Santa Ana police arrested two women who regularly monitor federal immigration raids in Orange County, accusing them of stalking a pair of off-duty ICE agents through the city Wednesday afternoon. Adeline Tonoco, 33, and Madison Crabill, 25, remained in jail Thursday on suspicion of stalking, obstructing a peace officer and criminal conspiracy, according to authorities.
According to the Los Angeles Times, police say the women followed a black SUV with tinted windows from a federal building to Santa Ana Police Department headquarters. The agents inside requested police assistance at around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, and officers say the agents recognized the women from an immigration enforcement assignment earlier that day in La Habra. The agents told police they were off duty when the women allegedly began trailing them.
Voice of OC, which identified the women as Santa Ana residents, reported the same set of allegations — resisting a peace officer, stalking and criminal conspiracy — though the outlet spelled Tonoco's first name differently in its own account of the arrests. Police spokesperson Natalie Garcia said the women blocked the agents' vehicle in an alley before following it toward the SAPD station, and that they drove erratically and ran two red lights to keep up with the agents' car. Garcia also said the women parked directly behind the agents once they arrived at the station and used a megaphone to yell obscenities at them.
Advocates Push Back On Police Account
Not everyone agrees with that version of events. Melissa Rios said the women followed the ICE vehicle from an appropriate distance and never blocked or interfered with its movement, telling Voice of OC that “they remained behind the vehicle, and they weren’t blocking it, and they weren’t interfering with the car’s movement.” Casey Conway, the OC Rapid Response Network's director of organizing and development, reviewed video recorded by an ICE watcher during the alley encounter and reached a similar conclusion, saying he “could not interpret any sense of the agents being blocked in at all from the video.” The Times noted it had not independently reviewed that footage.
Attorney Sean Garcia-Leys, who represented Tonoco and serves as executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center, disputed the grounds for her arrest outright. He said Tonoco followed the agents to warn people about ICE activity and to monitor government officials, telling the outlet that “without a threat of harm, it’s not stalking.” Garcia-Leys went further, criticizing police for failing to exercise reasonable caution before making the arrests and suggesting that accusing the women of posing an emergency threat could constitute criminal swatting.
Who Are Tonoco and Crabill
Tonoco volunteers with the OC Rapid Response Network, a group that documents local Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Border Patrol activity. Crabill is an activist with Lucha Orange, which monitors The Home Depot locations for immigration enforcement. Both women are described as having regularly monitored federal immigration raids across Orange County.
Santa Ana is Orange County's sole sanctuary city and affirms the state law forbidding local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, though the arrests of Tonoco and Crabill fall outside the scope of that sanctuary-city policy since they involve alleged conduct toward the agents rather than cooperation with them. Santa Ana City Councilmember Jessie Lopez planned to denounce the arrests and call for the activists' release at a press conference Thursday afternoon outside Santa Ana Jail. Lopez framed the stakes bluntly, saying the issue concerns whether a community can hold government accountable without fear and retaliation.
Part Of A Broader Pattern In Orange County
The arrests land amid what local immigration advocates have described as a 45-day ICE surge across Southern California that has hit sanctuary cities like Santa Ana especially hard, according to Voice of OC. Federal agents have targeted car washes, Home Depot parking lots, construction sites, street vendors and other businesses during an Orange County crackdown that began in June 2025. Earlier this month, about 20 people protested outside the federal building in Santa Ana over the arrest of another resident, Jackie Cordova, whom the Department of Homeland Security said had run in front of multiple ICE vehicles and struck them with a metal object — an account Cordova disputed.
Tensions between ICE watchers and agents in Santa Ana are not new. Last November, an ICE agent pointed a firearm at a woman in a car after saying she had followed and recorded him, and a Fullerton police officer who responded told the agent he could not intervene if no crime had been committed, per the Orange County Register. An ICE spokesperson at the time characterized such encounters as part of a growing trend of vehicles being used against agents. Santa Ana police have also faced scrutiny over their handling of anti-ICE demonstrations, having fired more than 200 less-lethal 40mm projectiles, roughly 60 bean bags and 35 chemical-agent munitions over four days last June — a response that cost the city nearly $400,000, Voice of OC previously reported.
