Immigration crackdown leads to chaotic scenes as ICE touts arrests
Immigration authorities raided a popular San Diego Italian restaurant before the Friday dinner rush, arresting several kitchen workers, while community members confronted agents, according to video shared by a local CBS station.
As heavily armed agents entered the restaurant, local residents screamed at them and filmed the scene. The agents wore tactical gear, including bulletproof vests emblazoned with the Homeland Security Investigations logo.
"The agents fired sound grenades, flash-bang grenades, at the crowd," Pedro Rios, director of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee's U.S.-Mexico Border Program, told CBS.
Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told FOX News that agents were doing their law enforcement duty during the raid.
"We should be supported, not being called Nazis, not being villainized," he said.
Immigrants arrested at scheduled hearings
Earlier last week, ICE agents were seen arresting immigrants directly after their scheduled immigration hearings at a San Antonio, Texas, courthouse - doubling down on a tactic that has caused an outcry among immigrant advocates.
"Families are being targeted at their most vulnerable time - attending their scheduled immigration hearings for what they believe to be progress in their cases," according to a statement by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
The statement links to a video that appears to show ICE agents arresting a mother alongside four children inside the courthouse, including a minor with his hands zip-tied behind his back.
Another video outside the same courthouse, undated but posted Friday, May 30, by advocacy group Unidos Podemos, showed the emotional scene of two mothers and a child being loaded by plainclothes agents into the narrow chamber of a vehicle outfitted to carry prisoners.
The child stands on the bumper, his arms outstretched. He says in Spanish, "It's OK, Mom, I'm here. It's OK."
ICE publicizes criminal arrests during crackdown
ICE, which has a significant social media presence, has largely refrained from sharing emotional or chaotic arrest videos and instead posts mugshots of arrested immigrants with serious criminal records.
The agency publicized its recent arrests of a Honduran man facing burglary and sexual battery charges, a convicted sex offender from El Salvador and a Venezuelan woman convicted of felonies in California and wanted on other charges in New York.
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