Charleston immigrant community decries police, ICE raid of SC nightclub
NORTH CHARLESTON — After law enforcement arrested 80 people during a weekend sting operation at a nightclub in Charleston County, federal immigration officials claimed 'the community at large knew that there was nothing good going on at that establishment.'
But for some people present during the 3 a.m. June 1 raid at the Alamo, that simply was not the case. For Alejandra De La Vega, the venue located just outside the town of Summerville, right along the Charleston and Dorchester county line, was a place to dance with friends.
'I went to Alamo to enjoy the night, just like many others,' she told reporters Friday. 'But instead of fun, it turned into fear and humiliation.'
De La Vega had just stepped out of the restroom when she said police stormed in, guns drawn. Patrons were running and screaming, she said, as more officers streamed in and ordered people to the ground.
'It was chaos,' she said at the news conference outside the Lonnie Hamilton Public Services Building in North Charleston.
County, state and federal law enforcement held and questioned the more than 200 people present at the club during the raid, dubbed 'Operation Last Stand,' for two hours, De La Vega said.
The S.C. State Law Enforcement Division began investigating Alamo in November 2024 after receiving a tip about potential human trafficking at the venue, agency spokeswoman Renée Wunderlich told the SC Daily Gazette Friday.
The Department of Homeland Security also got involved in the investigation at that time, she said.
Later Friday, SLED announced criminal charges against two people, the club's 59-year-old owner, Benjamin Reyna-Flores of Hanahan, and a 44-year-old security guard at the club, Terone Lavince Lawson of North Charleston.
Reyna-Flores faces multiple charges related to unlawful sale of alcohol. The club had no alcohol license.
Lawson faces illegal gun and drug possession charges. According to warrants from SLED, Lawson had 2 grams of meth, an eight ball of cocaine, and less than a gram of psychedelic mushrooms in his van. Police also found a pair of handguns in the van, which Lawson cannot legally possess due to past convictions for burglary in 2008 and assault in 2003.
Those arrested include two unidentified 'high-level cartel members' associated with the Mexico-based Los Zetas cartel and the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua gang and one person wanted by Interpol for murder in Honduras, said U.S. Department of Homeland Security agent Cardell Morant.
Ten juveniles as young as 13 — including one reported as missing — as well as an unidentified number of potential human trafficking victims were at the club at the time of the raid. Law enforcement also reported seizing guns, cocaine and cash.
In her retelling of events, De La Vega said police separated anyone with visible tattoos and photographed them.
De La Vega, a transgender Latina woman who has lived in the United States since 2001, said officers questioned the validity of her state-issued I.D. card, as well as that of the transgender woman she was there with.
De La Vega has legal residency status in the U.S. She was not arrested.
But 80% of those arrested Sunday did not have legal status to be in the country. The vast majority were arrested on civil immigration charges, not criminal violations.
Five people were arrested for criminal offenses, Morant said.
Homeland Security confirmed to The Post & Courier that Sergio Joel Galo-Baca is the Honduran man wanted for international homicide. Beyond SLED's announcement Friday, no other names or list of charges have been released.
Homeland Security officials have not responded to emails sent by the SC Daily Gazette.
'The narrative that's been put out by the sheriff, by the governor, by the attorney general, is that they are just trying to stop violent criminals, stop trafficking,' said Will McCorkle, a member of the Charleston Immigrant Coalition. 'But what they quickly overlook are the many innocent people that were detained and are now in the process of deportation for no real purpose.'
Now, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, several families do not know where their family members are.
They have searched their names online using Immigration and Customs Enforcement's database that people can use to locate the state and center where detainees are being held. But their family members' names have not shown up in the search, said Dulce Lopez, immigrant rights advocacy strategist for the ACLU.
They can only assume, based on news reports, that their family members are at an ICE holding facility in Folkston, Georgia.
'That made me realize, how easily everything can be taken away,' De La Vega said. 'I keep thinking, what if I didn't have a legal status? What if I were detained and ripped away from my family?'
'My mom is my hero,' De La Vega continued. 'She came to this country and gave me and my siblings a better life. She raised us with love and sacrifice and with so much strength. We're really close, and I don't know what I would do if I was taken from her. No one should have lived with that fear.'
Charleston County Sheriff Carl Ritchie, during a news conference Monday, cited noise complaints at the club and reports of assaults in the parking lot.
Outside of Sunday's raid, the sheriff's department responded to the club 13 other times since 2020 for calls including 'suspicious circumstances,' vandalism and one armed robbery, according to a call log provided by the department.
Area business owners said their biggest issue in the last several months had been club goers parking on the side of the highway and in their parking lots after the club's lot filled up, leaving behind excessive trash and beer bottles after nearly every weekend.
The nightclub did not have a license to sell alcohol.
A group of faith and immigrant community leaders stressed that they do not condone criminal activity.
'But no one deserves to be treated as guilty by association,' said Lopez, of the ACLU.
People have reason to be afraid, McCorckle said, citing the recent case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported in March to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Living in Maryland, Garcia had been protected from deportation by a 2019 judge's ruling that he likely faced gang persecution in his home country.
The Trump administration has insisted Garcia is an MS-13 gang member, which Garcia denied. On Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Garcia was back in U.S. custody to face criminal charges in Tennessee related to human smuggling.
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"My Alarm Bells Were Going Off": People Are Sharing Their Wildest "I F—ing Knew It" Moments That Prove You Should ALWAYS Trust Your Gut
Note: This post contains mentions of sexual assault and murder. It can be hard to ignore our gut feelings, even if the people around us don't quite believe them. And that "I knew it!" moment when we find out our instincts were right all along can be equally as disheartening as it is terrifying. Recently, redditor Unique-Landscape-202 asked the r/AskReddit community to share their own "I knew it" moments when their guts were proven right. Here are their eerie stories. 1."When my son was 14, he lost 30 pounds within a few months. I wasn't terribly concerned out of the gate because he started on the heavy side and seemed to be working for the weight loss. However, he went to Mexico for a week with his dad and came back 10 pounds lighter, and alarm bells started going off because my brother is a type 1 diabetic." "Kiddo had an awful migraine-like headache, so I decided to take him to his pediatrician to have a blood sugar run. I expressed my concerns, and the doc pooh-poohed me, spending a lot of time congratulating my son on his weight loss. She was resistant to running a blood sugar, but I insisted – sure enough, type 1 diabetes with a dangerous blood sugar of nearly 500. Sometimes, moms just know. Also, fuck that doc." —beatrix0 2."About 15 years ago, I was hired to assist with an inventory and appraisal of the wine collection of a guy who lived in the Caribbean and ran a bank there, specializing in selling long-term, high-yield CDs. I went down and spent a week doing that and spending time with him and some of his very few employees, none of whom seemed to do very much work at all. As soon as I got back, I set up Google alerts for the guy's name and Ponzi scheme." "A month later, it started going off; he'd been indicted, assets frozen, fled in his private jet, and eventually got picked up at a cheap motel in Canada. A year or so after that, I got interviewed by the FBI, mostly questions to establish who of his 'employees' I met and about his lifestyle (presumably to try to make a tax fraud case, although they ended up just getting him on Ponzi charges)." —EggCzar 3."A guy in HR at a company I used to work for always gave me the creeps from the first time I met him. There was something in his body language and his voice that just felt predatory. I dreaded any time I had to speak with him, and I made sure never to be alone with him. One day, the police showed up at the front desk quietly, asking where his office was. They fanned out through the whole building — people saw them on all the floors posted by the stairwells, elevators, and exits." "It was so strange. They brought him out in handcuffs with no audible discussion, and they were gone as quickly as they arrived. Months later, we found out from the news that he owned a few rental properties and was accused of sexually assaulting one of his tenants. He also had cameras set up in the bedrooms and bathrooms of his rentals and filmed his tenants. Apparently, the reason for the response was that he sent messages from his work computer threatening to kill the tenant he assaulted." —SnowMiser26 4."A town I lived in had a 'fast fashion' store take-up shop on the far end of the commercial district, which was too far to get any foot traffic. The displays in the windows never changed, and I never saw a single person go in or out. Every time I drove by, I said to my partner, 'That place HAS to be a front for something.' One year later, it was busted for being an illegal grow operation." —cyclejones 5."We had a couple of private Facebook groups at work for internal communications. Just asking coworkers for help on tasks, stuff like that. I came in one morning to find we were locked out of the Facebook groups. Me: 'This doesn't feel right. Something's happening.' Coworker: 'You're just being paranoid. It's just a computer glitch.' The upper management showed up mid-morning to start handing out layoff notices." —originalchaosinabox 6."When I was a kid, the day after Christmas, I would always check out the pawn shops near my grandparent's house so I could spend my Christmas money on used video games. There was one where the owner was very chatty but always gave off a creepy vibe. I couldn't quite pinpoint why, but his shop always felt uncomfortable. Eventually, it came out that he had murdered his ex-girlfriend and incinerated her in the basement of the shop. He got away with it for 15 years until his sons testified against him. I fucking knew it!" —IAmNotScottBakula 7."I was gaslit by my ex for six years, telling me I was hard of hearing. She would mumble things constantly, making me ask her to speak up. She said I was old, my hearing was going, etc., even though I never had to ask people at work in a busy office to speak up or repeat things. After six years, she fucked up, though. We live in Hawaii, and some of her college girlfriends came out to visit and stay with us." "After two days of walking and talking with her friends, one of her girlfriends finally snaps and yells, 'Why are you talking so quietly? What the hell is wrong with you? No one can hear you!! You never talked under your breath before! What the hell?' She looked at me and knew her ass was busted. So, for years and years, it was just a petty way to put one over on me, I guess. This was a 30-year-old grown-ass woman. I'll never understand it. " —ssshield 8."Recently, I was planning a sabbatical as I had been with the company for 10 years. In the lead-up to the month, I kept procrastinating on making the arrangements for one reason or another. I couldn't shake this sense of dread for some reason. I even mentioned it to my boss about a couple of weeks before in our 1:1. I told her I hadn't ever been away from work for so long. She reassured me that it would be good." "We then talked about how we'd discuss my career plans for the upcoming year next time. I can't emphasize enough that when we talked about this, it felt like it would not happen. Fast-forward a week, and I get an invite from my boss's boss. It was a Zoom meeting with our VP of engineering to lay me off." —staticjak 9."I always had a certain feeling about a former coworker in the accounting department — just a sneaking shady vibe I couldn't shake. One day, the head of HR accidentally printed a document that showed the salary and raise/bonus/profit sharing structure of every single employee on a shared printer instead of his office printer, and I found it. The shady coworker was getting paid WAY less than I expected her to be making for all the work she was legitimately doing. Despite my suspicion about her, she was actually a seemingly good employee and had worked her way up to a role with significant responsibility." "The moment I saw her pay structure, I knew she was making money off the company in other ways. There was NO WAY she was settling for that salary after being there for so many years and for the work she did. I just knew. Fast-forward a few years, and it turns out she'd been embezzling significant amounts of money from the company. She submitted false expense reports to pay for everything from groceries to gas to food delivery to vacations, and no one caught it because she was the head of the department. It all came to light when a new junior employee saw a suspicious Amazon expense and brought it to the COO. An investigation revealed tens of thousands of dollars in embezzled funds. I quit soon after the discovery, but I hear they're pressing criminal charges against her. Somehow, I just knew!" —kitteh_pants 10."My ex-wife said she was going to the park to relax. I told her to have fun, but it was out of the blue and felt odd. It might have been an invasion of privacy, but I tracked her phone. She was not at the park. I confronted her, and she came up with the most bizarre, pulled-straight-out-of-her-ass story I have ever heard in my life. I ended up seeing the texts on her phone. She was meeting up with another guy. The funny thing is she would always gaslight me in fear that I would cheat on her, but that never happened. I couldn't even watch movies with attractive women in them. I fucking knew it." —TechnicalChipz 11."Years back, I was visiting an ex at college. We went to her church, and I met the youth pastor for the first time. He was a cookie-cutter youth pastor: upbeat, only good vibes, always smiling; we've all met that guy. But something was off, and I didn't want to be around him. Just a gut feeling, ya know? I refused to go back to that church because of him. My ex and her family thought I was ridiculous. Some of our friends even said I was wrong. Fast forward a year, we had broken at this point, but I saw that he had been arrested for child solicitation with a kid at the church. Always trust your gut, people." —MammothWrongdoer1242 12."Recently, I dated this guy. Right before we broke up, he started acting odd. Distant. Less affectionate. He initially told me he was going through a lot mentally: issues with work, his car, his baby mama. He wanted to change his living situation. He was overwhelmed, but he insisted that he still absolutely adored me and that I was an absolute angel and a constant source of peace in his life. Okay. Fine. He continued pulling back. My gut was telling me something was just absolutely not right. There was something missing." "His baby mama blew him up at one point, and I overheard her say something along the lines of, 'This is a betrayal of trust.' When questioned about it, he tried saying it was just because he texted a female friend, consoling her because she lost her mom. My alarm bells were going off. Why is your baby mama upset about that? Why is that considered a betrayal of trust? There's no way this is just her 'being crazy' because this woman was perfectly fine with us dating and has been nothing but a sweetheart to me, but suddenly, she was up in arms over him doing something as innocent as consoling a friend who lost her mom. Anyway, I finally asked him if things were really okay between him and me. He tells me that he just thinks things aren't stable enough for him to have a relationship at the moment and that he doesn't have the mental energy to give me the attention I deserve. Fine. We leave it amicable and go our separate ways. I still had a feeling in my stomach. Something wasn't right. Right before he started acting weird, he told me that he had wanted to be with me for a very long time, that he thought we were perfect together, and that he loved me. If you love someone and you're that serious about them, I'd think that even if you're going through tough times, you'd lean on them or want them around, right? Less than a month later, guess what? I found out that the girl he was consoling was indeed his new girlfriend." —Queen_Lizard997 13."I was ordering illegal drugs from a lab in China to treat my cat's feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) in December of 2019. (Now legal in the US, and many more cats have been saved!) People started posting in the FIP group about how, suddenly, the labs were taking their money, nothing was being sent, all communication was blocked, etc. Then, in January 2020, labs began 'closing early for Chinese New Year.' I knew something huge was happening." "I figured it was SARS and told my husband he needed to think about ways to teach from home because the shit would hit the fan if/when it made it to the US. He never once doubted my prediction because one of my hobbies is studying past epidemics and pandemics (SARS, Ebola, Marburg, smallpox, influenza). I knew it was going to be bad, whatever it was, but I had no clue just how bad COVID-19 would be. My cat lived, so that's nice." —vengefulbeavergod 14."I always thought my dad and I looked so different than the rest of his siblings, my aunts, and uncles. We're both really pale with dark hair, versus his siblings, who are tan with light hair and no similar features. My cousin (grandpa's side) sent me a DNA test one day because she bought two, and her husband didn't use one, so she sent it to me as we were both into genealogy. I said, 'Haha, how funny would it be if we weren't related!' We aren't (we would've only been related on my grandpa's side from a previous marriage). My grandma cheated and took the secret to her grave. It turns out my dad's middle name, which is just the letter 'E,' was the first letter of her lover's name." —AmElzewhere 15."My sister and I had a big fight, and after it escalated, I told her, 'You're not borrowing my dress (that she needed to wear to a wedding). Find your own.' A day later, I went to my cupboard to get my clothes out for the next day, and my dress was gone. I said to my parents (who I still lived with at the time – she had moved out, I still lived at the family home), 'Has (sister) been over this morning?' My parents said they hadn't seen her. I thought this was weird because that dress was always on its hanger. It couldn't have just disappeared." "I called my sister and asked if she took my dress. She said that the dress was very ugly, she hadn't taken it, and didn't need it anymore since I was a 'bitch,' and she'd bought her own, which was a lot nicer. I said, 'Okie, dokie. Well, where is mine then? The exact one you wanted to borrow is missing now.' She became irate and furious that I was accusing her of stealing. We had another argument, this time about the dress missing. She was adamant that I was extremely rude in accusing her of stealing. I was angry because she had slinked into my parents' house unbeknownst to any of us and taken it. Anyway, she went to the wedding and posted a photo of her outfit, and indeed, it wasn't the dress that was missing. One week later, we sorted out our differences, and she demanded an apology for the accusations of stealing. We sorted things out, and I apologized. I went to her house after work. At this time, I was working in hospitality, so the usual routine was to come over to her to hang out, but I changed into some pants and another of her shirts to be comfortable. It was normal for me to grab something out of her closet. This time, she flew into her room and pushed me out of the way, and it dawned on me: it's my dress. Her then-boyfriend was lying in bed and said, "The gig is up; just give it to her." I pulled her out of the way and flung her cupboard doors open, and there it was: my dress. She really had snuck into the back door of my parent's house and taken it when I was right down the other end of the house, snuck out again, and went home with it. I looked back at her and said, 'I fucking knew it.'" —snagsinbread 16."I used to see the local big town/small city hockey coach on local TV. He would do interviews in a corner of the locker room surrounded by TV, radio, and newspaper reporters. Something about him I always found off to the point of creepy. Then a few years later, some of his players came forward saying he groomed them into sex acts with him, and he ended up serving (not enough) time." —tangcameo 17."One guy I knew suddenly got very rich. Post-COVID, he said he left his job and started a new business. Within a year, he bought a Mercedes and a luxury apartment. He said he was doing stock and equity dealings and forex investments. In 2023, he was doing many podcasts and interviews on TV as an emerging entrepreneur. Meanwhile, I told my friends there was no way this guy could earn that much money legally." "My friends thought I was jealous of him, but I knew something wasn't right about his rise in such a short time. Then, he bought multiple luxury cars and flats, spent millions on parties, and flexed his wealth. No one believed me. This year, he was arrested for running a Ponzi scheme. Now, he is in jail, and all his assets have been seized by authorities. Everyone in my circle was like, 'Holy fuck, you were right.'" —raisingpower 18."There was someone roughly in my PhD cohort who worked a few labs down the hall from me. They always seemed to get positive results with no protocol troubleshooting, and the results were always the sort of thing that journal editors looked fondly upon. Somehow, this person was twice as productive as even the super smart, 60-plus hour week working, creative grad students in other labs. This person won pretty much every graduate and postdoc award you could get and ended up a professor at a well-regarded university with a huge startup grant." "A year into their faculty position, their former postdoc lab, upon being unable to repeat any experiments or build on the data, figured out that the person had fabricated or fudged at least 60% of results that had been published in top-tier journals. We're talking outright fabrication, not just a slightly too contrast-enhanced micrograph or blot. They reported this to the funding agencies, and there was a full investigation. They lost their grants, and the university fired them. It turns out a similar thing happened when I talked to someone in the person's PhD lab. Some really questionable Western blots had been overly processed and cropped in ways that were definitely misleading. At least one Master's student burned a year trying to build on that work and got nowhere. It turns out that one of the golden children of my PhD program and someone who was featured by funding agencies as the next big thing had built their scientific career mostly on lies, and it took 10 years for anyone to really catch on. There are some really great scientists who just happen to land on fruitful projects, but no one is that productive and lucky all the time." —spicypeener1 Did you ever have a bad gut feeling about something and ended up being right? Tell us about it in the comments or fill out this anonymous form. Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity. If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
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American with 'CIA' credentials and variety of weapons arrested in Mexico
An American national with credentials that read "CIA" has been arrested in Mexico on weapons charges, Mexican authorities said Saturday. The unidentified man was arrested "for his probable involvement in the crimes of disturbing the peace and possession of weapons designated for exclusive use by the Army," according to the Secretariat of Security of the State of Mexico. Authorities found six firearms, magazines, live ammunition and tactical equipment, the agency said. "The individual was carrying a credential with the inscription 'CIA'," authorities wrote on X. Images posted by the security agency showed rifles, handguns, tactical vests, helmets, pocket knives and ammunition. The State Department told Fox News that it was aware of reports of the man's arrest. An agency spokesperson said it has no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens abroad.'When a U.S. citizen is detained abroad, the department works to provide consular assistance," the spokesperson authorities have not disclosed any additional details about the man's arrest or why he was in the country. Fox News Digital reached out to the Central Intelligence Agency, but did not immediately hear back early Sunday.
