Immigrant Rights Advocates Patrol Streets In Anticipation Of Possible Raids

Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, March 18, 2025…

• Chicago, Boston and Aurora, Colorado have all seen high profile raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of President Trump’s promise of mass deportations. Immigrants rights activists in Los Angeles say it’s only a matter of time before we see the same there. One group has taken the unusual step of patrolling the streets looking for ICE.
• Officials in the Tulare county city of Porterville are challenging a state law on pronouns. 
• Following a more than two year closure, Madera Community Hospital will open its doors to patients again Tuesday morning.

Activists Seek Out Federal Agents, Warn About Immigration Raids

A small group of activists assembled before dawn on a recent day in a South L.A. parking lot preparing to patrol the neighborhood. The gathering was not unlike what you see when police congregate in a parking lot preparing for a raid.

Only this time, the target was federal immigration agents.

The activists were from the Community Self Defense Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights. They were armed with two-way radios, bullhorns, and were trained to spot undercover vehicles from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security.

The coalition formed in the wake of the second election of President Donald Trump and includes groups from across Los Angeles. They say their aim is to find ICE agents, alert the community to their presence using bullhorns, and drive them out of neighborhoods. An ICE spokesperson confirmed in a statement that agents have aborted at least one enforcement action “due to safety concerns brought on by protesters/bystanders.” The spokesperson declined to give his name “due to a heightened security risk to ICE employees.”

Porterville Proposes Parent Notification Policy

A new proposal in the Tulare County city of Porterville is challenging California’s law on gender identity.

The ordinance would require teachers and school officials to notify parents if their children want to use different pronouns. It would also allow parents to sue the school or the district if the schools refuse to notify parents about the change.

The Porterville City Council recently took steps to also police the use of public restrooms by trans women. Both ordinances are still in the discussion phase.

Madera Community Hospital Is Reopening

When Madera Community Hospital abruptly closed its doors in early 2023, its ripple effects spread much farther than the immediate city and county that relied on its services.

The 103-bed hospital, which faced significant financial pressures for several years, will reopen on Tuesday under the management of Modesto-based American Advanced Management Inc. And when it does, it will provide at least a small measure of relief for a medical-care landscape in the Fresno-Madera area that continues to face more patients than there are available beds.

“Even though Madera Community is a smaller hospital, just the small impact of that closure on other hospitals is significant because the other hospitals are already completely over capacity almost every day,” said Dan Lynch, who heads the Central California Emergency Medical Services Agency for Fresno, Madera, Kings and Tulare counties. “What (the closure) told us, and has really identified even as a larger issue, is that we just don’t have enough beds in the Valley,” Lynch added.

The closure of the Madera hospital’s emergency department on Dec. 30, 2022, the January 2023 shutdown of the entire hospital, and its subsequent bankruptcy left Madera County with only one functioning hospital – Valley Children’s Hospital, a pediatric facility that’s closer to Fresno than it is to the city of Madera. As a result, patients in Madera and the surrounding rural area needed to make longer drives – or take longer ambulance rides – to hospitals in Fresno.