It's been several days since federal agents came onto the parking lot of Sarah Stiner and Linda Shafiroff's design business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and detained one of their employees. There still isn’t any confirmation on where the landscape gardener who was arrested was taken.
Stiner said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents parked a black SUV in the lot of her private property on May 30. The Great Barrington police department received confirmation ICE was in the area, but did not know their exact location nor did they cooperate with the federal agents under the town's trust policy, which prohibits their officers from assisting ICE agents.
When Stiner’s gardeners arrived to work, she said armed, masked individuals came out of the SUV and started interrogating her employees. Stiner intervened, quickly, and asked for warrants and identification from the agents. She was denied both.
“They don't really have to show you IDs. It just seemed really not right. Not right at all,” Stiner said. “By the end of this whole thing, there must have been seven ICE agents here saying they were looking for a drunk driver, but from speaking to other community members, the person they picked up doesn't even drive. So, it's just very confusing. It was a very chaotic, confusing, unsettling experience.”
Federal agents detained the gardener with a DUI charge that has not been confirmed. Stiner said the incident was unsettling.
“How do you know they're really federal agents if they just won't show anything, any ID? They're not in the same uniforms [as police officers]. They have different cars. They have different badges. How do you know it's not somebody? Just a group of people plucking people out because they're Brown. I mean, how do you know that?” Stiner said.
Stiner said it's unclear where the gardener, whose identity has not been released, was taken, but she said residents in the community believe he's in a facility in Boston.
She has reached out to the ACLU for guidance regarding the incident and to understand her rights as a citizen in this matter.
“Can we see their faces? Do they have to have some documentation,” Stiner asked. “I have so many questions like that. [I’m just looking for…] clarity, I guess. Clarity on what my rights are, what our rights are as citizens. What if this happens again…”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, U. S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Leah Foley and Patricia Hyde, field director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, announced that 1,500 people have been detained by ICE agents in Massachusetts during a press conference in Boston on Monday.
Hyde said 1,461 “criminal alien offenders” were apprehended with a little more than half having “significant criminality” and 277 “ordered removed from the United States by a Justice Department immigration judge,” according to reporting from WGBH.
NEPM's Elizabeth Román contributed to this story.
