At 6:56 a.m. Tuesday morning, Kara Dominguez was on her way to help a neighbor in Southwest Little Rock when she got a phone call from her husband. He’d left their house just minutes earlier, headed to work. “I thought he was joking at first. He kind of laughed, or it might have been like a cry. He was like, ‘ICE is pulling me over,’” Kara Dominguez recalled. “I’m like, ‘Quit playing.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not playing.’” Kara Dominguez, 37, is the lead organizer behind a new grassroots group called La Voz del Pueblo (“the voice of the people”) that tracks activity by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Arkansas. Originally it was just Dominguez — who is a U.S. citizen and is white — trying to verify rumors of ICE or Border Patrol activity in her area. But since she started posting on her Facebook page in February, she said, the effort has developed into a network of some 40 volunteers in a dozen cities in Central Arkansas and beyond, gathering and broadcasting accounts of ICE sightings. Her page now has 13,000 followers. Kara Dominguez said she believes that’s why her husband, Olvin Dominguez, 34, was picked up by federal agents on Tuesday and shipped out of state by the end of the day. Though Olvin Dominguez does not have legal status, he has no criminal record, she said. He’s lived in the U.S. for almost 17 years. (A cursory search of state and federal court records in Arkansas turned up a single minor traffic violation for an Olvin Dominguez in Pulaski County. Being present in the U.S. without documentation is a civil violation, not a criminal offense.) Credit: Courtesy Kara Dominguez Olvin Dominguez is now being held at Winn Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Louisiana, Kara Dominguez said. She’s been able to talk to him in detention. According to her, Olvin Dominguez said officers told him they had been watching his wife’s Facebook page and referenced the content of multiple specific posts she made recently. “I didn’t want to believe it [at first], because I didn’t want to feel like it was all my fault,” she said. But now she’s convinced her husband was targeted because of her activist work. Regional offices for ICE and Border Patrol didn’t return requests for comment on the specifics of the case or whether the agencies would target a specific undocumented person because of a spouse’s activism. Kara Dominguez has hired an immigration attorney with the Tellez Law Firm to try to bring her husband back to Arkansas. For now, she’s left alone to care for their 3-year-old daughter, who is autistic, and her two older daughters from a previous relationship, ages 11 and 14. Olvin Dominguez was the older girls’ father figure as well, Kara Dominguez said, and had been planning to legally adopt them as soon as possible. They “haven’t stopped crying” since their stepfather was arrested, Kara Dominguez said. “He was the one who took care of us. He was our provider,” she said. All week, the 3-year-old has been clinging to the winter hat her father had been wearing when he was detained, she said. Kara Dominguez raced to the scene of the traffic stop Tuesday morning after she got the call from her husband, arriving minutes before federal agents took him away. In an edited video she’s posted to her Facebook page, he takes off the hat and tosses it to her before an ICE or Border Patrol officer guides him into the back seat of a black vehicle. That’s the last she’s seen of him since Tuesday. “My baby can’t speak, but she doesn’t like anything on her head [usually], and every morning she puts this on and doesn’t want to take it off when she gets to school,” Kara Dominguez said. “He was her favorite person in the world.” Olvin and Kara Dominguez’ daughter with her father’s hat Credit: Kara Dominguez ‘This was never the plan’ Kara Dominguez said she didn’t set out to create La Voz del Pueblo. “This was never the plan. It just started happening,” she said. She now coordinates volunteer teams keeping an eye out for ICE and Border Patrol vehicles in Hot Springs, Benton, Bryant, Alexander, North Little Rock, Sherwood, Jacksonville, Cabot, Searcy, Conway and Jonesboro. Volunteers snap pictures and take video, which Kara Dominguez then shares on her Facebook page, alerting her thousands of followers if ICE has been spotted in a particular area. “Some people check my page before they go to work,” she said. Kara Dominguez said she collaborates closely with Migra Watch, another local grassroots group that tracks ICE activity and gets the word out on social media. She also works with the longstanding immigrant rights organization Arkansas United and other groups in Central Arkansas. Arkansas hasn’t yet seen the high-profile immigration raids or confrontations between ICE and protestors that have shaken some cities during the second Trump administration. But, Kara Dominguez said, federal agents have still ramped up arrests locally, including through a new partnership with the Arkansas State Police. Many families are terrified to leave their homes. The main task of La Voz del Pueblo is to document ICE activity, but the group also helps households hit by detentions and deportations. Volunteers help people get vehicles out of impound, transport children, accompany people to court or other appointments, or solicit donations for families who have suddenly lost a breadwinner. They’ve been holding regular workshops to draw up power of attorney documents so that people “can have a plan in place, in case a loved one is detained,” Kara Dominguez said. No one with the group is paid for the work, she said, though it’s effectively become her full-time job. (Before this year, she worked as a baker, she said, “but I just can’t bake cakes when our government is burning.”) La Voz del Pueblo is actively seeking new volunteers. Anyone interested can send a text message to 501-800-7338. “We need people who have cybersecurity experience, we need people who know marketing, we need people who can help recruit other people. We need people to go to court with immigrants — or with people who are just Hispanic and scared to go because they might be profiled. We need people that may be willing to pick up groceries from a store, people willing to donate,” Kara Dominguez said. As shaken as her family is by the events of the week, she is hopeful her husband will be released in the next few months. Unlike most unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S., Olvin Dominguez does have a pathway to legal status — through his marriage to a U.S. citizen. Kara Dominguez said they started that process earlier this year through an out-of-state law firm but only recently discovered the firm failed to file the proper paperwork. “We thought that maybe we were halfway done with the process. Now we’re realizing that all of a sudden, I have to get all this money together and start all over,” she said. This week’s arrest only makes her want to redouble her efforts with La Voz del Pueblo, Kara Dominguez said. “If you think this is going to change what I’m doing now, all I got is a reason to go harder,” she said. “We’re in America. … Why should I have to be scared that my family is going to be targeted when all I’m doing is helping the community?” she asked. Whenever she’s filmed traffic stops, she said, she’s kept her distance and not interfered with officers. “I never shouted profanity. I never said anything to them about it. I just documented what was going on.” “I was targeted because I was using my rights,” she said. “How American is that?”