Patricia Gonzalez was one of more than 30 people detained after immigration authorities conducted raids at Zipps Sports Grill locations across the Valley. Now, her daughter is speaking out.
When Betzaida Torres got a phone call from her father while at the movie theatre, she immediately knew something was wrong.
Excusing herself from the theatre, she called him back. She heard the fear in his voice and knew that the family’s worst fears had come true.
Federal immigration agents had arrested her mother, Patricia Gonzalez, while she was at work at Zipps Sports Grill in Scottsdale on Jan. 26.
“Everything that I had feared every day had happened. It felt very surreal. I dissociated a lot,” Torres said.
Torres, 25, and her boyfriend rushed over to the restaurant to observe what was happening and be near her mother. The 25-minute drive to Zipps felt like a lifetime, and Torres kept trying to get in touch with her mom, to no avail.
Once they arrived, they saw the restaurant was taped off with yellow police tape.
The restaurant was one of 14 Zipps locations across the state that was raided by immigration officials after Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), one of the two major branches within Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), received a tip that undocumented workers were staffing the kitchen.
In a statement, the US Attorney’s Office for the district of Arizona said that 39 people were taken into custody during the operation for being “unlawfully present in the United States and working at Zipps.”
The raid occurred after a year-long investigation into “unlawful employment of aliens, identity theft, and document fraud,” according to the statement, alleging that employees “may have been using fraudulent identification documents to verify their eligibility to work.”
The raids prompted outrage from local residents who quickly arrived at Zipps locations across the Valley to observe and document what was happening. At one location, observers were pepper-sprayed by immigration officials as they were leaving.
At the Scottsdale location, an immigration officer informed Torres that there was an active investigation before asking Torres if she knew anybody inside. She replied that yes, her mother was inside.
After about three hours, Torres was able to go inside the restaurant and hug her mother goodbye before she was whisked off to the Central ICE Field Office in Downtown Phoenix.
To avoid upsetting her mother, Torres says she put on a brave face in their last embrace, and believes her mother did the same. Torres left before she could see her mother put in the back of the ICE vehicle, believing she wouldn’t be able to handle the grief.
“It didn’t feel real. It was very, very sad,” Torres said.
Nearly three decades in the US
Gonzalez came to the US in 1999 in pursuit of a better life. Originally from a small town in Mexico, her economic opportunities were limited. It was hard to make ends meet, pay the bills, and feed her family, according to Torres.
Once Gonzalez and her husband arrived in the US, she settled in Phoenix. Her husband started working in construction, cars, fast food—whatever jobs he could find in order to send money back home to their family in Mexico. Gonzalez struggled to obtain work due to the language barrier and her fear of being arrested. She began practicing the language and eventually found work in the restaurant business.
In her 27 years in Arizona, she gave birth to four children, all US citizens, who grew up seeing their parents work day and night in order to keep them fed.
“They would pick up cleaning [jobs], anything to help me and my sisters and give us the best life they could. It was always for us,” Torres said.
When Torres reached working age, she offered to help pay the bills, a request her parents quickly shot down. They told her not to worry about work and to focus on her schoolwork instead, stating that it was their responsibility to worry about bills, not hers.
“They’re very hard working people, always willing to go in and work to be able to provide a good life for us, [it’s] something I’ll always be grateful for,” Torres said.
In the year since President Trump returned to office, the family tried to prepare and protect Gonzalez as best they could. Torres advised her mother of her rights—mostly to stay silent and avoid signing onto anything. Gonzalez would often pray, too, in the hopes that prayer could keep her family safe from immigration authorities.
Out of fear of being caught, Gonzalez stopped going to her beloved Zumba classes and spent most of her time at home, leaving mostly just to go to work. Torres and her sisters would take on household chores like grocery shopping in order to keep their mother home and away from any type of run in with ICE agents.
“She was getting to a point where she was scared to live. I could see it on her face, and I felt so bad for her,” Torres said.
In the end, the family’s best efforts to lay low didn’t matter. As the Trump administration increasingly targets immigrants of all kinds, including an overwhelming percentage without a single conviction, individuals like Gonzalez are increasingly finding themselves in ICE detention.
“These aren’t the ‘worst of the worst.’ My mom is an honest woman who just wanted to find a way to feed her kids and send money to her family back home. She’s sweet, she’s kind and she would never harm another person,” Torres said. “I just wish people had some empathy. These are human beings.”
The aftermath
The hours after her mother’s arrest were filled with a number of different emotions for Torres—fear, anger, and sorrow, to name a few.
“We were starving, but we had no appetite for it. I felt like I wasn’t even eating a burger, it felt like cardboard in my mouth. It was just very melancholy. We felt very defeated,” Torres said. “Our mom [was] taken away, we didn’t know where she was, we didn’t know when she would call. We didn’t know if we would ever see her again.”
Torres, her sisters, and her father all slept in the same room that night so nobody would have to be alone in their grief. At around 3:30 a.m., they finally received a brief phone call from Gonzalez, who was able to let them know where she was and that she was alright.
“I felt relief to have heard my mom’s voice, because a lot of the battle with a loved one getting taken by ICE is finding them,” Torres said. “I was relieved to have been able to get in touch with my mom and just know where she’s at. After that, I was nervous of the unknown.”
Without their mother, the house feels increasingly lonely. Gonzalez loved to dance, and the house always had the sounds of her mother’s Zumba music. Torres said you could hear her mother’s voice in every room, whether it be singing, talking with her friends on the phone, or simply chatting with her four daughters.
“It’s just kind of solemn [and] quiet. It feels emptier without her here,” Torres said.
The family is reeling in her absence, but trying to put on a brace face during their nightly FaceTime calls with Gonzalez, who is being held at the Eloy Detention Center, according to the ICE Detainee Locator System.
“She wants to be as positive as she can for us,” Torres said, but she can see how tired and worn down her mom looks during their calls.
Right now, the family is focused on obtaining a bond to get their mother out of detention, which has become increasingly difficult to do under the Trump administration. From there, they’ll begin fighting against deportation proceedings to help their mother, who hasn’t been back to Mexico in nearly three decades.
“This is our home. She’s been here for so long. She has four kids here. She wouldn’t want to leave us behind.”
The family has set up a GoFundMe to assist with legal costs.
