Premier Sector: Videos of Border Patrol bragging about arbitrary raids spark legal backlash
The official account of the federal agency’s El Centro branch — known for glorifying its own abuses and mocking detainees — has been cited as evidence in multiple lawsuits that have curtailed its operations within California
“This is a message to all those who break the law. The Premier Sector gives no warnings, just boots, breaches, and warrants with names on them. Door comes off, targets arrested! That’s how BORTAC [the Border Patrol’s tactical unit] rolls!” reads the caption accompanying a 30-second video showing officers dressed in military-style gear preparing to launch a special operation. The post, published on the official Facebook page of the El Centro sector of the Border Patrol in California, has 12,000 likes and more than 600 comments. “Keep up the GREAT work,” a woman writes. “We intend to... and ratchet it up!” responds the official account.
Posts like these — where the agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, boasts about its aggressive tactics and legally dubious raids while mocking detainees — appear nearly daily. They’ve become a hallmark of the El Centro sector’s public image, to the point that the agency has adopted its own nickname — Premier Sector — which often appears in its photos and videos.
But despite the apparent support from social media followers, the posts have been submitted as evidence in lawsuits arguing that agents “do not intend to comply with the requirements [...] but to perform warrantless arrests without probable cause.” These lawsuits have led to limits on the agency’s operations across California’s vast interior.
The El Centro sector, with 1,000 agents, is responsible for patrolling roughly 75 miles (about 120 kilometers) of borderland, from the mountains east of San Diego to Imperial County, near the Arizona border. However, until last month, the law allowed the agency to operate anywhere within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of a border — including coastlines — meaning nearly all of California was technically within its jurisdiction. It had never stirred much controversy — until Trump-era anti-immigrant rhetoric arrived and began exploiting legal gray areas for political gain.
In early January — weeks before Donald Trump officially began his second term as president — El Centro launched Operation Return to Sender in the heavily agricultural area of Bakersfield, some 250 miles from the border but just under 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean. For over a week, agents conducted sweeping outdoor raids clearly aimed at rounding up unsuspecting undocumented workers. Officers appeared at farms, parking lots, and restaurants where migrant workers often gather in the mornings to look for day jobs. Once apprehended, they were taken to detention centers and pressured to sign voluntary deportation orders.
Among the dozens arrested was Ernesto Campos Gutiérrez, a U.S. citizen who had lived in the area for over two decades, owned a home, and ran his own business. Agents in an unmarked vehicle stopped him on his way to work, even though he had committed no traffic violation and was traveling with all valid documentation. When he refused to hand over his keys, they forcibly removed him from his car. This was after they threatened to break his windows, and puncture his tires. He was accused — without evidence — of human smuggling, detained for hours, and narrowly avoided being illegally deported.
Initially, no one thought that such raids — deep in California’s Central Valley — could have been carried out by Border Patrol. But a later Facebook post confirmed it: “We are taking it to the bad people and bad things in Bakersfield,” the El Centro Border Patrol said in response to a comment on its Facebook page. “We are planning operations for other locals such as Fresno and especially Sacramento.”
In recent months, raids by the El Centro sector have been reported in other locations far from the southern border, such as El Monte and Pomona in Los Angeles County.
Another post from late February blatantly exposed the agency’s abusive methods. While national headlines focused on Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ordering all federal workers to report their weekly activities and accomplishments, the Border Patrol used the issue to joke about detainees. In a post of two photos of a car interior covered in shattered glass, the caption read: “#DOGE is really catching on! This illegal alien is listing his accomplishments for the past week: refused to open window during an immigration inspection; got his window smashed for an extraction; arrested by #PremierSector; went to jail; got deported.”
In response to these operations, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, along with several affected parties, sued to prohibit Department of Homeland Security border agencies from detaining, arresting, and summarily expelling migrants using practices that violate the Constitution. In late April, two judges ruled in their favor, limiting the area in which the El Centro Border Patrol can operate in California and prohibiting arrests made without reasonable suspicion.
In these lawsuits, ACLU attorneys included numerous social media posts from El Centro to demonstrate that the agency had repeatedly shown clear intent to violate the law. Fresno District Judge Jennifer Thurston cited this evidence in her decision, which ruled that border agents cannot arrest people without a warrant or clear justification for considering the detainee a flight risk.
Since the court order was issued, social media posts by the El Centro Border Patrol have continued. While they no longer show warrantless arrests, the glorification of force and ridicule of detainees continues. In a statement, a spokesperson for the El Centro sector said that the agency uses social media to “communicate directly with the American people” and that they “actively monitor communications to ensure they reflect agency priorities and public expectations.”
That claim is contradicted by the interaction on a late-April post in which the agency boasts about arresting two lawful permanent residents for not carrying their green cards. A woman commented: “I’m a US citizen and brown, what should I carry to prove my status?” The agency’s response: “Is that chip on your shoulder something you always carry?”
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