Neighbors React to ICE Raid at San Diego Italian Restaurant: ‘It Could Happen Anywhere’
Danielle Nozzi wasn’t there when heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents swarmed her favorite Italian restaurant, arrested four employees, and fired off flash-bang grenades at protesters who tried to stop them.
But in the days since the raid at Buona Forchetta, in the cute and trendy South Park neighborhood of San Diego, she’s been thinking about how she would explain the incident to her kids. She has yet to come up with a satisfactory answer for herself.
“I have no idea what I would say to them. ‘Oh, they’re taking away bad people.’ They’re not,” Nozzi, a 41-year-old mother of two, tells me as she waits to pick up a pizza on Wednesday night.
Like other workplace raids carried out in recent weeks by ICE, this one seems to signal a shift in the Trump administration’s tactics and an escalation of its deportation efforts. The White House has reportedly ordered ICE to expand its targets beyond gang members and violent criminals and to go after day laborers and other workers peacefully trying to earn a living despite their lack of legal status. That means more confrontations like the one that happened here—and more difficult questions about why immigration enforcers are busting into a restaurant in riot gear and face masks.
“They made a public show of it, and I think they’re doing it for a reason—to try to incite people and try to get a reaction,” says Nozzi.
Buona Forchetta is buzzing and crowded on Wednesday night, with a steady stream of patrons waiting for tables on the awning-covered patio or picking up orders from the to-go window around the corner. Everyone I spoke with had heard about the raid and seen footage of it on the news or social media, and many said they’d come to Buona Forchetta as a show of support for the restaurant—a low-key form of resistance, it would seem.
That includes Diana Ashhab, 43, who was waiting for a table wit
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