A Mexican national living illegally in Los Angeles has pleaded guilty in federal court after fabricating an ICE kidnapping claim intended to discredit federal officers.
Yuriana Julia Pelaez Calderón, 43, admitted Monday to orchestrating a fake abduction. She claimed armed bounty hunters seized her outside a Jack in the Box and tried to pressure her into voluntarily leaving the United States.
According to a Justice Department press release, “On June 25, 2025, Calderón falsely told an individual that ‘immigration’ was taking her while in or near a fast-food restaurant and that immigration officials had ‘turned the lights on,’ ‘threatened to break her window’ and were taking her into custody.”
Two days later, Calderón used a blocked caller ID to contact another person affiliated with a tenants’ rights organization, the DOJ said. She falsely claimed that “authorities” had taken her to San Ysidro, where she and others were pressured to sign voluntary departure documents.
Calderón also told a third person that she had been transported to an unidentified warehouse and held there alongside other detainees.
Her family and attorneys subsequently held a June 30 press conference repeating the false allegations, prompting inaccurate media reports about the supposed kidnapping.
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Although she knew the reports were false, Calderón did not correct them. Instead, she altered her appearance to suggest that she had been mistreated, staged a fake release and kept her phone switched off from July 3 through July 5.
“Dangerous rhetoric that ICE agents are ‘kidnapping’ illegal immigrants is being recklessly peddled by politicians and echoed in the media to inflame the public and discredit our courageous federal agents,” U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said last year.
A GoFundMe campaign was launched in connection with the allegations but has since been removed.
Calderón was ultimately located on July 5 in a shopping-plaza parking lot in Bakersfield. Even then, she continued to insist that she had been kidnapped.
She pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to “impede, obstruct, impair, and defeat the lawful function of Homeland Security Investigations.” Calderón faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison, with sentencing scheduled for Feb. 8, 2027.
