Many Americans attend immigration arrests for the first time and indignation – Chicago Tribune
By Julie Watson, Jake Offenhartz and Claire Rush
San Diego (AP) – Adam Greenfield was at home to take care of a cold when his girlfriend ran to tell him that immigration and customs control service arrived in his popular San Diego district.
The poet and producer of Podcast caught his iPhone and ran barefoot, adding to a handful of neighbors who recorded masked agents who were running a popular Italian restaurant, while shouting to the agents who leave. An hour later, the crowd had reached nearly 75 people and many of them faced agents’ vehicles.
“I couldn’t be silent,” said Greenfield. “I was literally in front of my front door.”
More and more Americans are attending people to be arrested during the purchase, exercise in the gymnasium, have trained outside and carry out their daily activities, because the government of President Donald Trump works vigorously to increase the arrests of immigrants. While raids affect the lives of people who are not immigrants, many Americans who have rarely or never participated in acts of civil disobedience come out in a hurry to record actions on their phones and launch improvised demonstrations.
Arrests outside gymnasiums and animated restaurants are underway
Greenfield said that, on the night of the raid on May 30, there were grandparents, retired soldiers, hippies and customers of restaurants who arrived for a night meeting. The authorities have launched amazed grenades to force people to withdraw and then left with four detained workers, he said.
“To do this, at 5 am, exactly at the time of the point of dinner, just at an animated intersection where there are several restaurants, they were trying to do theirs,” said Greenfield. “But I don’t know if what they want to do is get out as they wish. I think it causes more negative reactions.”
Previously, many arrests occurred late in the night or in the early hours of the morning, carried out by agents who were waiting outside of people’s houses when they went to work or outside their workplaces when they concluded their working day. When the ice (acronym in English of immigration and customs service) made a descent into another popular restaurant in San Diego in 2008, the agents did it early in the morning, without incident.
The Tsar Border of the White House, Tom Homan, said that the agents were forced to make more arrests in the communities due to the policies of the sanctuary which limit cooperation with ice in certain cities and states. Ice applies immigration laws nationally, but tries to obtain national and local aid to alert the federal authorities to immigrants who are sought for expulsion and ask them to stop this person until federal agents take care of their police custody.
On Friday, during a visit to Los Angeles, the vice-president JD Vance said that these policies had caused agents “a little disaggregated problem, because the local government of this community had told them that they were not allowed to do their job”.
“When this border patrol agent leaves to do his job, they said that in 15 minutes, they have demonstrators, sometimes violent demonstrators who are in the face to hinder them,” he said.
“It seemed to be a film scene”
Meleyssa Rivas had just arrived at her office in Downey, a suburb of Los Angeles, one morning last week when he heard the frightened cries of young women. He went out to find women confronted with nearly a dozen masked federal agents, who had surrounded a man who was on his knees on the sidewalk.
“It seemed to be a film scene,” recalls Rivas. “They had all their covered faces and stood on this man, who was obviously traumatized. And there were these young girls shouting to all the lungs.”
When Rivas began to record the interaction, an increasing group of neighbors shouted the agents who left the man alone. Finally, they left in vehicles, without stopping it, as shown in the video.
Rivas spoke with the man later, who told him that the agents had reached washing of the cars where he worked that morning, then persecuted it while he was fleeing on his bike. It was one of the many recent raids in the city’s workplace, mainly inhabited by Hispanos.
The same day, federal agents were seen in a Home Depot store, a construction site and a fitness gymnasium. For the moment, it was not clear how many people had been arrested.
“Everyone is agitated,” said Alex Frayde, a fitness employee who said he saw the agents outside the gymnasium and stopped at the entrance, ready to reject them while another employee warned customers of what they had seen. After all, the agents never entered.
Communities protest around ice buildings
The arrests in the immigration courts and other ice buildings have also caused emotional scenes, because the masked agents seemed to hold people who go to the appointments and the routine public.
In the city of Spokane, east of the state of Washington, hundreds of people rushed to protest in front of an ice building on June 11 after Ben Stuckart, former municipal councilor, made a publication on Facebook. Stuckart wrote that he was the legal tutor of a Venezuelan asylum seeker who went to register in the ICE building, to be arrested. Her Venezuelan room partner was also arrested.
The two men had the authorization to live and work temporarily in the United States, covered by a humanitarian conditional permit, Stuckart told the Associated Press.
“I’m going to sit in front of the bus,” wrote Stuckart, referring to the van which was ready to transport the two men to an ice detention center in Tacoma. “The Hispanic community needs the rest of our community now. Not tonight, not Saturday, but for the moment!”
The city of around 230,000 inhabitants is the seat of the county of Spokane, where just over half of the voters voted for Trump in the presidential elections of 2024.
Stuckart moved to see his mother’s caregiver among the demonstrators.
“She just suggested:” I’m here because I love your mother, and I love you, and if you or your friends need help, then I want to help, “he said in tears.
At night, the Spokane police service sent more than 180 agents, some of whom used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. More than 30 people were arrested, including Stuckart, who blocked the van passage with others. Then he was released.
Aysha Mercer, a housewife with three children, said that she “was not interested in politics, form, form or in a way”. But many children from their district of Spokane – who play in their garden and jump in their elastic bed – come from immigrant families, and the idea that they are affected by deportations were “unacceptable,” he said.
He said he couldn’t go to Stuckart’s protest. But on June 14, he went to a demonstration for the first time in his life, adding millions to the “No Kings” (“without kings”) demonstrations throughout the country.
“I don’t think I have felt a conviction as strong as the one I feel at this precise moment,” he said.
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Offenhartz reported to Los Angeles and Rush in Portland, Oregon.
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This story was translated from English by an AP publisher with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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