‘It’s completely racist’: Community mobilizes following arrest of 46 people in Tucson ICE raids

TUCSON – The Tucson community mobilized at three separate events on Friday evening after 46 people of Mexican origin were arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in raids that took place across several restaurants and homes that morning. 

A Community ICE Defense event was held at Yolia Botanica, a local naturopathy shop rooted in community. Meanwhile, a vigil was held outside the Taco Giro location on Grande Avenue, where, earlier that day, ICE deployed pepper spray against community members and U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva. And in downtown Tucson, nearly 100 people gathered outside of the Tucson Federal Building at 300 W. Congress St., which houses the IRS and several other federal offices.

“I'll put money down that none of those people [who were detained] are criminals,” said Rolande Baker, an attendee of the protest and a community organizer who works on the Rapid Response Tucson team. “They said they were only going to take the criminals, remember? ‘The worst of the worst.’ These are not the worst of the worst. When they took the people out of a restaurant, what were they doing? They were working. They were feeding us. That's who these people are.”

Baker had been up since 6 a.m., when the first call was made to the community-run emergency line about ICE at the residence of a Taco Giro employee. The rapid response team, which runs the 24-hour hotline, 520-221-4077, dispatches community observers to the scene to bear witness to interactions between law enforcement and people being detained.

She scrolled through hundreds of text messages in the group chat where organizers coordinate outings to observe ICE activities. According to her, locations all over Tucson were raided. 

“They went to Marana, they went to Tucson, they went to South Tucson, and then Valencia, Midtown and Grande,” she said, noting the different Tucson neighborhoods with reported ICE activity. “They were everywhere. They must have had this planned.”

She also received reports that ICE raided Leo’s Mexican Restaurant on Speedway and Rosemont boulevards. 

“This was a huge uptick” to the two to three calls they average a day, she said. 

The raids were a part of 16 search warrants across southern Arizona and a part of a “years-long investigation into immigration and tax violations.”

ICE spokesperson Fernando X. Burgos confirmed the arrests in a statement to CALÓ News, saying that “HSI Arizona conducted the operation with several law enforcement partners to include the Internal Revenue Service, Enforcement and Removal Operations, [and] U.S. Border Patrol.”

The collaboration between agencies comes out of the Homeland Security Task Force, a new government task force created by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, that coordinates with federal, state and local partners to “eradicate threats posed by transnational criminal organizations, cartel and criminal illegal aliens,” according to the statement. 

The immigration enforcement operations led to activists, community members, local leaders and politicians confronting federal agents that morning as they raided several Taco Giro locations across the city, and another in Casa Grande. The mobilizations that followed Friday evening were a direct result of ICE’s presence in southern Arizona.

Baker was an observer at the Taco Giro on Thornydale Road Friday morning, where she says she saw agents with IRS jackets entering the building. 

“I'm very upset with the way ICE has entered our community and are using law enforcement tactics that I think are outrageous,” Kevin Dahl, Tucson Ward 3 councilmember, said. “They should not be masked… They are cowards, bullies and they're probably poorly trained.”

The raids happened in partnership with the IRS, which, under an April memorandum, now shares taxpayer information — home addresses and tax data — to help locate and deport undocumented people facing final orders of removal or under federal criminal investigation, according to the National Immigration Forum.

In Arizona, a study found that undocumented immigrants contribute $704 million in state and local tax contributions, paying into social services they cannot access, like Social Security and Medicare.

“The IRS needs to be going after tax evaders that have a lot of money, not mom-and-pop shops,” Dahl said. “It’s completely racist, having to do with the narrative of the Trump administration thinking that Mexican Americans are bad people.”

Priscilla Teran said she attended the protest for her community and her students. 

Her parents are both Mexican immigrants who met and married in Tucson. Teran was born in the U.S., but her family moved back to Moctezuma, Sonora, early on in her life. They returned to Tucson when she was 15. 

A U.S. citizen, Teran says she feels like an immigrant in her own country. She’s had to deal with people underestimating her intelligence because of how she looks and speaks, despite having earned bachelor's and master's degrees. 

“I can’t sit at home and watch a movie right now on a Friday night when this is happening to our community, so here I am,” she said. 

Now, as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in the Tucson Unified School District, she’s more fervent than ever about standing up not only for herself, but for her students. 

“These are children who come from Mexico or are refugees from Africa,” she said. “I teach them because I was that student, and now it's my turn to be that teacher for these students. This is affecting my students, and it's also affecting my community… and so here I am, because we have to go out and show them that we're not going to stay silent.”

The arrests of the 46 people will have ripple effects throughout the community; the impact will be felt in their families, friends and colleagues. As immigration enforcement continues to ramp up in Tucson and across the country, the Tucson community has demonstrated its unwavering support.

“This has activated my staff and I,” Dahl said. “We're going to look at what opportunities we have to support the community: supporting the bail fund, supporting the Rapid Citizens Rapid Response Team, talking to my colleagues, the city attorney, TPD, to see what more we can do to not only express outrage at these federal actions in our city without city permission, but what can we do to resist it.”

Susan Barnett is an independent journalist in southern Arizona covering the immigrant and Latine community. She is a recent graduate from the University of Arizona, where she received her Master of Arts in Bilingual Journalism. She previously worked at La Estrella de Tucson and co-founded Tucson Spotlight.