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SAN DIEGO: Adam Greenfield was home nursing a cold when his girlfriend raced in to tell him Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles were pulling up in their trendy San Diego neighborhood.
The author and podcast producer grabbed his iPhone and bolted out the door barefoot, joining a handful of neighbors recording masked agents raiding a popular Italian restaurant nearby, as they yelled at the officers to leave. An hour later, the crowd had grown to nearly 75 people, with many in front of the agents’ vehicles.
“I couldn’t stay silent,” Greenfield said. “It was literally outside of my front door.”
More Americans are witnessing people being hauled off as they shop, exercise at the gym, dine out and otherwise go about their daily lives as President Donald Trump’s administration aggressively works to increase immigration arrests. As the raids touch the lives of people who aren’t immigrants themselves, many Americans who rarely, if ever, participated in civil disobedience are rushing out to record the actions on their phones and launch impromptu protests.
Arrests are being made outside gyms, busy restaurants

Greenfield said on the evening of the May 30 raid, the crowd included grandparents, retired military members, hippies, and restaurant patrons arriving for date night. Authorities threw flash bangs to force the crowd back and then drove off with four detained workers, he said.
“To do this, at 5 o’clock, right at the dinner rush, right on a busy intersection with multiple restaurants, they were trying to make a statement,” Greenfield said. “But I don’t know if their intended point is getting across the way they want it to. I think it is sparking more backlash.”
Previously, many arrests happened late at night or in the pre-dawn hours by agents waiting outside people’s homes as they left for work or outside their work sites when they finished their day. When ICE raided another popular restaurant in San Diego in 2008, agents did it in the early morning without incident.
White House border czar Tom Homan has said agents are being forced to make more arrests in communities because of sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with ICE in certain cities and states. ICE enforces immigration laws nationwide but seeks state and local help in alerting federal authorities of immigrants wanted for deportation and holding that person until federal officers take custody.
Vice President JD Vance, during a visit to Los Angeles on Friday, said those policies have given agents “a bit of a morale problem because they’ve had the local government in this community tell them that they’re not allowed to do their job.”
“When that Border Patrol agent goes out to do their job, they said within 15 minutes they have protesters, sometimes violent protesters who are in their face obstructing them,” he said.
’It was like a scene out of a movie’
Melyssa Rivas had just arrived at her office in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California one morning last week when she heard the frightened screams of young women. She went outside to find the women confronting nearly a dozen masked federal agents who had surrounded a man kneeling on the pavement.
“It was like a scene out of a movie,” Rivas said. “They all had their faces covered and were standing over this man who was clearly traumatized. And there are these young girls screaming at the top of their lungs.”
As Rivas began recording the interaction, a growing group of neighbors shouted at the agents to leave the man alone. They eventually drove off in vehicles, without detaining him, video shows.
Rivas spoke to the man afterward, who told her the agents had arrived at the car wash where he worked that morning, then pursued him as he fled on his bicycle. It was one of several recent workplace raids in the majority-Latino city.
The same day, federal agents were seen at a Home Depot, a construction site and an LA Fitness gym. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people had been detained.
“Everyone is just rattled,” said Alex Frayde, an employee at LA Fitness who said he saw the agents outside the gym and stood at the entrance, ready to turn them away as another employee warned customers about the sighting. In the end, the agents never came in.
Communities protest around ICE buildings
Arrests at immigration courts and other ICE buildings have also prompted emotional scenes as masked agents have turned up to detain people going to routine appointments and hearings.
In the city of Spokane in eastern Washington state, hundreds of people rushed to protest outside an ICE building June 11 after former city councilor Ben Stuckart posted on Facebook. Stuckart wrote that he was a legal guardian of a Venezuelan asylum seeker who went to check in at the ICE building, only to be detained. His Venezuelan roommate was also detained.
Both men had permission to live and work in the US temporarily under humanitarian parole, Stuckart told The Associated Press.
“I am going to sit in front of the bus,” Stuckart wrote, referring to the van that was set to transport the two men to an ICE detention center in Tacoma. “The Latino community needs the rest of our community now. Not tonight, not Saturday, but right now!!!!”
The city of roughly 230,000 is the seat of Spokane County, where just over half of voters cast ballots for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
Stuckart was touched to see his mother’s caregiver among the demonstrators.
“She was just like, ‘I’m here because I love your mom, and I love you, and if you or your friends need help, then I want to help,’” he said through tears.
By evening, the Spokane Police Department sent over 180 officers, with some using pepper balls, to disperse protesters. Over 30 people were arrested, including Stuckart who blocked the transport van with others. He was later released.
Aysha Mercer, a stay-at-home mother of three, said she is “not political in any way, shape or form.” But many children in her Spokane neighborhood — who play in her yard and jump on her trampoline — come from immigrant families, and the thought of them being affected by deportations was “unacceptable,” she said.
She said she wasn’t able to go to Stuckart’s protest. But she marched for the first time in her life on June 14, joining millions in “No Kings” protests across the country.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt as strongly as I do right this here second,” she said.

WASHINGTON: Japan has canceled a regular high-level meeting with its key ally the United States after the Trump administration demanded it spend more on defense, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been expected to meet Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya and Defense Minister Gen Nakatani in Washington on July 1 for the annual 2+2 security talks.
But Tokyo scrapped the meeting after the US asked Japan to boost defense spending to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product, higher than an earlier request of 3 percent, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
Japan’s Nikkei newspaper reported on Saturday that President Donald Trump’s government was demanding that its Asian allies, including Japan, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense.
A US official who asked not to be identified told Reuters that Japan had “postponed” the talks in a decision made several weeks ago. The official did not cite a reason. A non-government source familiar with the issue said he had also heard Japan had pulled out of the meeting but not the reason for it doing so.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said she had no comment on the FT report when asked about it at regular briefing. The Pentagon also had no immediate comment.
Japan’s embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. The nation’s foreign and defense ministries and the Prime Minister’s Office did not answer phone calls seeking comment outside business hours on Saturday.
The FT said the higher spending demand was made in recent weeks by Elbridge Colby, the third-most senior Pentagon official, who has also recently upset another key US ally in the Indo-Pacific by launching a review of a project to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines.
In March, Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said that other nations do not decide Japan’s defense budget after Colby, in his nomination hearing to be under secretary of defense for policy, called for Tokyo to spend more to counter China.
Japan and other US allies have been engaged in difficult trade talks with the United States over President Donald Trump’s worldwide tariff offensive.
The FT said the decision to cancel the July 1 meeting was also related to Japan’s July 20 upper house elections, expected to be a major test for Ishiba’s minority coalition government.
Japan’s move on the 2+2 comes ahead of a meeting of the US-led NATO alliance in Europe next week, at which Trump is expected to press his demand that European allies boost their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.