Two Los Angeles protesters were convicted Friday night of harassing a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after they followed him to his home in Baldwin Park.
In a split verdict that followed a weeklong trial, Ashleigh Brown and Cynthia Raygoza were found guilty of one count of harassment and acquitted of one count of conspiracy to publish protected personal information about a federal employee. A third defendant, Sandra Samane, was acquitted of both charges.
Jurors deliberated for about nine hours before reaching a verdict Friday night. As U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson read the verdict, people in the gallery began to cry, tears streaming silently down their faces.
The case arose from an incident in which the three women, who have regularly been 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 federal detention center in downtown Los Angeles on August 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 checkpoints has become a common protest tactic in Los Angeles and other cities, the case appeared to be the first case in which protesters confronted a federal agent in their home.
Under First Assistant U.S. Attorney. Bill Essayli, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles have aggressively accused protesters of assaulting and impeding immigration agents, filing more than 100 cases. While they obtained guilty pleas in 23 of those cases, they had lost all the cases they took to trial as of Friday.
“We thank the jury for delivering justice to these agitators who violated the law and endangered the safety of this federal official and his family,” Essayli said in a post on X. “Peaceful protests are protected by the Constitution, political violence and illegal intimidation are not.”
Raygoza, 38, of Riverside, and Brown, 38, of Aurora, Colorado, each face up to five years in federal prison, according to Essayli. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for June 8.
Video played at the trial showed Brown, Raygoza and Samane following the officer's vehicle from downtown Los Angeles to Baldwin Park. The entire incident was broadcast live on the popular Instagram account “ice_out_ofla.”
As they drive, the women can be heard discussing the possibility of the vehicle heading toward an immigration enforcement operation. They also asked their Instagram followers to respond to Baldwin Park to protest potential raids, a tactic used repeatedly in cities where the Trump administration has aggressively pursued immigration enforcement measures.
But the agent they were following, identified in court as Rogelio Reyes Huitzilin, was heading home. During the trial, Huitzilin told jurors he was meeting with his wife and two young children for a planned “surprise” when he noticed Brown, Raygoza and Samane on his block wearing masks.
Huitzilin got out of his vehicle holding his own camera phone next to his wife, and the two groups got into a heated exchange, according to a video played in court.
Raygoza called Huitzilin an “asshole” and a “race traitor” while yelling at onlookers: “Your neighbor is an ICE agent!” He also referred to him with a gay slur in Spanish, threatened to throw coffee in his face and called his wife, who is Latina, a “white bitch,” according to prosecutors and footage played in court.
“I was disgusted that my wife and I were subjected to that level of racism,” Huitzilin said in court this week.
In response, video footage shows him getting very close to protesters and then physically preventing them from leaving the area until Baldwin Park police arrived. Huitzilin alleged that he had been “assaulted” by Raygoza, but there is no video evidence to prove this.
The Los Angeles County district attorney's office declined to charge Raygoza with assault 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 charged the women with conspiracy and revealing personal information to a federal agent, 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 nearly 50,000 followers, posted an address on Chelsfield Street, near where the officer lived, according to records filed in court. The post showed a photo of Huitzilin, calling him “trash,” according to images shown by prosecutors during the trial.
In court, Homeland Security investigator Robert Kurtz admitted that he mistakenly listed the address posted on the protester's account as Huitzilin's in multiple reports and affidavits. The doxing charge was dropped after he informed a prosecutor of his mistake late last year. But prosecutors instead added a harassment charge, for which Brown and Raygoza were ultimately convicted.
Huitzilin told the jury his family has lived in fear since the incident. They moved from Baldwin Park; one of her children, fearing a backlash, opted to be homeschooled; and her youngest son, who is autistic, lost access to some necessary school services. His wife, who broke down crying on the stand this week, said he barely sleeps most nights and is receiving therapy after the incident.
But under cross-examination, Huitzilin admitted that no other protesters came to his house after that day and that he never heard from the defendants again. Baldwin Park Police Lt. Evan Martin told the Times that “no other incidents similar in nature or related to this incident have occurred” at the Chelsfield Street home.
Despite his concern that his home was no longer safe, Huitzilin also admitted in court that he has not sold the property and that several of his relatives still live there.
Lawyers for Brown, Raygoza and Samane spent the week arguing that the government's case was overblown. The defendants did not know who Huitzilin was, nor did they have any intention of identifying his address or harassing him. The lawyers also said it was Huitzilin who started the confrontation on Chelsfield Street by approaching the women.
“They never mentioned him by name. They didn't know his name. The officer made this whole situation about himself,” Raygoza's attorney, Gregory Nicolaysen, said during his closing argument.
Nicolaysen and other attorneys had argued at trial that the harassment charge was impossible to prove since the federal criminal code requires a defendant to follow a pattern of conduct to be guilty of the crime. The women only interacted with the officer one day, during an incident that lasted 90 minutes, he said.
“That's not harassment. This case is far from over,” he said, vowing to appeal.
Brown declined to speak to a reporter outside the courtroom. Samane's lawyer, Robert Bernstein, celebrated his client's acquittal.
“Freedom of speech still exists in this country,” he said. “The federal government cannot criminalize political speech that protests ICE activities.”
Trump administration officials have repeatedly expressed concern that revealing the names of ICE or Border Patrol agents would lead to harassment, but filing criminal charges in such cases is rare. Posting certain protected information, such as a federal employee's home address, Social Security number, or telephone number, for the purpose of inciting harassment or violence is a federal crime.
But the trial exposed much more personal information about the agent and his family than the alleged doxing incident. The protesters never mentioned his name in their livestream and never published his real address. During the three-day trial, prosecutors revealed Huitzilin's full name, his wife's full name, the names and ages of his children, his current home address and details about Huitzilin's career as a federal agent and military combat veteran.
A spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office declined to answer questions about whether prosecutors considered how much more information they could expose about Huitzilin before taking the case to trial.
