An immigration detention matters not just to a family, but a community.

Sometimes, a call to a handyman can become a friendship. That’s what happened to S. Friedman, 79, who was looking for some help when she moved to Seaside last year. She got connected to a neighbor who made a living mostly fixing cars, but also doing household repairs.

Friedman, a self-described “naive, white, Jewish girl” from the northeast, became close friends with the man, who the Weekly is identifying just as A. to protect the privacy of his mixed-status family – some are American citizens, some are non-citizens living in the United States legally and others are not.

For Friedman, it became a close friendship and an unusual one. She would visit A., who is roughly 50 years old, and his large, multigenerational family of Mexican immigrants. Some of them speak only Spanish. A couple of weeks ago, A. got her back on a bicycle for the first time in years. Then she planned an excursion for A. and his sister on Sunday, Oct. 25. It was a surprise, but the trio would carpool to San Juan Bautista for an a cappella concert.

They pulled away, A. driving Friedman’s car, A.’s sister in the front seat and Friedman in the back seat. One block from her Seaside home, unmarked vehicles stopped them. Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement approached and told A. to exit the vehicle.

Friedman says she started to roll her window down and ask the officers to identify themselves; she was chastised to roll her window back up. She watched through the car window as her friend was instructed to empty his pockets, handcuffed and guided into an ICE vehicle.

“We sat there stunned,” Friedman says. “We were shocked.”

A.’s sister was crying. After a pause, Friedman got into the driver’s seat and drove her car back around the block to her driveway where they had met just a few minutes earlier.

“It was traumatic,” Friedman says. “It was scary.”

But she did not anticipate then that it would take days to even locate him. “I know how to navigate a system,” Friedman says. But even for her, a native English speaker and American-born citizen, it was tough and required three days and 18 phone calls to various detention facilities and Department of Homeland Security phone numbers until they could confirm that her friend was being held in California City in the Mojave Desert, about a five-hour drive away.

“I’m mostly just terribly sad.”

Friedman went with A.’s mother and aunt to visit him on Oct. 30, where they could speak through glass. He has a court date scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 5, but still no attorney as of the Weekly’s deadline.

He said he was being treated reasonably well in detention. But it leaves Friedman processing that she’s likely to never see her friend again, even though he’s built a life over 25 years in Seaside.

“For me there’s this edge of tremendous sadness,” she says, “and tremendous anger at a system that was consistently intimidating at every step.”

She’s found herself unable to sleep in the week since, as she processed what happened and what is happening – and she is confronted with the reality that President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration policies are happening not to somebody else, but to her own community, broadened through her cross-cultural friendship.

“How do I get to be so lucky? I am white, I was born in this country. I have so many privileges I don’t even think about until I see them taken away from someone else,” Friedman says. “I am so grateful for everything that I have. But I’m mostly just terribly sad.”

It’s hard to know what to do in times that can feel so helpless. Friedman is finding that each of the 18 phone calls (and counting, to help find legal representation for A.) feels like doing something. Her world – that of a naive, white, American-born citizen – has been shaken in a way that she realizes many of her peers’ may not. So she is urging them to see the immigration crackdown not as something happening to someone else on TV, but to all of us.

“Every person [should] do something, even if it seems small,” Friedman says. “It’s A) acknowledging we have a problem and B) getting off your ass and doing something. Every little bit matters, in different ways.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.