights.
This story was originally published July 18, 2025 at 1:05 PM with the headline "70 federal agents were in Sacramento. Border Patrol won’t confirm if they left."
