Tiff Williams was walking their dog around 6 a.m. Thursday in their north side Tucson neighborhood when they saw a commotion at the house across the street.
Williams watched as agents spilled out of a large gray tank-like vehicle, guns drawn, and began yelling in English and Spanish. The officers arrested several men as well as two teenagers.
A truck tagged DEA, or Drug Enforcement Administration, could be seen in photos shared by Williams. Other cars appeared unmarked.
The encounter raised a host of questions: what was happening, what agency was taking their neighbors, and what would happen to the rest of the family’s children and teens left waiting outside under the care of agents.
Those questions have become increasingly common, and urgent, as immigration enforcement in local neighborhoods has become a steady thrum across the country.
This summer, immigration agents detained more than 10,000 people in a five-day period, part of an ongoing surge to increase arrest rates. Immigration arrests more than tripled in Arizona in 2025, with street-level ICE arrests in particular going from near zero to hundreds per month under Trump, according to an analysis by Arizona Luminaria and Calo News.
Williams said the experience left them feeling anger, fear, and helplessness. “This shouldn’t fucking be happening, and that it happened so early in the morning means that they are really just trying to do this in silence, and it’s a scary thing,” Williams told Arizona Luminaria by phone. “It feels like they are doing this on purpose so people can’t save their neighbors.”
After Williams called Tucson Rapid Response Network, observers came to the scene and began to piece together information about who was taken during the operation.
As they spoke on the phone, Williams said they could see three young people standing outside of the house among officers.
Rapid response volunteer Carmen Smith-Estrada was able to speak to one of the children waiting outside who said the people detained were her father, an uncle, a friend of the family and her two brothers.
Smith-Estrada said the operation had characteristics the group has come to associate with immigration raids. That includes agents with their faces covered, wearing casual non-uniform clothing like blue jeans and cowboy hats, agents who would not identify themselves and unmarked vehicles.
The group’s next steps are figuring out how to best support the family in terms of locating their detained family members and finding legal representation.
Fernando X. Burgos, public affairs officer with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said because arrests are made every day, they could not respond to a request for the comment on the operation without the full name of the person taken and either a specific number assigned by the Department of Homeland Security or an individual’s date of birth.
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