The New Yorker:

As communities across Southern California document and protest the escalating raids, loved ones grapple with the unimaginable.

By Emily Witt

On Tuesday, June 17th, Nancy Urizar was at her job working in the fund-raising department of a Jesuit boys’ high school in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts when her phone rang. “It was just a normal day for me,” she said. “It was twelve, and I had just come back from lunch.” On the other end of the line was her father’s landlord. Some friends of her dad’s had come over, the landlord told her, and they were asking for her phone number. Since June 6th, when two significant raids on undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles marked the beginning of an escalation of operations by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, it has been a time of fear and anxiety. “She didn’t want to open the door because she was scared,” Urizar told me. But the friends turned out to be colleagues of her father, Francisco Urizar, who worked delivering Mission-brand products, including tortillas, to local grocery stores. “She was, like, I have your dad’s friends and they’re saying that they saw—I think, on the news or on social media—that there was a video, and it was my dad that got taken,” Urizar said. “I’m, like, in shock. I’m, like, stop playing this joke on me. It’s not funny.”

The video was recorded by a bystander at a Food 4 Less grocery store in the city of Pico Rivera in eastern L.A. County at nine-thirty that morning. It shows a parked yellow box truck with a homemade-looking paint job, next to which stands a group of immigration agents dressed in camouflage, helmets, and flack jackets, and holding what appear to be rifles. They wear neck buffs pulled up to hide their faces, sunglasses, and gloves, and are laden with tactical gear, as if in a combat zone and not a suburban parking lot. Francisco Urizar has been interrupted mid-delivery and, flanked by two of the agents, waits next to a dolly stacked with boxes of food. As the person recording comes closer to the scene, some bystanders shout out advice: “¡No diga nada!” (“Don’t say anything!”); “¡Hasta que tiene un lawyer presente no diga nada!” (“Until you have a lawyer present don’t say anything!”) Francisco wears a blue baseball cap and has a mustache. As the agents lead him to the back seat of a white Customs and Border Protection S.U.V., he glances back anxiously at his truck and the tortillas. 

Go to link