Two weeks before the 47-year-old housekeeper with a chronic health condition fainted while being handcuffed by ICE agents in front of her brother-in-law’s East Palo Alto home, two similar-looking men had pulled up to the same address.
“Do you have ID?” the man asked Ernesto Jasso, who was standing next to his truck that carried tools for his landscaping business.
The man never identified himself, but Jasso said he would grab his ID from his house. Afraid of being deported, he never came back outside and eventually the car pulled away.
But he believes that same man — along with a group of other federal agents — returned at 7:15 a.m. Monday and arrested Jasso’s 29-year-old son, Dario, as he climbed into his truck to go to his construction job. Minutes later, Yenycey Rodriquez the housekeeper, and her husband Oscar Flores who worked as a gardener with Jasso, arrived at Jasso’s house. Flores was joining his brother-in-law to carpool for a day of landscaping work when his wife was arrested.
On Tuesday, Flores sat down with the Bay Area News Group and detailed the terrifying morning Monday when he narrowly escaped arrest himself and filmed his wife who has a blood condition passing out as ICE agents handcuffed her. She remained at Stanford Medical Center Tuesday with federal agents blocking her door. His nephew was taken to a federal detention center in Bakersfield, he said.
“I’m just completely stressed and drained about it,” Flores said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — did not respond to requests for comment.
Flores and his wife came to California with 10-year tourist visas that expired two years ago, he said. They brought their three daughters here to give them a chance at a better education and join Bay Area relatives who are citizens.
“We haven’t committed any crimes besides overextending the visa, not even a speeding ticket,” he said of his whole family caught up in Monday’s ordeal.
Their experience raises questions about why this family of housekeepers and gardeners were targeted and why the men showed no warrant or deportation order to arrest them. President Trump had campaigned on a platform of “the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out” to deport immigrants living in the U.S. without permission with an implied focus on those with criminal records. He would deport millions of them — but there aren’t millions with criminal records.
East Palo Alto Police Chief Jeff Liu said his dispatch center received a phone call from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents early Monday morning letting the agency know that they would be operating in the area. They offered no details of their plans, he said, and his officers did not participate.
After Monday’s arrests, both Flores and Jasso fled their own homes and are staying in what they consider “safe houses.”
One of their relatives, Issy Tovar, said she’s upset that the Trump administration is going after immigrants without criminal records. Overstaying a visa is generally not a criminal offense, but is a serious immigration violation subject to deportation and prohibitions against re-entry into the U.S.
“They are now after productive members of our community, people that are hardworking, that are appreciated and loved by their neighbors, by their employers and they’re causing trauma in whole families,” Tovar said.
In a Tuesday afternoon interview, Flores explained that on Monday morning, he and his wife had already dropped their 11-year-old daughter, their youngest, off at school. They had just parked in front of Jasso’s house where Flores was meeting up to start his work day.
After he got out of the car and his wife took the driver’s seat to get ready to head to her housekeeping job, he felt a hand grab his arm.
“Do you have an ID?” an agent in black asked.
“I didn’t even look at him,” Oscar said. “I just reacted and ran.”
He fled into a neighbor’s yard, but the agent pursuing him stopped at the sidewalk — not venturing onto private property.
None of them had ICE insignias on their black clothing, although one had a jacket that said “Police.”
As the agents focused on his wife, Flores slipped over to his brother-in-law’s yard and began to film what happened next. From his video, you can hear his wife screaming as she’s on her knees while agents are handcuffing her. As they lift her up and move her towards a parked black van, her body goes limp. Flores yells that she’s fainted.
“She’s sick!” he yells in Spanish. “If she dies it’s your fault.”
His wife, who goes by “Yeny,” has a chronic blood condition called called Thrombocytopenia that causes her to pass out in high-stress situations, Flores said. She has been treated previously at Stanford for it.
Before the van pulled away, Flores said, the same agent that had stopped his brother-in-law in his yard two weeks earlier pointed at Jasso and said “you’re next.”
Another relative followed the van to Kaiser Redwood City where he confronted the ICE agents and saw Yeny still unconscious in the back seat, Flores said. It’s unclear what happened at Kaiser, although the agents instead took her to Stanford, where she was admitted.
The federal agents guarding her door allowed the family to visit her for several hours Monday morning, but banned them for the rest of the day and Tuesday.
Tuesday afternoon, Stanford Hospital spokesperson Lisa Kim confirmed that “federal agents brought an individual who was in their custody” to the emergency room Monday and “in accordance with our current policies and in compliance with federal agencies, is providing the needed care for this patient.” She did not offer details about the patient’s condition.
Patti Regehr, a member of Santa Clara County’s Rapid Response Network that helps undocumented immigrants, spent much of Monday in the Stanford Hospital waiting room with the family.
“People are running scared, and we need to stand up,” she said.