805 UndocuFund Leading the Fight for Immigrant Rights on Central Coast

805 UndocuFund Leading the Fight for
Immigrant Rights on Central Coast

Executive Director Primitiva Hernandez Reflects on
First 100 Days of Trump Presidency

By Ryan P. Cruz | May 1, 2025

Read more from our Reign of Administrative (T)error cover story.

With so much confusion, fear, and misinformation over Trump’s immigration agenda, it’s become even more important for organizations on the ground to ramp up their efforts to keep communities informed and prepared for the worst. In the past few months, 805 UndocuFund has stepped up as one of the leading organizations holding “Know Your Rights” workshops, training volunteer advocates, and providing real-time reports of immigration law enforcement in Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo County through its 24/7 Rapid Response Hotline (805) 870-885.

Primitiva Hernandez, executive director of 805 UndocuFund, has emerged as one of the region’s most passionate advocates for immigrant rights and has spent countless hours organizing, holding informative seminars, and working with families who are dealing with the fallout from the Trump administration’s push for mass deportations.

Hernandez was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and comes from a family of farmers significantly impacted when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) changed the agriculture industry in the mid-’90s, opening up the market to cheap, subsidized U.S. imports and forcing hundreds of Mexican farmers to either shut down or migrate to the U.S. for work.

For much of her early life, Hernandez bounced back and forth between Mexico and Santa Barbara County, where she went to elementary school and where her father found work in the avocado and citrus industry. When she was 15, she came back to the U.S. for the final time, became a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient under the Obama administration, and made Santa Barbara her permanent home.

Seeing her family dealing with mixed immigration status, and her own experience coming across the border as an unaccompanied minor, Hernandez said, gave her the lived experience to understand the struggles of the undocumented community. As she went through high school, Santa Barbara City College, and Antioch University, she began to volunteer with immigrants’ rights organizations like Importa Santa Barbara.

“I’ve always had that deep commitment to advocate for the rights of the immigrant community,” Hernandez  told the Independent. “People can understand the history, and they can know the root cause of why people migrate. But they don’t get the amount of destabilization they go through, and how much they are afraid for their lives.”

After earning her college degree, she began working for the county Housing Authority as a family services representative, using her off-time to volunteer with Importa SB, where she would eventually join on as a boardmember.

In 2024, she applied for an opening as executive director of 805UndocuFund, an organization that helped her family with much-needed assistance in previous years. “To me it felt like a calling for me to give back in a meaningful, impactful way like I always wanted to,” she said.

Hernandez was hired to lead 805UndocuFund in January, just a few weeks before Trump was set to take office. She said the organization and other immigrant rights groups had already been meeting for months at that point, working with the California Immigrant Policy Center to prepare for what may come after the election. 

When Trump was elected, along with a Republican majority in the House and Senate, 805UndocuFund started making plans to revive the 24/7 Rapid Response Line, a program the organization ran during the first Trump administration to verify and report suspected immigration law enforcement activity in the region.

Within days of Trump taking office, it became clear that the federal government was going to do everything in its power to deport as many undocumented individuals as possible, starting with targeted operations across the country — including here on the Central Coast.

“It was a lot worse than we thought,” Hernandez said. “We honestly anticipated it being bad, but we didn’t think it would be this bad.”

Hernandez said the Rapid Response Hotline was able to verify two targeted operations on the Central Coast that began in the last week of January. These included the first verified sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in heavily Latino neighborhoods like Santa Barbara’s Eastside and Westside.

On January 26, the hotline received reports of ICE making stops in unmarked vehicles, dressed in plainclothes, demanding that people exit the vehicle without any warrant for their arrest. The ICE agents, who portrayed themselves as local police, were aggressive in their tactics, Hernandez said, even surrounding one man’s truck, mocking him, and shouting for him to “come out and be a man.”

In that case, the hotline connected the man with a representative from the Immigrant Legal Defense Center, who helped the man assert his rights and prevent an arrest.

Another close call came when a woman, identified only as Maria, was on her way home from work when she noticed she was being followed by an unmarked vehicle. When she was stopped, the men from the vehicle came out, said they were local police, and asked her to open her door. When she said she wanted to exercise her right to not speak with them, they continued to ask her questions while she got in contact with the Rapid Response Hotline. After several tense minutes where Maria kept telling the officers she knew her rights, they left empty handed.

“If you know your rights, that can possibly be what saves you,” Hernandez said.

Hernandez said the frequency of immigration arrests has slowed down since those targeted operations, in which ICE agents were said to be looking for specific individuals who have been flagged for deportation. But while the arrests aren’t happening as frequently, there have still been ICE sightings and alarming reports of collateral arrests, in which agents detain a person who has not been convicted of any serious crime. 

“If they’re not the original target, there’s no reason they should be taken,” Hernandez said. “It’s not only undocumented people, either. Visa holders are being revoked and green card holders have been denied reentry into the country.”

ICE and the Department of Justice have refused to disclose specific statistics for each county, leaving the tracking and reporting of arrests up to nonprofit organizations like 805 UndocuFund. In the first 100 days of Trump’s second presidency, the Rapid Response Hotline has fielded thousands of calls and text messages, receiving 33 verified reports of arrests in the tri counties, with most coming from Santa Barbara County, where at least 24 have been arrested (with the most recent arrest coming on April 24). But Hernandez estimates the actual number of local arrests are much higher, since these reports are only those who called into the hotline.

“ICE is not being transparent, and their system is not very accurate either,” she said. “There are people that are being arrested or deported without anybody knowing, especially if they don’t have family or friends or if ICE doesn’t let them call.”

What the hotline has done more than anything is help the public be involved in verifying reports of ICE activity and dispelling rumors or false reports. The organization has trained over 40 hotline operators, and at least 60 legal observers who can go on scene and check out reports in each county. These volunteers, and the real-time reports on 805 UndouFund’s social media pages, have become an integral part of informing the community.

Recently, 805 UndocuFund has turned its focus to connecting families with resources and keeping the public aware of the impacts from the latest developments, including the Trump administration’s attempts to sidestep court orders and fly undocumented individuals to foreign prisons without a proper court hearing, or the federal government asking undocumented folks to “self-deport” through an online app. Many of these announcements, she said, may not have a direct impact on the ground but serve as a way to spread fear among affected communities.

“It isn’t real. Only a judge can order a real deportation,” she said. “But it’s having a big impact. It’s a very overwhelming time to be undocumented, and be part of a targeted population. This is close to home. Family separation is happening here. It’s very real, and it’s impacting families in various ways.”

Hernandez isn’t one to give herself credit for the work she’s been doing for the undocumented community, but her passion for advocacy was recently recognized by the CAUSE Action Fund, which presented Hernandez with this year’s “Corazón Award” for leaders who dedicated their work toward progressive political action. She received the award during the 2025 Leadership Awards on April 26.

During her acceptance speech, Hernandez fought back tears, recalling her firsthand experiences with the “inequity and injustices” of the U.S. immigration system. She passed on the praise to the countless others with whom she wanted to share the award, from the Rapid Response Hotline volunteers to her colleagues with the 805 Immigrant Coalition to the “youth who dare demand dignity for their families” with action in the face of all the fear. “This award is not mine alone,” she said. “It belongs to all of us who know that justice is promised … you are the corazón of this fight.