Trump Wants Us to Fear ICE — Our Resistance Must Spread Solidarity, Not Panic

Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided a home up the street from my house. A neighbor, Alisa Cullison, saw three unmarked vehicles haunting the quiet block early in the morning. Another neighbor, Emily Ingebretsen, witnessed a dozen armed men in masks emerge from the vehicles, knock on a door and come out a few minutes later with three men in handcuffs and chains.

The three men walked slowly, heads down, as Ingebretsen followed the officers and filmed with her smart phone, demanding, “Warrant, do you have a warrant? Do you have identification?”

The quiet bamboo forest and familiar walkways in the background prickled the hairs on my arm when I watched Ingebretsen’s cell phone video later that day on TV news. I recognized the way the soft street looked in the rain. ICE had walked more or less into my backyard and snatched our neighbors from their home.

This was what we had been afraid of: Trump’s new administration would escalate anti-immigrant policies already in place, stoking fear by making random raids with the stated goal of rounding people up for mass deportation. People would disappear into unmarked vans, be taken to unidentified locations, detention centers or prison camps. Days before the February 13 incident in my North Carolina neighborhood, Trump had made a pronounced display of sending around 100 undocumented men to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the notorious torture site, claiming without proof that they were the “worst criminals.”

Before Trump’s return to office, migrants who came to this country without permits or visas already lacked rights and a sense of safety. Under the new paradigm they also lack sanctuary, with the Trump administration declaring its intention to pull people out of schools and churches in addition to their workplaces and homes. The concept of sanctuary, even for refugees seeking asylum, is under practical and cultural attack.

So in some sense, all of this was anticipated, at least by people who were paying attention. We expected to see ICE unleashed in our neighborhoods. We expected intimidation and, ultimately, mass deportations.

Most ICE Sightings Are Unconfirmed Rumors

An interesting detail emerged about the raid near my home that day: Out of hundreds of reports of ICE and border patrol raids in our region in the three weeks prior, this was the first that appeared to be legitimate.

The evening news and local papers that day reported on the raid, pasting my neighbors’ cell phone videos directly into their newscasts and on their websites. My neighborhood listserv went wild, as our left-leaning corner of a blue city rallied in solidarity with the disappeared neighbors, who it was later confirmed were relatively new arrivals to the neighborhood and were originally from India. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) told media that it had conducted an operation that day in Durham, taking a total of 11 people to an undisclosed detention center.

A group called Siembra NC confirmed the veracity of the three deportations witnessed near me, and spoke with their families, who requested privacy. After the neighbors saw the agents, who did not have anything on them that visibly identified them as federal agents, they called Siembra’s hotline. Siembra was founded in 2017 to build a rapid response system for migrants in North Carolina threatened by ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), police, and predatory employers and landlords. In addition to the hotline, Siembra trains community members on how to respond to suspected ICE presence, fights against deportations of people in jails, supports workers whose wages have been stolen and helps people form their own community ICE Watch groups.

Their agenda of fear must be answered by fearlessness and fact-checking on the part of bystanders and neighbors like mine; we cannot allow their faceless intimidation to be normalized.

The organization aligns with a national movement of immigrants and their allies who are preparing for the increase in deportations with Know Your Rights trainings and ramped-up rapid response networks — a movement that has already caused Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, to comment that advocates are “making it very difficult” to detain people.

The day of the raid, Siembra staff came to the block and spoke to the families of the people who had been taken, who said they didn’t believe the federal officers had judicial warrants. After confirming that three people had indeed been taken, Siembra contacted media, who later received confirmation of the operation from CBP.

Since the January 20 inauguration, Siembra told Truthout it has gotten 1,200 calls about suspected ICE presence, and hundreds more about wage theft, from across central North Carolina. For each call, Siembra staff worked to verify whether the warning was real: asking questions of the callers, going to the scene, and calling and messaging people in the area to confirm or dispel rumors. In all these cases thus far since January 20, the presence of ICE had been hearsay or a misunderstanding, with a small handful of calls also coming from people who were already in detention. This was the first report of ICE presence from a third-party witness that Siembra confirmed was actually federal immigration agents.

“We know that the goal of this … is to inspire people to self-deport by creating an environment of panic and chaos,” said Nikki Marin Baena, co-director of Siembra, in a press conference later that day. The organization praised the neighbors for their response, for using the hotline as it was intended, and pointed out that if the federal government had warrants to arrest people, those should have been easy to produce.

They also discouraged people from spreading unverified rumors about ICE, particularly those originating on social media. A report last week from the Guardian suggests that someone tampering with the dates on previous press releases about ICE raids has caused Google searches for ICE raids to spike in a misleading way since late January, and unconfirmed ICE sightings are rampant.

“What we were seeing starting in 2017 is that one well-placed rumor that made its way around Facebook or WhatsApp could keep hundreds of people home from work, keep lots and lots of kids home from school, and we want people to be able to live as normal and as dignified a life as they can, even under these circumstances,” Baena said.

“These rumors are not keeping people safe,” said Marlene Martinez, Siembra’s deputy field director said in an interview. “It’s creating unnecessary panic and it prevents people from being able to go about their daily lives.”

Community Members Have the Power to Slow Deportations

Siembra has been urging community members to do exactly what the two Durham witnesses did: to call the hotline when they suspect ICE presence, cautiously verify if a rumor is real, ask the officers who they are with and whether they have a judicial warrant, and, if officers proceed with an operation, to bear witness and document.

The witnessing neighbors — and the dozens more in my neighborhood who responded to the raid with outrage and organizing after the fact — have mounted a spirited defense of their community. Ingebretsen said that when she asked why almost all the officers had masks covering their faces, one of them replied, “‘If you were doing something in your community, you might want to cover your face too.’ To which I said, there is nothing that I would do in my community where I would ever hide my identity.”

“This is not what I understand community to be,” said Cullison.

Siembra representatives have repeated over and over that the federal government is primarily continuing enforcement operations in the same pattern as it did under the Biden administration — but it has increased its threats and intimidation, trying to stoke fear and push people into hiding. Most calls they receive about verifiable deportations originate in jails, where ICE partnerships with local law enforcement make people who are picked up by police vulnerable to being turned over to the feds and deported. A North Carolina law that went into effect in December requires all sheriff’s departments to cooperate with ICE, removing a key lever of local organizing against the agency’s reach.

Still, all over the country, residents are preparing to turn ICE and CBP away at the door where possible and to question their presence in our communities. A united, grassroots front against deportations can make our communities safer as it shames and slows down the deporters. Their agenda of fear must be answered by fearlessness and fact-checking on the part of bystanders and neighbors like mine; we cannot allow their faceless intimidation to be normalized.

My neighbors expressed anger and frustration, a much more hopeful response than passive acceptance. As Ingebretsen said, “to watch your neighbors get plucked out of thin air in the middle of the day — that’s not normal.”