Protesters gather to denounce ICE outside the U.S. federal building in downtown San Diego on Thursday.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
Sitting in the warm late January sunshine outside the U.S. federal building in downtown San Diego, a silver whistle clipped to 71-year-old Adriane Levy’s shoulder bag glistened in the sun.
She’s a long way from the frozen streets of Minneapolis, where whistle blasts have formed the soundtrack to weeks of running street clashes with federal immigration agents, but Ms. Levy is anxious. She hasn’t had to use her whistle yet, but she worries she will have to soon.
Like thousands of other Americans, Ms. Levy has signed up for legal observer training and expects to take part in community patrols that aim to track federal immigration agents and alert neighbourhoods to their presence.
“When I told my wife what I was doing … she looked at me and she said, ‘Don’t get killed,’” Ms. Levy said.
Four days after federal agents fired 10 bullets into 37-year-old Alex Pretti’s prone body, killing him and exacerbating already furious protests in Minneapolis, Ms. Levy was preparing for her first day of activism as a court-support volunteer.
Activists across San Diego are bracing for increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in the wake of ICE agents killing Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis earlier in January.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
She’ll join an organized collective of volunteers who attend immigration hearings and court-ordered check-ins with people at risk of deportation to witness what happens to them and provide emotional support where they can.
There often isn’t much else they can do, as families are separated before their eyes, in cases such as that of a mother who activists said had been pulled from her child that morning and whisked away into detention.
“It’s horrible,” Ms. Levy said. “I never thought of myself as a patriot. I fear nationalism because it takes people’s minds and controls it. I’m absolutely horrified.”
In Minneapolis, a surge of roughly 3,000 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began descending on the city weeks ago, detaining people, sometimes seemingly at random. On Jan. 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three. Two weeks later came Mr. Pretti’s killing.
The killings jolted people across the country into action. Ms. Levy knows what she signed up for but isn’t entirely sure what to expect.
“I’m Jewish,” she said. “I made a commitment in high school that if something like this happened in the U.S., I would be involved with it.”
A protester gestures and shouts at a driver who stopped to blast pro-MAGA music at the rally.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
After the killings of Ms. Macklin Good and Mr. Pretti, the backlash not just in Minneapolis but across the country was swift, and it appears to have forced the Trump administration to back down, including by withdrawing some officers from Minneapolis and reassigning ICE’s controversial commander at large, Greg Bovino.
But activists and community members in San Diego remain tense. They are worried that Mr. Bovino could be returning to his original post in nearby El Centro, and that they could be next to enter his crosshairs.
Standing on an overpass during the morning rush hour, 33-year-old Jeremiah Weibe-Anderson waved an American flag at the gridlocked traffic below. Dozens of horns honked their support in return.
Mr. Weibe-Anderson works for an organization that provides community health worker training to immigrants, refugees and Native Americans. Many of his clients are scared, he said.
“More and more are afraid to go about their daily lives. You can’t go to work to put food on the table or pay rent, but if you go out and you get scooped up by ICE, you’re not gonna be there for your kid either,” he said. “It’s a really terrible catch-22.”
Mr. Weibe-Anderson said he’s anxious for his clients every day.
“There’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of sadness.”
ICE agents killing Renee Nicole Macklin Good and Alex Pretti during immigration enforcement raids in Minneapolis jolted people across the country into action.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
If a major enforcement surge does come to San Diego, one of the neighbourhoods to be targeted could be Barrio Logan, a working-class community with modest homes in the shadow of the massive warships at San Diego’s naval base.
The area has already seen a number of people taken by ICE in smaller operations, but Sean Elo-Rivera, a city councillor, said he worries about what might happen if Barrio Logan were subjected to major sustained raids like the ones Minneapolis has seen.
Shopkeepers and baristas in the area were reluctant to discuss ICE, but several said the community is on edge.
Mr. Elo-Rivera represents a district with a large Somali-American community. A fraud scandal in Minnesota that has resulted in charges against several Somali Americans is one pretext that Mr. Trump has cited for his administration’s focus on Minneapolis.
Mr. Elo-Rivera said he and his constituents are feeling “terrorized, angry, sad, anxious.”
“I’ve talked to folks who have been face to face with some of these agents,” he said. “And two months ago, they said, ‘Sean, they’re going to kill one of us.’
“What they are seeing [in San Diego] from these agents is a level of lawlessness and violence and aggression that makes them feel like their lives are at risk.”
City councillor Sean Elo-Rivera in his office in downtown San Diego.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
In May, long before the Minnesota enforcement surge, and before Trump sent Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton into Los Angeles, ICE agents staged a raid on a much-loved San Diego restaurant.
Witnesses said dozens of agents, some in full battle dress, stormed into the restaurant around 7:30 p.m. in the middle of the dinner rush and began attempting to detain staff.
Restaurant patrons and local residents reacted immediately. Video captured by witnesses showed residents shouting at officers, standing in the street and blocking ICE vehicles. According to local news outlets, a small number of people were detained.
Mr. Elo-Rivera said for him, and many of his constituents, the dramatic raid was the logical outcome of Trump’s rising anti-immigrant rhetoric and, therefore, not truly surprising.
But he said the raid functioned as a wake-up call for many of the wealthier, whiter San Diego neighbourhoods that were not used to seeing Border Patrol trucks roaming through their streets.
In a city that’s roughly 50-per-cent non-white, almost everyone, including workers at City Hall, has undocumented family or friends, and worry what might happen to them.
In October, San Diego city council passed a due process and public safety ordinance that requires ICE officers to have a warrant before they can enter non-public, city-controlled areas, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said the city’s police will not co-operate with ICE.
State legislation also prevents municipal police forces from sharing information with ICE, and legislation that came into effect on Jan. 1 now seeks to bar ICE officers from wearing masks or obscuring their identities.
Five-year-old boy, father return to Minnesota after detention in Texas ICE facility
On Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters gathered for a weekly demonstration outside the Edward J. Schwartz federal building. They marched, sang and gave speeches denouncing Mr. Trump and calling for the abolishment of ICE.
Partway through the rally, a weathered black SUV repeatedly circled the block, blasting MAGA anthems from loudspeakers mounted in its windows with lyrics like “the devil is a Democrat” and “woke people are the terrorists,” attempting to drown out the protest.
It was a reminder that, despite the scale of public outcry over ICE activities, not everyone agrees. A recent Reuters poll conducted in the days after Mr. Pretti’s killing found that 58 per cent of Americans feel Mr. Trump’s immigration policies have gone too far. That means roughly 40 per cent don’t.
People attend an anti-ICE rally in front of Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego on Sunday.John Francis Peters/The Globe and Mail
At the Mexican border, where a towering fence reaches into the sea, the American side is covered in trash and smells of sewage. But on the Mexican side, families can be seen strolling the beach. Some approach the border wall to peer through or take photographs.
This was once a meeting place, where family members could gather and talk to each other through the fence. On the American side, the International Friendship Park now sits largely dormant.
A lone Border Patrol agent keeps watch, making sure nobody gets too close to the fence.