In Fresno, in the heart of California's Central Valley, immigrant advocates say the most basic question at an immigration stop has become unanswerable: is the masked, unmarked man ordering someone out of a car a federal agent, an impersonator, or something worse? Reporting by Fresnoland on October 30 — built around a community assembly hosted by United San Joaquin (USJ) on October 19 — describes advocates pressing for a new law on masks and identification after California's own ban was blocked in court, with one advocate suggesting that if a state law cannot survive, a city-level law should set protocols for federal agents operating locally.

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

“You're picking up people off the streets in a way that is so violent that you don't know if it's another organized crime group,” said Dr. Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, regional partnerships specialist at the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative (CVIIC). “We don't know if it's immigration because again, they're not having their cars marked or anything. So of course, people are going to be scared.” She said agents not wearing identification, masked agents, and people impersonating agents together distort how residents interact with immigration authorities — and noted that costumes and equipment sold online, including on Etsy and Amazon, make it easy for bad actors to pose as federal agents, while civilians forming patrol groups can use easily obtained gear or AI-generated fake identification.

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

The stop near Shields and West that nobody can explain

Daycare worker Victoria Ford told the October 19 assembly about a traffic stop she witnessed earlier in October near her workplace at Shields and West in Fresno. As Ford described it, a man in plain clothes first identified himself as an agent of “Kerman County Parole” — a fictional-sounding agency — wore a camouflage-green bulletproof vest marked “police work,” and ordered a woman of colour out of her car under threat of physically removing her. Ford said the man changed his story when witnesses questioned him, and was then joined by two other men who vaguely claimed to be law enforcement; one, she said, wore a badge that looked like a Halloween costume, and the other wore a face mask. Her account is a witness allegation: the men's identity was never established. “Were they ICE agents, traffickers? We still don't know,” Ford said. “What I do know is that these kinds of tactics are terrorizing our communities.” Ford and her colleagues called the Valley Watch Network and recorded the vehicles' licence plates, and the woman's, in case something happened to her.

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

Advocates say documented encounters with actual agents raise a second problem: even legitimate operations, conducted masked, leave residents unable to tell the difference — and, they allege, embolden rough conduct. Fresnoland reported that on October 13, video shows agents shining bright lights at activists and surrounding one individual, and calling another activist a vulgar name; in another clip, Fresno Resistance co-founder Alfred Aldrete accused agents of pepper-spraying him and his brother Noah on October 14, and said agents pushed Noah into a car, knocked Aldrete's phone from his hand and threw him down, with a police car visible in clips of the incident. Those are the activists' accounts of the encounters, reported by Fresnoland; the federal agencies did not provide a response in the report. “These masks give these goons just enough confidence to become physical,” Aldrete said.

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

The sheriff and the mayor: ‘We are not immigration enforcement’

The confusion cuts the other way for local officers. Fresno County Sheriff John Zanoni, speaking at the same October 19 USJ assembly, urged residents to be responsible when sharing information on social media, saying videos have incorrectly identified sheriff's deputies on his department's auto-theft task force as ICE agents. “I ask that people be responsible,” Zanoni said. “When you see this uniform, you see the sheriff's office. Know that we are not immigration enforcement officers.” He said it matters for safety and liability that people know who they are dealing with, and that federal agents be distinguishable from impostors: “We need to be readily identifiable and have our badge and other identifications visible.” Zanoni acknowledged the concerns about masked, unidentified federal agents — “that's not how we do business or major operations” — and added that ICE could do a better job of communicating with his office about its enforcement activities.

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, the city's longtime former police chief, told the assembly that if federal agencies want to focus on immigration, “it should be on the worst of the worst,” and called for local governments to keep a unified voice and realistic expectations. “We're not going to go out and arrest ICE,” Dyer said. “We can't do anything [about masks directly]. But we need to be very vocal and say that we don't want ICE doing what they've been doing within our community.”

Source: Fresnoland, Oct. 30, 2026

Background: a law passed, blocked, and argued over for a year

California's legislature passed the mask ban — Senate Bill 627, the No Secret Police Act, authored by State Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September 2025 — after plainclothes, masked arrests in Los Angeles and, earlier, in Fresno itself. In June 2025, Fresnoland reported federal agents in masks, sunglasses, dark T-shirts and jeans, with badges tucked on belts and unmarked vehicles, arresting two men outside an office in downtown Fresno; Sheriff Zanoni said then that he was “absolutely” concerned, and Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto said the agents should at least have used a marked vehicle identifying their agency. In February 2026, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder ruled that California does have the power to ban federal agents from wearing masks, but held that SB 627 could not be enforced because it singled out federal officers while exempting state officers; Wiener immediately announced new legislation to add state officers to the ban. A companion law, SB 805, the No Vigilantes Act, required plainclothes officers to show visible identification — and on October 14, 2026, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled that requirement cannot be enforced against federal officers either, holding that it directly regulates the federal government in violation of the Supremacy Clause. The result, as Fresnoland put it, is that currently there is no valid law requiring ICE agents to identify themselves during routine operations in California.

Source: Office of State Sen. Scott Wiener, Feb. 9, 2026

What it means in the Central Valley — and what happens next

Fresno and the wider San Joaquin Valley are home to one of America's largest Punjabi communities — farm families, shopkeepers and the truck drivers who run Highway 99 and Interstate 5 — alongside the Latino farmworker communities at the centre of the accounts in Fresnoland's report. For residents of both communities, the practical divide the sheriff drew is the one that matters on the street: Fresno County deputies work in a marked uniform with a visible badge and, in Zanoni's words, are not immigration officers, while a masked person in plain clothes in an unmarked car currently has no legal duty in California to prove who he is. Advocates at the assembly documented encounters through networks such as the Valley Watch Network, and Aldrete said communities do not feel safe “while ICE operates under the cover of masks avoiding accountability for their harm they cause.” New Jersey, Oregon and Washington passed mask bans earlier this year and Los Angeles County and Saint Paul, Minnesota, have passed local bans, according to Fresnoland; Wiener's revised state bill, extending the ban to state officers as the court required, has been announced but, as of the October 30 report, no new deadlines had been announced — which is why De La Cruz Santana is now floating the city-level route, and why the argument that began in Fresno in June 2025 is still running, four days before the November 3 midterms.