Breaking News: Video Shows ICE Agents Detaining Man at Redding Apartment Complex

Video obtained by North State Breakdown appears to show U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining at least one man in the parking lot of a Redding apartment complex.

The encounter took place the morning of Sept. 12 at The Peaks Apartments, at 3980 Churn Creek Road in Redding, in a lot fronted by the complex's garages.

(video at the bottom of the article)

An agent in a vest marked "POLICE ICE" wears a badge and two body-worn cameras at The Peaks Apartments on Churn Creek Road in Redding. No name tape is visible. — An agent in a vest marked "POLICE ICE" stands beside a pickup truck at the apartment complex's garages.

An agent whose vest reads "ERO," Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE division responsible for immigration arrests and deportations, walks a man in a white polo shirt across the lot. — An agent whose vest reads "ERO" — Enforcement and Removal Operations, the ICE division responsible for immigration arrests and deportations — walks a man in a white polo shirt across the lot.

The video does not show what led to the encounter. It begins with people already gathered near a parked pickup truck.

An agent in a vest placarded "FEDERAL AGENT" beside a black RAM pickup. None of the vehicles at the scene carried light bars, agency decals or government plates.

A growing federal presence in Redding

ICE has operated a facility in Redding, at 443 Redcliff Drive, for years. Shasta Scout first reported its existence in the summer of 2025, and found that local officials, including the police chief and the former city manager, said they knew little or nothing about it. Federal records reviewed by the outlet refer to the site as the "Redding Hold Room," and it does not appear on ICE's public list of detention locations. Documents obtained by Shasta Scout traced ICE activity in Redding to at least 2012.

Hold rooms are not detention centers. They were designed to hold people for a matter of hours, and they are not subject to inspection by state officials.

Detentions there have climbed steeply, and federal records released last month show the climb continuing well past the point where it was last publicly reported.

North State Breakdown analyzed the most recent detention data obtained and published by the Deportation Data Project, a University of California, Berkeley and UCLA initiative that sues the federal government for immigration enforcement records. The dataset identifies the Redding site by the facility code REDHOLD and contains 295 book-ins there, running from October 2022 through Aug. 3 of this year.

The pattern is stark. The facility booked in two people in 2022, 12 in 2023 and 28 in 2024. In 2025 it booked in 186. Through the first seven months of this year it has booked in 67 more. Of all 295 detentions on record at the site, 250, roughly 85 percent, have come since Jan. 21, 2025. The busiest single month on record was September 2025, with 29.

Ninety-nine of those detentions came after mid-October 2025, the point at which the previously available data ran out. The last two months in the file are likely incomplete, since the records were compiled in late August.

The records also describe who is being held. Of the 250 people booked into the Redding facility since January 2025, 135 were classified as convicted criminals, 80 as having pending criminal charges and 35 as immigration violators with neither, meaning roughly 46 percent had no criminal conviction. Two hundred thirty-seven were men and 13 were women. Mexico was by far the most common country of citizenship, at 195. The second was Laos, with 11.

That last figure has a local resonance. Shasta Scout reported in December that Mien refugees in Northern California, an ethnic group from Laos, many of whom resettled in the region after the Vietnam War, were living with renewed fears about their status. The federal records indicate members of that community have been booked into the Redding facility.

California's Values Act bars state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement, with limited exceptions.

A national surge, and a shift in tactics

The Redding numbers track a national escalation. ICE arrested a record 50,925 people nationwide in August, NBC News reported, on the heels of 50,208 in July and nearly 44,000 in June, three consecutive monthly records. The agency averaged roughly 1,600 arrests a day in August, up from about 1,000 before the administration set a target of 2,000 a day.

"For the third straight month, ICE set a new record for the highest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month, nearly 51,000," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement.

How those arrests are being made has also changed. After the highly visible, militarized city operations earlier in the year, enforcement shifted toward street arrests and toward working with local jails and local police, along with arrests at airports, courthouses and ICE check-ins.

The people being arrested have changed too. The Deportation Data Project found that the share of ICE arrests involving people with criminal convictions hit an all-time low of 27 percent in July. By NBC's accounting of the same data, 73.5 percent of those arrested by ICE in July had no criminal conviction, up from 62.6 percent a year earlier.

The project also documented a sharp 2026 rise in detainer requests, in which ICE asks local jails to hold people on its behalf, increasingly aimed at people with no convictions, and a surge in arrests in places where local police have been deputized to perform immigration enforcement under the federal 287(g) program. Both are mechanisms Shasta County has been asked about in the past year.

What we don't know

The identity of the man detained, the reason for the stop, and whether they remain in custody are all unknown. So is whether local law enforcement was notified or present.

Because the agents were wearing body cameras, it is presumed that a federal recording of the encounter exists.

See the video for yourself.