Undocumented Mexican admits to staging fake ICE kidnapping, faces up to five years

In Los Angeles, 43-year-old Mexican undocumented immigrant Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderón confessed to orchestrating a hoax that alleged ICE agents had kidnapped her at a Jack in the Box restaurant. She told one person on June 25, 2025 that officers had “turned the lights on” and threatened to break her window, then called a tenants’-rights activist two days later claiming she was taken to San Ysidro and pressured to sign removal papers, and later said she was held in an unknown warehouse.

Calderón altered her appearance, staged a fake release, and remained silent about the deception, even turning off her phone from July 3-5. Authorities located her in a Bakersfield shopping-center parking lot on July 5, where she continued to assert a kidnapping. She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to impede, obstruct, impair, and defeat the lawful function of Homeland Security Investigations and faces a maximum of five years’ imprisonment at a sentencing hearing scheduled for February 8, 2027. Prosecutors noted that such fabricated claims fuel dangerous rhetoric against ICE.