A Mexican national who illegally entered the United States five times, and tried four more times, was finally nabbed by ICE agents on a beachside walkway in Southern California, only after local police twice refused to honor federal detainer requests.
Ernesto Alejandro Perez-Garcia was walking the Redondo Beach esplanade early Thursday morning when ICE agents approached him. He lied about who he was. The agents pulled out an old mugshot. Perez-Garcia stopped lying.
Fox News Digital witnessed the arrest and interviewed Perez-Garcia afterward at an ICE facility, where he sat in custody and offered a blunt self-assessment of how he ended up there: alcohol. Not the five illegal entries. Not the criminal record stretching back more than two decades. Not the detainer requests his local police department ignored. Alcohol.
"At the end of the day, it's the alcohol that got me back in this mess," Perez-Garcia told Fox News Digital after being booked and processed. He blamed a friend's recent death for pulling him deeper into drinking. "It shouldn't have, so it's my mistake, and I've got to be responsible for that."
That narrow self-diagnosis skips over a long trail of law-breaking and a local police department that, by ICE's account, let him walk free when federal agents wanted him held.
Perez-Garcia's first recorded run-in with American law enforcement came on April 3, 2003, when the Torrance Police Department arrested him for driving without a license. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 days. Over the next few years, he picked up additional convictions for driving on a suspended license and possessing controlled-substance paraphernalia.
Then the charges got more serious. On April 10, 2006, the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County convicted Perez-Garcia of threatening crime with intent to terrorize, a charge that carries real weight. He received 60 days in jail and three years of probation.
ICE removed him to Mexico the following month, May 2006. He came back. By June 27 of the same year, barely a month after deportation, he was arrested again on the same charge: threatening crime with intent to terrorize.
That pattern held for the next two decades. ICE records show Perez-Garcia illegally entered the country five times and made four additional attempts, including repeated crossings near Tecate, California, along the southern border. The specific dates and outcomes of most of those entries and attempts are not public, but the sheer volume tells its own story: the border did not stop him, and neither did deportation.
Cases like his are not outliers. ICE recently arrested more than 1,200 illegal immigrants in an Atlanta sweep, many with serious criminal histories including sex offenses and child abuse. Perez-Garcia's record fits a familiar profile: repeated illegal entries, escalating offenses, and a system that kept giving him another chance to disappear into the community.
Since 2020, Perez-Garcia was arrested five times for disorderly conduct. Four of those arrests came from the Redondo Beach Police Department. Two landed in 2026 alone, April 17 and May 8, just months before ICE finally caught up to him on the esplanade.
Each of those arrests was a chance to hand him over to federal immigration authorities. ICE asked. Twice, once in 2020 and once in 2026, the Redondo Beach Police Department declined to honor ICE detainer requests for Perez-Garcia.
Tom Giles, ICE's Los Angeles Field Office Director, spoke with Fox News Digital shortly before the arrest and laid the consequences of those refusals in plain terms:
"When these detainers aren't honored, what it does for us is it sends our officers out into the community, putting our officers at risk and other community members at risk to go out and try to apprehend this individual."
Giles called on local jurisdictions to cooperate. "It will make our communities safer," he said.
The consequences of non-cooperation extend well beyond one man walking free on a beach. When local departments refuse to hold suspects for ICE, agents must track them down on streets, in neighborhoods, and in public spaces, exposing officers and bystanders to risks that a simple jail transfer would eliminate. An illegal immigrant in Connecticut was recently charged in a drunk-driving crash that killed a police officer and mother of three, a case that underscored the real-world price of allowing illegal immigrants with criminal records to remain at large.
Perhaps the most striking detail from the post-arrest interview was Perez-Garcia's claim about what the Redondo Beach Police Department told him. He said officers there had tipped him off.
"Redondo PD had told me about it, you know, Redondo PD was cool with it. They let me go with it, you know what I mean, but they also told me I had a warrant for my arrest."
Perez-Garcia said the warning came "a couple years ago." Fox News Digital reached out to the Redondo Beach Police Department for comment on that claim. No response was reported at the time of publication.
If accurate, the claim raises a pointed question: did a local police department not only refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement but actively inform a five-time illegal entrant that federal agents were looking for him? The assertion is unverified and comes from Perez-Garcia alone. But it tracks with the documented fact that the department twice declined ICE detainers, a pattern that, at minimum, gave Perez-Garcia room to keep living in the community despite an active warrant.
Sanctuary policies that shield illegal immigrants from federal enforcement have produced grim results across the country. In California, an illegal immigrant trucker received less than five years for killing three people in a crash, a sentence that drew bipartisan outrage. The common thread in these cases is a system that treats immigration enforcement as optional, and leaves American communities to absorb the consequences.
Perez-Garcia did not present himself as defiant during the Fox News Digital interview. He was candid about lying to agents, about his chances, and about his attachment to the country he entered illegally.
Asked why he initially denied his identity on the esplanade, he was direct: "To see if I could get away with it." When agents produced a mugshot, the gambit collapsed. "Once I saw the officer... with the picture of me, there was no way I was going to run," he said.
He acknowledged the gravity of his situation in blunt language: "I'm busted, you know, in other words, I'm f***ed."
But he also made a case, not a legal one, an emotional one, for why he kept coming back. "I was trying to lie about it because I actually don't got nothing there in [Mexico] right now, you know what I mean? I grew up right here, and this is what I know," he said. He told Fox News Digital his children live in the United States.
"I already knew it was going to catch up to me; I just didn't know when," Perez-Garcia said. "I don't know what's going to happen, to tell you the truth."
His uncertainty about what comes next is the one honest thing in a two-decade record built on evasion. Perez-Garcia's immigration outcome following this arrest, whether he faces deportation proceedings, continued detention, or additional charges, was not disclosed at the time of the interview.
Giles, the ICE field office director, framed the arrest as a direct consequence of local non-cooperation. His argument was simple: if the Redondo Beach Police Department had honored either of its two detainer requests, ICE agents would not have needed to track Perez-Garcia down on a public walkway on a Thursday morning.
"So, for [sanctuary policies], what we ask these jurisdictions is to cooperate with us."
The request is modest. Hold a suspect who is already in custody. Transfer him to the federal agency that has legal authority over his immigration status. Instead, Redondo Beach released Perez-Garcia, a convicted criminal, a five-time illegal entrant, a man with an active warrant, back onto the streets, twice.
In Minnesota, officials went even further: Governor Tim Walz and state authorities pardoned an illegal immigrant convicted of sexually assaulting a child, blocking his deportation entirely. The Perez-Garcia case is less dramatic but structurally identical: local officials chose to obstruct federal enforcement, and the public bore the risk.
ICE has ramped up street-level operations in jurisdictions that refuse cooperation. The agency recently deported an alleged cartel hitman wanted for murder in Mexico, another case that required agents to operate outside the controlled environment of a jail transfer. Every one of those operations puts officers and civilians in a position that a cooperative local department could have prevented.
Perez-Garcia blames alcohol for his arrest. ICE blames sanctuary policies. Only one of those explanations accounts for the 23-year record, the five illegal entries, the four failed attempts, the declined detainers, and the Thursday morning confrontation on a beachside walkway in a Los Angeles suburb.
When a man can enter the country illegally five times, rack up a criminal record across two decades, get arrested repeatedly by local police, and still walk free because a city department won't pick up the phone, the system isn't broken. It's working exactly the way sanctuary advocates designed it.