Transcript 0:00 A quick note from the editor. After this interview took place, Leo and VC Defensa were targeted by Homeland Security Investigations. 0:07 On May 13th, 2026, Leo and several members had their home searched during a pre-dawn raid. 0:13 This has not deterred the volunteer-led advocacy group from organizing neighborhood ICE watch patrols across Ventura County, California. [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Latino Newsletter podcast. 0:24 I'm your host, Michelle Zacarias, and our guest today is Leo Martinez, a lead organizer and volunteer for VC Defensa, which is an immigrants' rights collective based in Ventura County, California. 0:36 In October 2025, Leo gained attention after a federal vehicle rammed his truck while monitoring and documenting ICE activity in an industrial area of Oxnard. Thank you so much for being here, Leo. 0:49 Thank you so much for inviting me on the show. It's a pleasure. Talk to us about your personal journey into organizing and what led you to take on a lead organizing role at VC Defensa. Having a scrappy mom. 1:02 Some of us have mamas luchonas, and in every neighborhood of this country, they're there, and they exist, and they're already pulling resources and doing things for their neighbors. 1:10 So having a mom like that really kind of was the precursor for a lot of this. So it just kind of made sense. 1:15 And then when I was 23, 24, me and a few friends got together to, to start a business where we sold vandalizing supplies, and that brought all of the attention from local law enforcement. 1:25 So once we finally got them off our, off our butts, we're like, "All right, well, what do we do with all this hands-on experience with law enforcement?" 1:32 [laughs] So it just kind of made sense to, to progress, and we'd always been supporting, uh, different types of movements and collectives throughout the county and everywhere else. So it ju- it was just a natural fit. 1:42 And a lot of us organizers on VC Defensa do have a few years in organizing experience in various fields. 1:47 And then I think the general public, after watching the war on Palestine for the last year, felt a certain level of anxiety and solidarity to want to put their, um, their passion to work, right? 2:01 And this project came around at the, at the perfect time to be able to just keep that momentum going, and we're very proud of that. Yeah. 2:08 And I like the point that you make about how a lot of the foundation for the organizing work that happened throughout the raids was really already set, right? 2:16 Like, you guys had momentum, had people building and, um, establishing tools and resources. Ventura County itself is a really culturally diverse area. 2:27 There's a large, um, Hispanic Latino population, very family oriented demographic, and it's also a significant place for manufacturing and agricultural workforce base. 2:38 Um, and so I'm wondering for you, like, what are the ways that the organization has been really successful in empowering local residents to create these self-sustaining systems? 2:48 Because most of the volunteers are actually local from the area, right? Yeah. We made it a point to build a team that was hyper local, but at the same time countywide, right? 2:59 It's like, have support from the rest of the county, but your day-to-day work is in your neighborhoods, in the areas that you know. 3:05 Um, one of the most successful parts of the project, because we s- do so many different things, but one of the most successful parts that we're doubling down our efforts this year on is we were able to build throughout the county and all the hotspots or all the high-risk areas, um, form messaging groups for all the neighbors in a certain apartment complex or in a certain neighborhood, right? 3:22 And that's where we update everybody from time to time on not only the activities that are happening on that side of town, but also workshops and a lot of resource distribution through there and, and kind of keeping everybody up to date on the, on what happens around the rest of the county, right? 3:37 And it's a lot easier to do that for a very specific neighborhood, because if you send out a message at 5:00 in the morning that ICE is outside, we know that that neighborhood is locked in. They know how to respond. 3:47 They know how to react. 3:48 Everybody who's got papers will go out into the streets and yell, kick, and scream, and kick them out of the neighborhood, but everybody who doesn't have papers locks down, has cameras in the windows, is alerting everybody and communicating through the messaging system. 4:00 So that's something that we, we want to keep expanding on, because rarely when we go into, uh, a lot of these families' lives, rarely is an arrest or the threat of deportation the only thing they're dealing with. 4:12 So it's just natural for us to flow into the rest of this work, which has everything to do later on down the road and right now in some cases with tenants' rights stuff or, um, other legal things that are going on. 4:24 Tenant rights stuff is a big one because you have landlords that are, you know, always threatening to call ICE on people, or you'll get some bully landlords that don't fix any of the situations. 4:34 So being able to, uh, put some energy into developing out that part is just a natural progression. If ICE disappears tomorrow, we're still in these neighborhoods. 4:44 We're still going in harder, and we're still gonna be focusing on all the other issues that they gotta take care of. Yeah. 4:49 And just speaking as somebody who's living in Southern California right now, so many of, like, the local organizations out here in LA County really look to VC Defensa as kind of like the embodiment of the work that we can continue to be doing, right? 5:03 You guys have done so much meaningful work, self-sustaining work, um, really effective work. 5:09 And so, you know, I think knowing all of that, I'm interested in hearing, like, what were some of the barriers that y'all initially faced when it came to getting people to engage, right? 5:21 A specific participation of it, because I imagine that you had to build a lot of trust. The weird thing is, is that it's kind of the easiest thing to do is build the trust. 5:32 If somebody shows up tomorrow to a volunteer meeting and they sit through our volunteer meeting and they say, "Hey, my apartment complex has been hit," or this and that, which for starters, there's no apartment complex in this county that we don't know of. 5:45 Like, we know where every arrest happens for the most part, so we target those areas after something happens with outreach. But let's say something like that were to happen. 5:53 Um, it's very easy for us to show up with that person to their neighborhood within a week or so and get everybody together and joke around and bring a bunch of Costco chickens or-Just hang out with them and then have a convo about this because everybody's worried. 6:11 This affects everybody in all these neighborhoods. Nobody's looking at us like, "Oh, who are you guys here trying to bring us resources and workshops," right? It's welcoming. Quite the opposite. 6:20 That's not where we ran into the hurdles and roadblocks. 6:22 The hurdles and roadblocks, I mean, yeah, there's a part of it is how vast the county is and how are we gonna get everywhere, but that's, that's more of a time thing, not so much of a, like, how do we get around this problem? 6:33 Um, one of the biggest problems that's still persistent to this day is everybody else, whether it be management or whether it be, um... Even within the education system, it's not teachers. It's never the para educators. 6:44 It's always the administrators. It's always the school district. Running into those roadblocks. 6:49 Or for example, it's agriculture heavy out here in Ventura County, so there's a ton of fields, but none of these field owners want us on their property talking to the employees during their lunch hour. 6:59 We've tried really hard early on. I'm sure now it might be a different story, but that was very difficult early on when nobody knew who we were. 7:06 And, and even at the same time even if they knew who we were, a lot of these property owners for the fields are not gonna want us on their property because the minute that we show up to advocate for immigrants, it's immediately gonna turn into a, a labor rights issue. 7:19 It's immediately gonna be like, "Oh, they're stealing boxes from you guys," or, "They don't pay you guys completely for this and that. Oh, you guys aren't getting your lunch breaks." 7:26 It's, it so easily snowballs into that. So that's, to this day, probably one of the hurdles. Factories and things like that where they all support us. The security guards all have our back. 7:36 They'll call us if anything happens. The employees inside will have our back 100%. Maybe part of management really, really, uh, vibes heavy with what we're doing, which is not a rarity. 7:45 But that doesn't mean that we're gonna be able to get the, the red carpet rolled out when we come around asking to do a workshop with employees on their lunchtime. It just hasn't really happened. But that doesn't matter. 7:54 That's why we focus on the neighborhoods. That's why we focus on where our people are at, and that's why we build solidarity there. Like, that's... It's easier to do that. 8:05 [gentle music] So I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about what happened in October. You were arrested and detained, and you were released after maybe three hours. 8:19 Um, since then you have been the target of harassment by federal agents and other law enforcement. Would you be comfortable sharing more about that? Yeah, sure. Um, I think 8:33 it's, it's we are targeted as volunteers, and it's just because some of us are more frequently running into them that we end up being a target, right? 8:44 I don't think they're waking up every morning saying, "Oh, let's go figure out what Leo's doing." I'll, I'll find you. Like, [chuckles] we'll, we'll run into each other eventually. Uh, yeah. 8:52 October was when they were frustrated and when they hit me, and by, I think, December we had another run-in where they tried to box me in, and they're just... 9:04 They're also not good drivers, and they're not well-trained, so it wasn't something that, that ended up in their favor either. 9:12 Uh, I think the other day when we kicked them out of one of the neighborhoods and they tried to hop on the freeway, they also t- It's one guy that tried to box me in. I was like, "Are you gonna... Well, you're one car. 9:23 Like, it's not... In the middle of the freeway on-ramp." So we do have little incidents and run-ins with them. I think it has more to do with their, uh, lack of ability to, um, strategize. They're not smart people. 9:37 They're terrible drivers. They run into dead ends all the time. They get frustrated and just make multiple U-turns. Um, they don't know any of the neighborhoods that they're in. 9:47 They go in the wrong direction, you know, against traffic sometimes. Like, they're just... It's cartoonish how bad they are of drivers. But they are aggressive, and they are arrogant, so we will give them that. 10:00 But, um, yeah, they've cra- they've smashed some of our other volunteers' windows. 10:05 They have, like I said, they sometimes they'll put pepper spray on the vents of the cars, so we're trained to, like, keep the air circulating, keep our windows up, keep the doors locked. 10:16 And, um, yeah, it's, it's something unfortunately that's become a little normalized. None of this should be normal for any of us, and we have to keep reminding ourselves about it. 10:25 Sometimes we beat ourselves up, and we're like, "Oh, why don't we do this?" Or, "Why wouldn't we do this?" We... 10:30 We're figuring this out as we go along, and we're good at it, but also at the same time, none of this is supposed to be normal. We shouldn't be doing any of this. 10:37 So it is difficult to contend with that and kind of understand where, where you could push and where we could take things serious and where we could look at some of their actions and not take them so serious. 10:48 Um, it's at the end of the day, regardless of how much funding they have, regardless of how aggressive they are, regardless of how many agents they pump into the streets, those agents are still human. 11:01 Um, right now, for example, they're at the county jail, and we have volunteers there right now probably yelling and cursing and all kinds of things. 11:08 But we tell volunteers to go to that because we want you to see them face to face, and we want you to watch their hands tremble, and we want you to watch how they're not gonna make eye contact with you. 11:17 So they're also scared. They have nothing to be scared of with us. None of us are armed. We're not the ones in the neighborhoods kidnapping people. 11:24 But we are people that are gonna be pissed that you guys are coming to do that in our neighborhoods, and we are not gonna allow it anywhere in this county. 11:31 And not only do we do everything by the law, we have to go above and beyond that because anything that we do, they're gonna try and misrepresent or accuse us of something 11:43 by twisting whatever facts they do have in their favor, right? So that's also why we're incredibly proud of the volunteer base that we have. It's a 11:52 incredible group of people, some very disciplined, some not so disciplined, but still doing everything considering all the other folks in the movement and everybody else. 12:03 So we're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish.And so I really wanna know, even leading up to this occurrence, were you hearing, were you able to hear what they were saying to the police at the time, and were you able to hear the revision of the, uh, account of events that was happening? 12:23 No. I didn't hear any of that because they kept us at a distance, right? Um, but we knew what was happening. We'd been dealing with these guys since January. 12:33 Like, we're so used to them lying all the time, uh, now to local law enforcement because one of their tactics is because we know that they can't arrest us as citizens, that's why we do the work that we do. 12:46 But also at the same time, they always run to the local police departments, and they always call in and say, "Oh, we're being followed aggressively by some violent drivers that are doing this, that, and the other." 12:54 That's why we started installing dash cams in everybody's car, of all the more consistent patrollers. Because it's like if we ever end up in a jam, we know this will absolve us. 13:03 Um, so that's always been one of the things that we've had to contend with. 13:07 Uh, but I knew that they said that because the police officers communicated to me that the ICE agents said that I smashed into them and that I took off and ran. Um, which it's fine. 13:19 Like I said in a few other times with everybody, like the whole reason why everybody was able to respond so quick and effectively, I'm incredibly proud of how the team operated that day, is because I'm not the first and I'm definitely not gonna be the last of the volunteers that gets arrested or gets into some... 13:34 Has a, has a run-in with these guys. For the last year, they have, uh, hit us with pepper spray. They have hit us, uh, with tear gas. They pointed guns at us. They pointed tasers at us. 13:44 They've done a whole multitude of things, right? This October, the incident that I had with them was only the first time that they actively tried to, with their cars, come at us. Um, every other time we've been on them, 13:57 you know, yelling, screaming, kicking. Um, so when other people have been arrested or have been detained, whether it be at the Glass House raid or whether it be one of the other incidents, like we know that we're good. 14:09 We know that we're absolved. And just like with me where they didn't push any charges on me, they said the charges were pending, we have a few other people that also have charges pending. 14:17 It's, it's a, a big part of you, especially after Rene Good got shot, makes me feel like, oh, this is gonna affect our volunteer base and people aren't gonna necessarily want to do this type of work. 14:27 But what we've seen time and time again is that the opposite happens. This makes people be like, "No, no, no, I... For some reason I want to be out there." And I mean, everybody has their reasons. I know why I do it. 14:37 I know why a few of the other volunteers do it because we've talked about this. We don't really have to say a whole lot. 14:43 Everybody understands that we grew up in this environment, whether it be from local law enforcement or anybody else, like we grew up in an environment of hostility out of a lack of resources. 14:52 But also at the same time, we've seen how hard our parents worked to give us the few privileges that they were able to give us when other people were able to skate by without having to deal with that, right? 15:02 And I think this is where a lot of the rage and a lot of the, the anger in some of our souls is, is that we also saw how our parents were treated in this country. We also saw how, um, 15:18 people who can't hold a candlelight to our parents' light treated and disrespected our parents growing up, right? 15:25 And that feeling of impotence and not being able to do anything because someone's being disrespectful to your parents is something that never really leaves. 15:33 Whether they worked in housekeeping or whether they had a small business or whether they did whatever it is that their job was, whether it was on their job, in their personal lives. 15:43 We've seen how teachers talk to our parents. We've seen how all kinds of positions of authority have treated our parents. And at the end of the day for so many of us, this has to do with basic dignity. 15:54 Like, that is the one thing that we're always gonna defend, and if we have that privilege of citizenship that went so hard into doing it, that doesn't mean I have to respect this country. But at that... 16:04 I mean, that does mean that I'm gonna scrap and fight for everybody that doesn't have that privilege that I consider somebody that is either a friend or a family or a known person that has went through a similar struggle. 16:14 You know, maybe that's a lot of words to express how we feel, but that's because I don't have a simpler way to put it. Like I, I don't really have to explain it to anybody else. 16:22 If they get it, they get it, and I think a lot of us do understand that. So it's just finally one of the few things that we could do on a day-to-day basis that you could see a tangible difference in your day-to-day life. 16:34 Like when you run a workshop with a neighborhood and two days later they kick out ICE agents, you saw a whole housing complex go from riddled with fear and scared to all of a sudden ready to go out every morning and scrap, and who's next and what else are we doing? 16:49 It's a complete 180. That's a very difficult thing to do in any other aspect of social justice. If you're fighting for jail reform, what does a victory look like? You know, what... 16:59 How hard do you have to work for that small a victory? 17:02 And I think that this is something that's tangible, it's accessible, it's the reason why we have volunteers from old retired folks all the way down to like middle schoolers and high schoolers, which it's harder to figure out what to do with them, but they can still do work, right? 17:15 Um, from all walks of life. 17:18 Yes, there's migrants and documented and undocumented folks, but more importantly, there's also a bunch of random people that we would've never expected to be volunteers and do it for their own reasons. 17:27 So we try to find something for everybody to be able to do within this movement. Yeah. And I, I really appreciate you kind of highlighting the fact that this is sort of like a generational, um, fight, right? 17:39 This is something that a lot of people feel drawn towards and compelled to do because our parents were put in disadvantaged positions and were, you know, even something as simple as discipline for speaking Spanish in schools and practicing their culture. 17:56 Um, and so I see, interestingly enough, a lot of like first generation organizers who are really kind of reconnecting with their roots, reconnecting with their cultural traditions, um, and also finding community and organizing in spaces like this.Um, for you, I guess, is there anything culturally that feels like it grounds you during a really chaotic and unpredictable moment in this country? 18:26 [laughs] Yeah. I think, uh, at no point, I say this ad nauseam, at no point in the last year of this project have I ever felt hopeless, even in the worst of the worst situations. 18:37 Because I look around and I see all my friends, and they're friends that I made through this project, and without saying anything, we have each other's back. Like, I don't... 18:45 I- it's very different from if I wasn't doing this type of work and I was just seeing it on my social media feed, then I see where the desperation and I see where the hopelessness would come in. 18:54 Well, I also know that by looking around and seeing everybody that has our back and everybody that's also putting in work from their trenches, that means that we're better off than if none of us were around. 19:04 Like, we know just roughly what the arrest rates would've been had we not been doing this work, because the ICE agents took it out on the next county up. 19:13 When they couldn't get those numbers here, they went somewhere else to get those numbers before the end of the year. So when you see things like that, you're m- not only are you motivated, but it's easy, right? 19:23 I know it's funny when we talk about words like culture, because there's corporate culture, and then there's other, you know, our culture. How do you... You know, what's our culture? What is our culture? 19:33 I think a big part of that is the culture that we create. 19:36 And as an organization, we have a culture of backing each other up and hanging out and socializing, but at the end of the day, the irony of it is, is that I don't even wanna be in this country. I wanna be in Mexico. 19:47 I'm not supposed to be here. I wanna be in Mexico City living my life and touring and exploring all of Central and South America. That's the irony of it. 19:54 But if I'm gonna be here, I wanna be in a culture of people that care about these things, a culture of so many families that we hang out with all the time, right? 20:04 Like, we've become friends with so many of these families, and even though we know each other from doing this work, like, that's not why we hang out with each other. 20:11 Like, we hang out with each other 'cause we like each other. And before I'm an organizer, I was a part of the culture. 20:18 And, and I think that's something that a lot of organizers misunderstand, because I get that a lot of organizers come at this from, uh, maybe academia is where they started to realize some of these things when they were able to go off and, and have a university experience. 20:32 And for a lot of us that didn't get to have that university experience, um, w- like, the academia came to us. So in, in those conversations of culture, 20:45 I think it's super important to focus on the culture part of it first, and then bring in the organizing and bring in the structure and bring in, um, these ways of mobilizing. 20:56 But even then, when we study it, um, a lot of what I learned comes from Central and South America, and how neighborhoods out there set up their community defense committees, and how they were able to distribute resources. 21:07 So I'm, I'm still learning from culture. Like, we're still within that. I think culture itself is a big word, but we do create our own cultures, even within our friends groups. 21:16 Like, we have a certain culture within this friends group. So the, the only thing is how many... "Un mundo donde caben muchos mundos," no? Right? Like, that's a, a very good Zapatista quote. 21:26 Uh, we want a world where many worlds fit, and that's what we're aiming for. 21:29 We have our culture within that, and we wanna not only make our stamp and make it clear that this is how we interpret that culture, but also we're from that culture before we're organizers. That, so that we... 21:42 It's our job is not to be an organizer Monday through Friday from this hour to this hour, and then when we clock out, we go back to being a person of our culture. It's the opposite. It's we are who we are. 21:50 Pull in that organizing, pull in those tools, pull in that skill set, right? 21:53 Bring it into this world where it's normalized, where you're not necessarily organizing with people that see eye to, eye to you politically, right? 22:00 But because we're all in the necessity of the situation, we're gonna have each other's back and build a culture of trust amongst us. 22:05 Um, and I think that that's one of the important parts, is that we get to create the culture that we want with the people that we wanna do it, and we're incredibly proud of what we've been able to do around here, because we're people of the culture first before we're organizers. 22:19 [gentle music] When we first started this project, it was to do a text messaging system to alert people, maybe get some people that could show up when an incident happened, run some workshops, and in the best case scenario, we might be able to help one or two people avoid being arrested. 22:47 We had no idea that we would be able to get to this point of effectiveness in, um, avoiding so many arrests. 23:00 Yes, part of the patrolling is, is something that's pretty intense for, for those of us that have been doing it long enough, but 95% of the time we're patrolling, nothing's happening, and that's what we want. 23:13 We want quiet neighborhoods and quiet communities. There has been some intense weeks, but because we're able to push back on them consistently so hard, it makes them turn it down the week after and the week after. 23:24 Like, there are bursts of a lot of activity, and we do an incredible job of just being out consistently, and the community responds. 23:31 That's the, that's the awesome part, is the community responds when we're prepared, when neighborhoods are locked in, when we've had... 23:38 The more work that you do ahead of time is the less work you have to do in the moment of crisis. 23:43 Like, that's, it's, it's fascinating to see, but also we're, again, we're incredibly proud of that, because none of this happened overnight. None of this is something that was just handed to us. 23:55 We fought and scrapped for every ounce of peace and tranquility in this county at the hands of ICE agents. 24:02 And like I said earlier, unfortunately, our neighboring counties had to suffer the effects because those agents go into those areas to make the arrests that they can't make in our area, and we work with teams over there, and we train them up as well, too. 24:15 Like, we will work with anybody that we could compare notes with and share information with. 24:20 But I think that's the biggest takeaway isI would have never imagined that this project would get to the point where it is right now. 24:26 We have a contingency of 60 to 70 doctors and medical professionals, healthcare workers, mental health professionals that were already volunteers or that joined up because of some incident at a hospital and are now a team that got their own malpractice insurance. 24:40 So now they're getting ready to go do house-to-house visits when we have families that need that, or run clinics, or, uh, they also use their resources so that they could structure their workplace to have a better response plan internally. 24:51 It's a back-and-forth thing. We also have, like, 60, 70, um, teachers and education professionals that are doing similar things within their field. We have, uh, union port worker guys. 25:02 You know, so it's, it's this whole vast project that it, it's, it's incredibly inspiring. There are friends here that we've made that are friends for life. 25:12 There's people here that we have only had around for a few months, but in those short few months, uh, we've been in situations where we look over and they're there holding their ground, and everyone's pushing, and everybody's doing what they can where we can. 25:27 The food distribution of the hundreds of families that get served every week is a whole team of volunteers, right? And, and it's where else in 25:36 my social circles do I see an elderly older white lady with the trans homegirl with the cholo homie with the undocumented... Like, it's a, it's, it's a beautiful harmony there. 25:49 It's a beautiful culture that we've been able to create, but we created it. We fought tooth and nail for this. There is no substitute for going out into neighborhoods. There's no substitute for knocking on doors. 26:00 There's no substitute for doing a workshop with parents or going into Zumba classes where they cancel classes for one day just so that they can bring their families and run a workshop with the Zumba families or Princess House or whatever other situation it is. 26:16 There's no substitute for that. You have to do that. One of the phrases that I love is that Los Mexicanos se conocen en el desastre y en el desmadre. 26:23 So we definitely apply that as well to the work that we're doing because it can't just be all work, work, work. It has to be fun integrated within the work. It has to be a part of what we do as the work. 26:33 If we wanna throw a fundraiser and hire a banda and do a quermés at somebody's house, that's, that's what we wanna do. That's where we wanna be. 26:41 One of the most amazing fundraisers that we've ever had was a fundraiser, uh, years ago for, uh, Mexico when the earthquake hit, and we had a tenants union, and all of them offered to bring food. 26:53 And when they all brought the food, we're eating tamales from four different regions of Mexico. We're trying mole from three different regions of Mexico. 27:01 We're trying this vast culinary, like, display that is all homemade with love and passion, and that is what was the fundraiser. Like, we... You can't plan that out with... 27:14 Like, that is just something that naturally comes about. Uh, so, so again, we're incredibly proud of what we've been able to build. Well, thank you so much for speaking with us about your work. 27:27 We're really grateful that you're able to share more, and I look forward to following and seeing what else is in store for BC Defensa. 27:35 [upbeat music] Until next time, this is your host for the Latino Newsletter Podcast, Michelle Zacarias. Un placer, Michelle. Muchísimas gracias. 27:46 This episode of the Latino Newsletter Podcast was produced by Joaquin Kotler, Juan Diego Ramirez, and Michelle Zacarias, with editorial support from Edward Wilkie. Julio Ricardo Varela edited the conversation. 28:00 The music is by Cast of Characters via Soundstripe. Season 2 of the Latino Newsletter Podcast was made possible through individual gifts and the Latino Media Consortium. 28:10 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and host and don't necessarily reflect those of the Latino Newsletter or its staff. [upbeat music]
