The Immigrant Day of Action was held in Sacramento, full of panels and presentations from advocates and state leaders. One panel titled “Leading the Nation: California’s Response to Detention and Deportation” featured two state Assemblymembers and two advocates discussing the work they have been doing to serve the immigrant community.
They all began by discussing what drives them. Huy Tren, Executive Director of Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN), spoke about his parents and them being war refugees who fled Vietnam.
“When I think back to what my parents gave up to come here, it just drives me insane, thinking about how and what we’re seeing today and how it hurts families across this country. So our work here is rooted very much in the experience of my parents.”
Lindsay Toczlyowski, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, discussed the work her organization has been doing amid the attacks from the Presidential Administration on the immigrant population and the conditions they are seeing.
“2026 is blowing 2025 out of the water in terms of the conditions that we’re seeing in the ice prisons and the number of people who are dying,” she said. “There are people dying in ICE detention because of the abject cruelty that we’re seeing at a rate of one person every six days.”
She explained that currently, due process is not being followed for many people being detained, and because of that, they are only focusing on those detained. The moderator also noted that among those attacks on the community was the deployment of the National Guard in 2025.
“One of the things that was inducted almost immediately was since June, when Trump rolled out, horror on our streets in Los Angeles, we have not taken any released cases. We only do detained cases. We make sure that we are prioritizing our limited resources, our lawyers, our dozens of lawyers, so that people who are at the very front of the line to be deported have a fighting chance at remaining here with their families and communities,” said Toczlyowski.
Toczlyowski and Tren noted that the conditions in the detention centers are the worst they’ve ever seen.
“I’ve been an immigration lawyer for 18 years, and I have never seen the things that are happening to our clients that have happened in the last year and four months,” Toczlyowski explained. “We get calls from family members, and we have to respond immediately because we have seen cases where we get a call, someone is picked up in the morning, on the streets of Los Angeles, and by the sunset, they are in Tijuana.”
Tren spoke about a married couple that SIREN assisted who had been in the United States for over two decades and had never spent a night apart from each other before they were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“They had gone through the entire process, and at the very end of it, their final interview, they were told that their attorney could not go to the final interview with them. When they walked into the room, they were immediately detained, separated, put into different detention centers. Immediately,” said Tren.
He explained that SIREN got involved because the attorney they already had wanted them to pay $5,000 more while being detained. Within a week, the wife was deported, but the husband wanted to stay and fight, so SIREN tried to file for a bond to get him out.
“While he was in detention, he was denied medical care. He was provided no amenities. He had to sleep on the ground,” said Tren. “He cried so much that he couldn’t even get eye drops to rehydrate his eyes. When we finally got to the bond hearing, it was denied by a judge who didn’t believe that he had any connections that would keep him here in the country, despite the fact that he had been here for two decades. He had family here.”
Tren stated that after losing the bond hearing, the husband gave up. The conditions in the detention center were cruel, and he wanted to be with his wife, so he wanted to go.
“The reality is that these detention centers represent the worst of us. We are being cruel,” said Tren. “We are seeing families separated and people put into conditions that we haven’t seen in my lifetime. I have not seen anything like this in my lifetime. So we have to punish these companies who have found ways to profit, to make hundreds of millions of dollars off of the suffering of people. And when we see these companies making their way into California, we have to ask ourselves, does this represent our values? Does it represent who we are? We have to fight them.”
In finding ways to fight against deportation and detention, some politicians have introduced bills to push the private companies that own the detention centers out of California. Assemblyman Matt Haney serves the 17th district, and according to him, over one-third of his constituents were not born in the United States. One action he is taking in response is trying to pass AB1633. If passed, private detention centers would be taxed more heavily, and the additional money would be used for immigration services.
“We can tax them at a level that they are not welcoming here. And if they choose to continue to operate here, they’re going to pay 50% of all of the revenue that they bring in, and we’re going to put it back into immigration services for the, to, to deal with the harm that they’re causing,” said Haney. “We’re going to create the most hostile environment as we possibly can for them.”
Assemblywoman Liz Ortega, serving the 20th district, spoke about AB2465, also known as the Not Another Dollar for Family Separation Act. The bill would ensure that state resources are not used to fund ICE and other federal agencies, such as border control.
Ortega stated that her passion for driving the bill stems from the fact that she and her parents came to the United States when she was three years old. She explained that her parents not only work to receive the “American Dream” but also contribute to it.
“But the thing is, they didn’t just come here to look for that dream. They contributed to that dream,” said Ortega. “They worked very hard, oftentimes two or three jobs, and they paid taxes along the way. And they still do every time they go to the store, every paycheck they get, taxes are removed from that. And so we didn’t just come and search and ask to be given these things. We contributed to them, and that’s the one thing that I keep talking about because it’s a fact. It is a fact that Latinos and immigrants contribute to this nation, to this country, and that is what we stand for here in California.”
She emphasized the community’s dollars should not be used to separate families.
“Enough is enough. And these are our dollars. These are not their dollars. These are our dollars, that we work very hard for, that we go to work for every single day. They should not be used to kill us. They should not be used against them, and they should not be used to torture our babies,” said Ortega.
