“We are all here because we want to know what to do when ICE shows up in our communities,” Alejandra Escobar told the hundreds of people gathered for the Community Defense and Legal Observer training session Escucha Mi Voz Iowa (EMV) held in Iowa City on Saturday.
Escobar is an organizer with EMV, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of and assists immigrants in eastern Iowa. This was the third training session EMV has held, and the hundreds gathered in the auditorium at Dream City made it easily their largest one yet. Every seat was filled, and the walls were lined with those who couldn’t get a seat. The turnout was impressive, especially given the freezing weather on Saturday morning, but not surprising given the actions of ICE and the policies of the Trump administration.
“We’re seeing red lines crossed all over the country on a daily basis,” Escobar said. “… For example, the shooting and the killing of Renee Good. For example, the threat of ending birthright citizenship. For example, the use of the National Guard against us, the community. And unfortunately, we can keep going for a while on red lines.”
“So, in order for all of us to defeat this oppression, we have to connect, we have to organize our community so we can use our collective power and eventually win.”
Before the discussion of what to do when ICE is in the community began, two people who were detained by ICE and recently released briefly spoke about their experiences.
“My name is José. I’m from Bolivia, and I came to this country because my life was at risk,” José Yugar-Cruz said as he took the stage, with Escobar serving as his translator.
Yugar-Cruz fled Bolivia in 2024 after being tortured by corrupt local police officers for refusing to help them with their illegal drug operation, according to court filings in his asylum case. He made his way to the U.S., where he has family. Yugar-Cruz crossed the border into Arizona in July. He immediately surrendered to immigration officials and was jailed by ICE. While in custody, Yugar-Cruz began the process of applying for asylum, because of the threat to his life in his home country.
In December 2024, an immigration court judge held a hearing on Yugar-Cruz’s asylum request, and in January 2025, the judge granted him “withholding-of-removal relief,” preventing his deportation to Bolivia, after finding Yugar-Cruz faced a credible threat of persecution if returned to his home country.
Before the second Trump administration, it would have been common for someone like Yugar-Cruz to be released from custody with orders to check in at the nearest ICE office on a regular schedule while his asylum application was pending. But ICE did not release him.
Yugar-Cruz was sent from Arizona to the Freeborn County Adult Detention Center in Albert Lea, Minnesota. According to court documents, an ICE agent there told him in February last year that he would be released in “15 days or so.” But ICE did not release him. According to Yugar-Cruz, ICE agents later said they would continue to jail him while they worked on deporting him to some country other than Bolivia.
In December 2025, Yugar-Cruz was transferred to Muscatine County jail, which has a contract with ICE to incarcerate detainees. It was there that Yugar-Cruz, with the support of EMV, acquired legal representation through the University of Iowa College of Law’s Immigration Clinic, which provides assistance to immigrants, including those, like Yugar-Cruz, who are applying for asylum.
On Dec. 12, Yugar-Cruz filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the administrator of the Muscatine County Jail claiming that continuing to incarcerate him almost after an immigration judge granted withholding-of-removal relief violated federal law. Earlier this month, a federal judge agreed and ordered Yugar-Cruz released.
“I was 18 months away from my family and they wanted me to join them,” Yugar-Cruz told the people at Dream City. “What saved me was, first of all, God and my faith, the community, my lawyers and now, Escucha Mi Voz. What’s key in this moment is that I was not alone, ICE was not able to disappear me.”
The second speaker, Jorge González Ochoa, addressed the training session remotely via Zoom.
“Good morning, my name is Jorge González. I am an immigrant from Colombia. I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there today, I’m still on house arrest,” he said through a translator.
“I came to this country to make a better life for my family. I was violently detained by ICE. I had to fight from jail to be able to return to be with my family again.”
González Ochoa came to Iowa City in 2024 to join his partner and her mother. He and his partner Laura are the parents of an infant boy, who was born here and is therefore a U.S. citizen. González Ochoa entered the country without the necessary paperwork. He was in the process of applying for asylum, and had been attending regular check-ins at the ICE office in Cedar Rapids. As a condition of his release, González Ochoa wore a GPS ankle monitor. That’s how ICE knew where he was on the morning of Sept. 25.
González Ochoa was at his job at Bread Garden Market on the Ped Mall in Iowa City. He was cleaning the tables in the outside eating area, just as the lunch rush was beginning, when he was approached by three federal agents. The agents were not displaying badges or other ID, and did not identify themselves as they approached him. One agent grabbed González Ochoa’s arm. He pulled away, and ran inside shouting for help.
The agents tackled him, and knelt on González Ochoa as the knelt on him while twisting his arms behind his back to handcuff him. At one point, an agent pulls out a taser, but does not use it, possibly because a crowd was gathering around them, with people videoing their action and demanding to know who they were. The whole time González Ochoa continued to cry out for help.
Videos of the seizure quickly appeared online and went viral, and attracted the attention of the national news media. González Ochoa was first held in Linn County Jail on an ICE detainer, then transferred to Muscatine County Jail. ICE agents tried to pressure him into agreeing to being deported, he said on Saturday.
“They tried to tell me many times to sign my deportation order, but I kept fighting from jail,” he said.
Two weeks after he was seized, González Ochoa was charged with fraud and misuse of documents, use of immigration identification documents not lawfully issued, and using a false social security number. Because they were federal charges, he was transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshal Service, but remained in Muscatine County Jail.
A detention hearing was held in federal court on Oct. 20, to determine if González Ochoa would continue to be held in jail as he awaited trial on those charges, or if he would be released on bond. Supporters of the Iowa City resident packed the courtroom for the hearing.
On Dec. 8, U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher ordered González Ochoa released without bond, subject to home confinement and wearing a GPS ankle monitor. As soon as he was released, González Ochoa was detained by ICE again. His attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that ICE did not have legally sufficient grounds to detain González Ochoa. Judge Locher agreed, and ordered ICE on Jan. 3 to release González Ochoa within seven days, unless they could produce evidence that his detention was lawful. ICE did not do that, and González Ochoa was sent home.
“I want to first thank God, my family, the support for us, Escucha Mi Voz and all of the work that law students and law professors from the University of Iowa have put forward,” González Ochoa told the people gathered at Dream City on Saturday. “They fought for my case, and it’s because of them that I am now free.”
“I have conditional liberty now, I’m on house arrest.”
“I want to thank all of you for your help, it’s thanks to all of you that we are now together as a family,” he concluded. “When we fight together, we win.”
Eva Castro, González Ochoa’s mother-in-law, also spoke via Zoom with the assistance of a translator. She echoed González Ochoa’s thanks for the support their family has received, and added, “We are honorable people, we are hardworking people, we came to this country with a lot of hope for a better future.”
“We were hoping to find peace and security, and we got here and we found ourselves in this situation. But the situation has also taught us that if we are together we can do it. That together we are stronger. And we’re still in the process, we need to keep fighting. For our family, and for all of the immigrants.”
One of the videos of ICE seizing González Ochoa was used in the training session, with aspects of it being used as examples of what to do in such a situation. The person shooting the video maintained his distance from the ICE agents as he documented what they were doing, as is recommended for legal observers. Since there is no fixed definition for legal observer status, advice on how far from agents or police officers a person should be varies, from an arm’s length to six feet or more. But importantly, the observer in this case did not attempt to intervene with the agents’ action. ICE routinely uses violence on people attempting any sort of intervention and will arrest those who do so.
EMV also showed “We Have Rights When Documenting ICE,” a video summarizing an observer’s rights and best practices.
As the Supreme Court has established, people have the right to film any law enforcement action in public, but “ICE doesn’t always respect these rights, and so will sometimes target the person filming,” the video cautions. “So always assess your personal risk before hitting record.”
“When documenting the arrest, film openly and comply with any instructions the agents give you. If the agents tell you to stop filming, you can tell them, ‘I am exercising my right to document this arrest,’” the video states.
It also offers less obvious but important advice such as, “Always keep your camera focused on law enforcement, not the person being arrested or their family members. Showing their identities can make them vulnerable to retaliation.”
Many legal organizations also publish advice for people who want to serve as legal observers for ICE enforcement actions or actions by other law enforcement agencies. The ACLU of Nebraska has a convenient summary on its site.
“If there’s an ICE sighting — whether it’s a whisper, a rumor, a ghost — we have teams that go out and report on those instances, try to gather the facts and bring things together,” EMV executive director David Goodner said during the session. He encouraged anyone who has information about an ICE sighting, or even a suspected one, to report it by calling EMV’s hotlines, 319-321-8664 or 515-729-6482.
But most of EMV’s work doesn’t involve that sort of rapid response work, Goodner explained.
“We spend most of our time doing the unsexy, behind-the-scenes work helping immigrant workers get the legal aid and the housing support that they need, so they can fight their cases, get asylum and defend deportations.”
Over the past year, EMV has seen dramatic growth, quadrupling in size, according to Goodner. More than 5,000 people have signed up for its email lists since Trump returned to the White House.
Much of the session on Saturday focused on getting people mentally and emotionally prepared to act when ICE shows up. The sudden, violent actions of ICE agents, like the ones who seized González Ochoa — or, in a more extreme example, the armed and masked agents currently confronting residents of the Twin Cities — can be disorientating for observers, leaving them intimidated into not reacting. To give everyone an idea of what they might encounter, there was a simulated ICE raid during the training, which involved two people masked and dressed in black storming into the auditorium, shouting “ICE” and taking two EMV members off the stage.
At first, the simulation did not produce much of a reaction from the audience. In part, that’s because the program for the session listed the simulation on its schedule, so most people were aware it was coming. In part, it was also because audience members were waiting to see the reaction of organizers on the stage, who, in turn, were waiting for the audience to react.
Following a discussion on what could have been done, the simulation was restaged. This time, hundreds of phones were raised to record what happened.
After the 90-minute training session concluded, Alejandra Escobar spoke with Little Village about EMV’s response teams. In addition to checking on reports of ICE activity, the volunteers on those teams perform many other functions. In cases where immigrant families feels uncomfortable picking their kids up from school because of an ICE sighting, a response team member might. Likewise, team members might deliver groceries to families who are reluctant to go to the store if ICE is present in the community. Team members also volunteer to drive people to hearings in Omaha, the location of the nearest immigration court as well as ICE’s regional headquarters for the area including Iowa. Anyone interested in volunteering can contact EMV by email at info@escuchamivozia.org.
EMV is also encouraging people to gather outside the Cedar Rapids ICE field office (3351 Square D Dr SW) on the morning of Feb. 3, as the agency’s monthly check-ins for immigrants are held. Among the people scheduled to check in with ICE is Jorge González Ochoa. It will be his first regular check-in since being released from custody earlier this month.
