North Country communities form immigrant protection networks as ICE enforcement intensifies

Local volunteers coordinate legal aid and emergency response amid heightened immigration enforcement

By Tim Rowland

In the mid-1800s following passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, North Country residents came together to help Black people evade slave catchers. Today, a somewhat similar network is evolving to protect immigrants from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

These groups are not exclusive to the North Country, and many were formed before the second Trump administration to make their communities more welcoming to immigrants who were picking crops, tending cattle, landscaping estates, roofing homes and generally performing essential work when no one else would.

More recently, these groups have united in web video conferences, information swapping and action plans to make sure ICE agents are following the law. These coordinated efforts connect previously disparate groups, including caregiving Adirondack Welcome Circles, dairy farmers, churches, summer camp operators, amusement parks and others who recognize the cultural and economic value of migrants.

Advocacy groups pivot to emergency response and legal training

Over the past few months, the focus has shifted to legal seminars for migrant support groups, classes on how to recognize ICE activity and rapid response teams that are dispatched to scenes where migrants are being detained, ensuring ICE is operating within the law and gathering names and identification codes of workers who are taken from their families so they don’t simply vanish.

“There’s definitely a very active ICE presence in our region,” said Grace Sullivan, an immigration attorney with the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York. “Anyone who’s a noncitizen present in the U.S. is potentially at risk of detention, removal or expedited removal, depending on the individual facts of each case, based on rapidly changing law and policy.”

During an online seminar, Sullivan said the boundaries of immigration law are being aggressively tested by the government. “The category of who can be detained and who’s at risk of being detained is quite broad,” she said.

Regional coalition connects immigrants with essential services

The network of immigrant advocates is becoming more robust. Prior to the Trump administration, Richard Leach, an 81-year-old former physician, founded the Adirondack Regional Immigration Collaborative, a nonprofit comprised of individuals, nonprofit service providers, faith-based and civic organizations, employers, town planners and elected officials. Citing their cultural and economic value to North Country communities, this collaborative helps immigrants by coordinating groups that help immigrants adjust to life in an unfamiliar setting by providing basic needs such as food and medicine, legal, housing and educational assistance and friendship.

“In northeastern New York, there are maybe half a dozen Immigrant Welcome Circles from Saratoga up to Plattsburgh, and so anybody who is interested in bringing migrants together into a community and making them the best new neighbors that we can possibly help them be,” Leach said.

Prior to ARIC, the North Country had little in the way of mutual support. “If you draw a line between Albany and Buffalo, everybody to the south is so far ahead of us up here,” Leach said. ICE raids on everything from Glens Falls roofing projects to Potsdam nail salons have shattered any hope that the North Country would be too remote for government raids.

So the response has been to form alliances where “allies are trained to some degree to watch and see where there’s ICE activity,” Leach said. “Know what the vehicles look like. Know what the uniforms look like. And if they are driving around or going shopping or whatever, and they see an ICE event, then they hit the Signal chat that has been set up for this purpose, and the word instantly goes out.” Evidence has shown that when ICE agents are confronted by people who know the law, they are more likely to abandon their raids, Leach said.

Businesses adapt operations to protect immigrant workers

Sullivan said it’s critical for employers to prepare and assign a trusted team of employees to confront ICE if its agents arrive.

That may come in the form of an announced audit or an unannounced raid. ICE agents do not have to identify themselves, but they do need a warrant to come onto private property. These warrants come in two types, and the difference is important.

A judicial warrant has more weight and allows agents to search the premises. The more common administrative warrant allows agents to access public spaces, such as a lobby, but does not give them the right to enter private spaces.

“The warrants issued by DHS are going to say Department of Homeland Security. It’s going to say it’s an administrative warrant,”  Sullivan said. “They do not give ICE permission to your home or a private workspace, and they will be signed by an ICE officer, not a judge.”

Sullivan advised business owners to clearly mark private spaces and instruct general staff not to speak with ICE agents and to not allow them to enter the workplace. 

“Designate specific individuals who have the authority to speak with ICE,” she said.”This should be limited to a small number of trusted employees who have been appropriately trained. If ICE has an administrative warrant with a specific employee’s name on it, you do not have to say if that employee is working that day, and you do not have to take ICE agents to the employee.” Sullivan advocated video recording ICE visits, but only for use in documenting potential violations. Posting videos to social media can do more harm than good.

Community events build connections amid enforcement fears

While the raids have been frightening, Leach said the current environment also provides  the opportunity to get to know the immigrant community better.

At a March “Voices at the Table” event, “we brought together migrants in our community and businesses who employ migrants and an attorney who talked to some degree about law and ‘know your rights’ and all that stuff,” he said. “And it was basically a celebration of our immigrant neighbors. We had a lunch provided by five different restaurants that were all owned by immigrant families. So that kind of event starts to change the nature of the conversation in a community.”

‘Eyes on the ground’ network monitors ICE activity

Communities are also establishing “eyes on the ground,” detecting and responding to ICE activity. They are trained to know what the vehicles and uniforms look like, and when they enter a neighborhood, word goes out in a Signal chat and “anybody who can will drop everything and go to the event.” If a half a dozen people show up and it’s clear they know the law, Leach said experience has shown that ICE is less likely to persist.

As the movement gains traction, north from Lake George to Elizabethtown and Saranac Lake, Leach said people “have been falling out of the woodwork” to become involved and show immigrants that they are loved. At some point, Leach hopes it reaches a tipping point. “Why am I doing this? Well, like, God knows, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have some optimism,” he said.

Top: H-2A worker harvests Champlain Valley’s apples at Rulfs Orchard in Peru. Photo by David Escobar.