Elizabeth Castillo wasn’t an activist until Immigration and Customs Enforcement started taking away her neighbors.

It all began in June, after Donald Trump directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to sweep Los Angeles, then used scattered violence at protests of ICE’s tactics as a pretext to send in the military. Castillo felt her working-class neighborhood in Pasadena, just outside Los Angeles, was under siege. Six people, she said, were seized at a Winchell’s doughnut shop. Two people were taken when ICE raided her apartment complex.

“It was just chaos,” she said. “And you can see, you can hear, you could feel the fear, the intimidation. You could feel the terror.”

A small woman with long dark hair, Castillo, the American-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, looks younger than her 38 years. She has five children, two of them grown but three still at home. Before the ICE crackdown she’d followed the news and always voted, but her kids and her job in health care administration took up most of her time. “You know, it’s practices here, practices there,” she said. “‘Mom, pick me up.’ ‘Mom, drop me off.’”

But she’s someone who knows firsthand what deportation can do to families. In 2012, she said, when her kids were all under 10, her husband, who was born in Mexico but grew up in the United States, was thrown out of the country. She’d been a full-time student; he was the family’s sole provider. Castillo had to drop out of college and explain to her children why their father could no longer live with them. “I can relate to what it does to a family,” she said. So this summer, when ICE started grabbing people from her community off the streets, she felt she had to act.