The Soccer Mom Chasing ICE

It was 8 a.m. on a Saturday last June, and Angelica Vargas was folding laundry while her girls ate breakfast at home in Downey, California. Her 15 and 16-year-old daughters, both student athletes, didn’t have any soccer games scheduled that day, and her graveyard shift at a youth shelter didn’t start until 11 p.m. Vargas, 34, had nowhere to be—just “one of those days where you catch up on all your stuff,” she tells me on a video call in March. In single-mother terms, it was a unicorn morning.

Then her phone rang. It was Vargas’ mother, her voice measured, calling to tell her that her older sister was at the Home Depot in Paramount when border patrol agents had swarmed the store. Her sister, who had simply been shopping, was trapped in the parking lot while people around her were being tear-gassed and grabbed without explanation. Vargas’ first instinct was disbelief. “I thought she was exaggerating because that's just my sister," she says. “She’s 10 years older than me, but she’s a big baby. I’m kind of the rebel.”

But it was early June 2025, and the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign was beginning to hit Southern California. Federal agents had started raiding stores, factories, and construction sites across L.A., though the full scale of what was coming was not yet clear. By the time Vargas hung up, she was already moving. She told her daughters she’d “be right back” and drove the six minutes to Paramount—a commute she’d made a thousand times. Although she’d never seen the neighborhood like this.

What she saw was a multi-agency operation anchored by border patrol in full tactical gear, locking down the surrounding blocks. Police were staged at intersections, and a helicopter circled overhead. Paramount sits at the edge of Compton, a bridge away, and protesters had already flooded the surrounding streets. Water bottles and rocks flew one direction, pepper spray and rubber bullets the other. It sounded, she says, like a war zone.

Vargas had never been in a situation she couldn’t talk her way through, and a federal blockade was not going to be the first. She parked five blocks out (as close as they’d let anyone get) and started working her way in, determined to get to her sister. At the first perimeter, a sheriff’s deputy—who happened to be a Latina woman—told her she’d pretend she hadn’t seen her. “Go,” she said. “I’m going to look this way.” Vargas left her car parked crooked, before eventually making it past two more checkpoints. When she reached the Home Depot parking lot, she found her sister in her pickup truck, crying and tear-gassed, children coughing in their parents’ cars around them.

Standing in the parking lot, Vargas improvised an exit plan. Her sister would drive the pickup straight at the border patrol line. Vargas would ride on the outside, hanging off the side rail. And then, she’d simply ask to be let out. She was terrified—half wondering whether she’d be tackled, even shot—but she had a feeling that the worst thing she could do was show it. “Once you show fear to them, that’s where they can read that,” she says. So she didn’t—and somehow, it worked: The agents, perhaps too stunned to argue, gave them “three seconds” to go and her sister drove through. But as the truck cleared the perimeter, a protester shouted something that has been lodged in Vargas’ head ever since: “Why did she get to go? What about everybody else in there?”

It was a stranger’s question, shouted in anger, but Vargas couldn’t shake it. “They're right,” she remembers thinking. “I should be out here doing more for my community, not just my sister.”

She didn’t have to wait long for that opportunity. A few days after the Home Depot incident, she was driving through Downey to pick up coffee when she saw a border patrol agent in a green vest sprint around a corner, then tackle a man painting the outside of a gas station. Without thinking, she pulled in, coffee still in hand, and started recording. She told the agent what he was doing wasn’t okay, and asked the man for his name so she could let his family know he had been detained.

More agents arrived, including border patrol and ICE in plainclothes. When she got back in her car, they boxed her in with a Tahoe and an SUV. She rolled her window down: “We can sit here all day. I got my coffee,” she told them. After four minutes, they gave up and left, at which point, Vargas decided to follow them. (She hadn’t actually planned to, she says, but the fact that they boxed her in “truly pissed me off.”)

That night, she posted the footage to TikTok, and it went viral. Suddenly her phone was flooded with messages about reported ICE sightings from across Southern California. Her U.S. citizenship, she figured, gave her a margin that undocumented people don’t have, and the sheer volume of people reaching out compelled her to keep going. She started driving around looking for ICE agents on her own, learning where they staged each morning and what their vehicles looked like. But the best intel came from the community itself: people calling from work to tell her where trucks were, sending license plate numbers, flagging suspicious vehicles.

A system built itself around her, one tip at a time, and a GoFundMe she set up for gas money eventually raised over $122,000. “I just started posting what I was doing and people just started following and sharing,” she says. “I was like, Oh, okay, people actually like this.” And the need only grew: the enforcement campaign that had begun in California spread to Chicago in the fall of 2025 and to Minneapolis by early 2026, where the administration deployed 2,000 federal agents in what it called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, one in which two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents. What Vargas had stumbled into on a coffee run was now a national crisis.

Today, she is known online as Angie the ICE Chaser, where her TikTok has hundreds of thousands of followers and tens of millions of video views and she documents her mission to follow ICE vehicles through the streets of Southern California, capture their movements, and post the footage for anyone who needs to know.

“My intention was never to grow on social media,” she says. “It was definitely to document the injustice that was going on within our communities and to alert people of what streets they were on or what city they were targeting.” But the mom with her Mercedes, who's a team manager for her daughters' soccer team and a mental health professional who does crisis intervention with teenagers, has no mission to slow down.

Vargas grew up in Lakewood, California—a suburb where she was, by her own description, the only Mexican girl on the block. Her father, a former professional soccer player, had built a flooring company and moved the family there, but made sure she never forgot where she came from, especially when it came to her grandmother. The family lore goes like this: A security officer once chased her father through their town in Mexico over a stolen piece of gum. When he got home, his mother came out, grabbed the officer’s baton, and started hitting him with it. He’d tell Vargas: “Everybody in that town was scared of your grandma. Your grandma was not a woman to mess with,” she says, smiling, “I guess it’s genetics.”

It’s a useful inheritance. When the Trump administration launched a sweeping immigration enforcement campaign in the summer of 2025, Vargas’ neighborhood was among the first to feel it. Protests erupted across L.A. after federal agents began raiding Home Depots, factories, and farms. In the span of a couple weeks, immigration teams arrested over 1,600 people in the L.A. region. Agents targeted places where Latino people work, shop, eat, and live.

For Vargas, whose entire family holds U.S. citizenship, the question she keeps getting is why she bothers. “Some people are like, ‘If your family’s not affected, why do you care so much?’” she says. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a citizen or not. You should not be mistreated or targeted for looking a certain way.”

That principle has attracted company. Vargas is now part of a vetted rapid response network of roughly eight to ten volunteers coordinated through Siempre Unidos LA, a South Central nonprofit founded by 26-year-old Liz Ramirez. The group runs on a messaging chain: when a sighting comes in, whoever is closest and available goes. There’s an aftercare side, too, which includes connecting families of detained individuals with food, legal resources, and support.

In the months they’ve worked together, Ramirez has observed in Vargas a composure under pressure that the rest of the team has learned to rely on. “Angie’s definitely very fierce. She’s a very strong, courageous woman,” Ramirez says. It helps that the rest of Vargas’s life has been, in its own way, training.

Her nights at the youth shelter are spent de-escalating teenagers in the middle of the worst moments of their lives so far. “Kids throwing stuff around the room and I’m just like, ‘You’re going to be fine. Just take deep breaths.’ I practice that every day,” she says. On our call, Vargas shows the same unhurried calm, laughing through stories like she’s genuinely amused by her own life.

Her role as team manager for her daughters’ soccer club has paid off too: She has spent the better part of a decade coordinating schedules, organizing carpools, and building relationships with every parent on the sideline since her girls were three and four years old. Those parents now help her handle rides to practice and games when she can’t. Beyond her soccer mom crew, her mother stays with the girls overnight and helps cover pickups, and her boss at the shelter gives her flexibility when an emergency call comes in. “It’s a whole community that has been coming together for me to be able to be out here on the streets for my other community," she says.

So she keeps showing up. By her own estimate, Vargas has responded to roughly 200 ICE-related incidents since that Saturday in Paramount; at times, that has meant as many as three responses a week. The pace has eased from its peak, she says, but the calls haven’t stopped, and neither has the risk.

In January, while tailing an ICE truck near Alhambra, local police pulled behind her and intercepted her car, claiming her emergency lights were on (they weren’t, according to Vargas). Then federal agents parked in front of the police, got out, photographed her vehicle inside and out, and asked about her citizenship. In that moment, “I felt like this is it,” she says. Eventually, her team showed up and the agents left, but the encounter stayed with her, and her mother still worries every time she goes out. “[She’s] always like, ‘I don’t want them to try to shoot you,’” Vargas says.

But the hardest part of the work, she explains, is the people she can’t get to in time. Vargas was in touch with a fruit vendor who went to work every day despite the risk because she had no financial alternative. She was on medication, she’d told Vargas, and was hopeful she’d never get detained. One day, she called Vargas to say a car was circling her. Vargas was five minutes away, but “when I pulled up, her food stand was by itself.” The woman had been detained, and is still fighting her case.

Then there’s her best friend, a fellow activist who traveled to Chicago to document a protest and was ambushed by border patrol agents. He was held for a month and a half, was mistreated in custody, according to Vargas, and targeted because of his visibility. It took more than a month for her to get back on the streets after that. “When they target others is when it breaks me more mentally,” she says.

She’s had three days, total, where she considered closing her social media accounts and giving it all up: “I’ve just broken down and I’m like, ‘Dude, how am I doing this? This is so much on me. I need a break.’”

What gets her back on the road every time, she says, is her girls. In December, she brought both of them to a toy drive organized by Siempre Unidos. They helped run the booth, gave out gifts, and mingled with vendors. “I want them to know that they’re my inspiration, and they are what keeps me going. I hope that I leave enough for them to take on and do better than me,” she says. The older one has told Vargas she wants to be like her when she grows up because she’s “such a good person.” The younger one, on the other hand, isn’t interested in imitation.

“I’m going to pass you, mom,” she’s told her. “I’m going to help way more people.”

Photographer Sela Shiloni