Biography
Isaac Antonio Villegas Molina is a Los Angeles day laborer and a named plaintiff in Vasquez-Perdomo v. Noem, the Southern California civil-rights lawsuit alleging that the Department of Homeland Security has unconstitutionally arrested and detained Latino day laborers, bus-stop riders, and street vendors to meet arbitrary arrest quotas without reasonable suspicion. The case reached the Supreme Court on the shadow docket in September 2025; the Court lifted the lower-court injunction restricting race-based stops, drawing dissents calling the ruling a license for blatant racial profiling.
Villegas Molina was first detained by ICE in June 2025 while waiting at a bus stop outside a store in Los Angeles during the LA ICE-raid surge. An immigration judge ordered him released on bond. On April 16, 2026 — months after he became a named plaintiff in the lawsuit — ICE re-detained him without prior notice to him or to his attorneys, despite the standing bond order. He was first held at the B18 ICE facility in the basement of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, then transferred to the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in the high desert.
The ACLU of Southern California issued a public statement calling the second detention retaliatory. NDLON attorney Cal Soto said: His arrests were unconstitutional, and his imprisonment in Adelanto was unlawfully cruel and punitive. Civil-rights advocates described it as the first documented retaliatory ICE arrest of a plaintiff challenging immigration raids in the United States. He was released from the Adelanto facility on April 23, 2026 after a week of community pressure, news coverage, and litigation.
