It was a cloudy morning on Belvedere Street in La Jolla, San Diego. I was just about to check my email when my mom’s caregiver came to tell me of the ICE arrest that she witnessed when pulling up to our house. I had yet to encounter Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) agents anywhere in San Diego, let alone La Jolla. San Diego’s most iconic beach, Windansea Beach, is just down the street—Belvedere Street—on which cars whiz by at more than 50 miles an hour due to the lack of speed bumps and stop signs. Occasionally you see influencers on the street posing for their audiences in front of the ocean view. It’s the same beach Tom Wolfe immortalized in his book The Pump House Gang. At Windansea or one of the beaches close-by, a twentysomething Eddie Vedder wrote three hit songs for Pearl Jam’s first album 10—while surfing. But it’s not surfing nor songwriting that keep the gears turning here: it’s the immigrant day laborers and professionals who care for the elderly, tend gardens, and work construction. Surely, they are aware that they could be arrested at any moment by ICE at any moment, I’ve told myself while passing garden and construction workers while walking down to the beach, not quite believing it. But maybe, like them, I’ve been lulled to sleep by the beaches and palm trees and landscaped gardens.
I walked outside and saw 23-year-old “ICE Chaser” Arturo Gonzalez walking towards me. He explained that a housecleaner had been detained in front of a house two doors up the street. She and the ICE agents who arrested her were already gone; he knew shew was a housecleaner because of the supplies he had seen in the vehicle. The black Tacoma truck was parked in front of the house she had been presumably contracted to clean.
Gonzalez showed me the Instagram video he had just posted to his 152,000 followers, showing the arrest. Then he showed me the social media message he received by one of his followers, letting him know that ICE was active in La Jolla…