ICE agents spotted in Kern County

On Tuesday, December 16, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were spotted in Bakersfield. Organizations like Organizing for A Better Change and California Immigrant Youth accounts have posted on social media, highlighting raids that are currently underway in Kern County.

Around 8:52 in the morning, two Ford vehicles are seen stopping a man who was driving a white truck on the corner of South H Street and Brundage Lane. The two cars that belong to the ICE agents are both shown parked in front and in the back of the white truck.

Minutes later, the video shows the agents who were wearing all black with their faces covered getting out of the vehicles and arresting a Latino man who was wearing a black beanie, blue shades on top of his head, black sweater, blue dark jeans and brown work boots. The man was put in the gray Ford truck.

This is the first video that has been going around since its last noticeable immigration operation in Bakersfield back in January. Could this be the continuation of a bigger mass operation starting again in Kern County?

Earlier this year, the private prison and detention contractor CoreCivic finalized an agreement with the ICE to transform its 2,560-bed facility in California City. Currently, Kern County has two ICE detention facilities, located at the Golden State Annex in McFarland and Mesa Verde in Bakersfield, off Golden State Avenue. 

In July, Dolores Huerta and other organizations hosted an emergency conference in front of the detention facility where Rosa Lopez, a member of the Rapid Response Network of Kern County, joined the conference to urge the public to pay attention to the developments of the detention center happening in the city. 

“Core Civic, which owns this prison behind us, is moving fast and bypassing local and state laws to open the largest immigration detention facility in Kern County and in California,” she said.

According to the Disability Rights California organization (DRC), they conducted a monitoring visit at the California City Detention Center in September 2025, shortly after the facility began confining people. 

Despite being open for about four weeks before DRC’s monitoring, DRC had already received numerous distressing reports that people with disabilities were experiencing poor medical care and substandard living conditions at California City.

The facility, a former prison, which is located in northern Antelope Valley in Kern County, lies about 100 miles north of Los Angeles and spans roughly 203 square miles. The proposed ICE detention facility sits on a desolate stretch of land roughly six miles from the city center, deep in an area often described as “the middle of nowhere.”