Two Los Angeles protesters were convicted late Friday of stalking a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after they followed him to his Baldwin Park home.
In a split verdict that followed a weeklong trial, Ashleigh Brown and Cynthia Raygoza were each found guilty of one count of stalking and acquitted of one count of conspiring to publish protected personal information about a federal employee. A third defendant, Sandra Samane, was acquitted of both counts.
Jurors deliberated for roughly nine hours before reaching a verdict Friday evening. As U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson read the verdict, people in the gallery began to cry, tears silently streaming down their faces.
The case stemmed from an incident when the three women — who have all been regularly involved in protests against the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration actions in Southern California — followed an unmarked government vehicle as it drove away from the downtown Los Angeles federal detention center on Aug. 28, 2025.
Some supporters in the gallery said during the week that this case was a test of the limits of protest against the Trump administration. While following ICE and Border Patrol agents to enforcement sites has become a common protest tactic in L.A. and other cities, the case seemed to be the first instance of protesters confronting a federal agent at their home.
Under First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have aggressively charged protesters with assaulting and impeding the actions of immigration agents, filing more than 100 cases. While they’ve secured guilty pleas in 23 of those cases, they had lost every case they took to trial until Friday.
“We thank the jury for bringing justice to these agitators who violated the law and endangered the safety of this federal officer and his family,” Essayli said in a post on X. “Peaceful protests are protected by the Constitution, political violence and unlawful intimidation are not.”
Raygoza, 38, of Riverside and Brown, 38, of Aurora, Colo., each face up to five years in federal prison, according to Essayli. Their sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 8.
Video played at trial showed Brown, Raygoza and Samane following the agent’s vehicle from downtown L.A. to Baldwin Park. The entire incident was livestreamed on the popular “ice_out_ofla” Instagram account.
As they drive, the women can be heard discussing the possibility that the vehicle is headed toward an immigration enforcement operation. They also called on their Instagram followers to respond to Baldwin Park to protest any possible raids — a tactic used repeatedly in cities where the Trump administration has aggressively carried out immigration enforcement.
But the agent they were following — identified in court as Rogelio Reyes Huitzilin — was headed home. During the trial, Huitzilin told jurors he was meeting up with his wife and two young children for a planned “surprise” when he noticed Brown, Raygoza and Samane on his block wearing masks.
Huitzilin exited his vehicle holding up his own camera phone alongside his wife, and the two groups got into a heated exchange, according to video played in court.
Raygoza called Huitzilin a “pendejo” and “race traitor” while screaming to onlookers, “Your neighbor is an ICE agent!” She also referred to him by a gay slur in Spanish, threatened to throw coffee in his face and called his wife, who is Latina, a “white b—,” according to prosecutors and footage played in court.
“I was disgusted that my wife and I were being subjected to that level of racism,” Huitzilin said in court this week.
In response, video footage shows him stepping very close to the protesters and later physically blocking them from leaving the area until Baldwin Park police arrived. Huitzilin alleged he had been “assaulted” by Raygoza, but there is no video evidence showing that.
The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to charge Raygoza with battery in December, records show.
While Huitzilin said he was concerned the women might have weapons, none were recovered at the scene and no one was injured.
Federal prosecutors soon indicted the women on charges of conspiracy and disclosing the personal information of a federal agent, which is effectively a federal anti-doxing statute. “Doxing” is a slang term for revealing a person’s private information online.
The “ice_out_ofla” account, which has almost 50,000 followers, published an address on Chelsfield Street near where the agent lived, according to records shown in court. The post displayed a picture of Huitzilin, calling him a “scumbag,” according to images displayed by prosecutors at trial.
In court, Homeland Security Investigator Robert Kurtz admitted he erroneously listed the address published by the protester account as Huitzilin’s in multiple reports and affidavits. The doxing charge was dropped after he informed a prosecutor of his error late last year. But prosecutors added a stalking charge instead, of which Brown and Raygoza were ultimately convicted.
Huitzilin told jurors that his family has lived in fear ever since the incident. They moved out of Baldwin Park; one of his sons, fearing backlash, opted to be home schooled; and his youngest son, who is autistic, lost access to some needed school services. His wife, who broke down in tears on the stand this week, said she barely sleeps most nights and is undergoing therapy after the incident.
But under cross-examination, Huitzilin admitted no other protesters came to his house after that day, and he never heard from the defendants again. Baldwin Park Police Lt. Evan Martin told The Times “no other incidents similar in nature or related to this incident have occurred” at the Chelsfield Street home.
Despite his concerns that his home was no longer safe, Huitzilin also admitted in court that he has not sold the property and several of his relatives still live there.
Attorneys for Brown, Raygoza and Samane spent the week arguing that the government’s case was blown out of proportion. The defendants did not know who Huitzilin was, or have any intention of identifying his home address or harassing him. Attorneys also said it was Huitzilin who initiated the confrontation on Chelsfield Street by approaching the women.
“They never mention him by name. They didn’t know his name. The agent made this whole situation about himself,” Raygoza’s attorney, Gregory Nicolaysen, said during his closing argument.
Nicolaysen and other attorneys had argued at trial the stalking charge was impossible to prove since the federal penal code requires a defendant to engage in a pattern of behavior to be guilty of the crime. The women only interacted with the agent on one day, during an incident that lasted 90 minutes, he said.
“That’s not stalking. This case is far from over,” he said, vowing to appeal.
Brown declined to speak to a reporter outside the courtroom. Samane’s attorney, Robert Bernstein, celebrated his client’s acquittal.
“Free speech still exists in this country,” he said. “The federal government cannot criminalize political speech protesting ICE activities.”
Trump administration officials have repeatedly expressed concern that revealing the names of ICE or Border Patrol agents will lead to harassment, but the filing of criminal charges in such cases is rare. Publishing certain protected information — like a federal employee’s home address, Social Security number or phone number — for the purpose of inciting harassment or violence is a federal crime.
But the trial exposed far more personal information about the agent and his family than the alleged doxing incident. The protesters never mentioned his name on their live stream and never published his actual home address. During the three-day trial, prosecutors disclosed Huitzilin’s full name, his wife’s full name, the names and ages of their children, their now-former home address and details about Huitzilin’s career as a federal agent and military combat veteran.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to answer questions about whether prosecutors considered how much more information they might expose about Huitzilin before bringing the case to trial.
