This is the first story in a four-part series that examines how President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign is unfolding in the Green Mountain State. The next three stories follow families who are grappling with the fallout.
On a warm afternoon in late September, Will Lambek walked up to an intercom box outside the U.S. Customs and Border Protection station in Richford.
His cell phone had been inundated with calls and texts since Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained nine construction workers during a targeted operation in Hardwick earlier that morning.
Lambek, an organizer with the group Migrant Justice, had come to the CBP station seeking answers about the detainees’ whereabouts.
“I was wondering if maybe they were brought here? Or if you know if they’re at ICE in St. Albans?” Lambek asked the agent through the intercom speaker.
“Sure, no problem, hold on one second,” the agent responded.
If CBP had the answer, they weren’t giving it to Lambek.
“Alright, no comment,” the agent replied. “Have a good day.”
Lambek walked back to the car to resume the search for the immigrant workers, all of whom lived in Caledonia County.
Back in January, it wasn’t at all clear what President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign would mean for immigrants in Vermont. Reality came into clearer focus on April 21, when immigration agents arrested and detained eight people at a dairy farm in Berkshire.
It was, at the time, the largest known immigration raid in Vermont history. It’s since been eclipsed multiple times in communities across the state, including by the Hardwick arrests.
“I think it’s still happening so much in the shadows,” Lambek told Vermont Public. Vermonters, he predicted, “are going to be shocked by the volume” of arrests.
Vermont has seen a bipartisan push over the past decade to protect its growing community of immigrant workers by prohibiting state and local police from collaborating with federal authorities on civil immigration enforcement. But in the past year, an influx of resources at the Department of Homeland Security, and significant changes to its enforcement protocols, have given federal agencies the tools they need to descend on rural Vermont communities and arrest people on their own.
In the last 10 months, federal agents have arrested more than 100 people in Vermont, according to Migrant Justice. Those arrests have upended the lives of those individuals and the families they support, and sent shockwaves through their communities.
Migrant Justice was founded in 2009 to improve working conditions and advance civil rights for Vermont’s immigrant farmworker community. This year, however, much of its work has been devoted to aiding immigrants targeted by a deportation program that’s unlike anything the organization has ever seen.
For this series, Vermont Public's Peter Hirschfeld traveled up and down the state over the course of several months to speak with immigrant families, spending hours in their homes or at their school. This type of in-depth reporting is only possible thanks to the financial support of Vermont Public members. Become one by making your gift today.
'The deportation machine on crack'
Rossy is an organizer at Migrant Justice who’s lived and worked in Vermont since 2017. Vermont Public is not using her last name because her immigration status puts her at risk of deportation.
“We’re living in terror,” Rossy said, speaking through an interpreter. “When we hear about an immigration detention happening like this it creates terror in the community and it has this very quick ripple effect where people hear about it and they feel fear. They don’t want to leave their homes. They don’t want to visit family members. They don’t want to go to the store.”
Migrant Justice operates a 24-hour emergency hotline for people to report immigration arrests, and it maintains a database of case files for people arrested and detained in Vermont. A raid of construction workers at a gas station in Jeffersonville in early November pushed this year’s total to more than 100.
Last year, the organization documented fewer than 20 detentions.
Federal immigration authorities have not provided state-specific data on the total number of arrests in Vermont this year.
When people are detained, the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law School is one of the few places they can turn to for legal services in Vermont. Last year the center got four calls from individuals seeking advice or counsel, according to its director, Brett Stokes.
“Fast forward to now, I have simply just lost count of the number of calls that our office has received,” Stokes said.
Stokes and other immigration attorneys weren’t sure what to expect when Trump began his second term, because his campaign rhetoric back in 2016 didn’t translate into major policy shifts during his first term in the White House.
“If you’re trying to split hairs between what like, Trump 1 and Biden looks like, they’re exactly the same,” Stokes said. “There were no quantifiable differences in immigration enforcement policy between those two administrations.”
Stokes said Trump’s second term has ventured into uncharted territory.
“Basically I describe it as, this is the deportation machine on crack,” he said.
Trump officials say the crackdown is necessary to combat what they’ve characterized as “mass unchecked migration” into the United States.
One distinguishing feature of the new administration, according to Stokes, is the abandonment of historical norms that focused immigration enforcement primarily on public safety threats.
“Everyone’s a target now, versus in the past there was some semblance of what I’ll refer to as enforcement guidelines or enforcement priorities,” he said.
The Trump administration has also dramatically increased financial resources available to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement, and assumed a far more aggressive posture in federal immigration courts.
Making a life in Vermont
Vermont residents caught up in that wider net have sometimes been sent to out-of-state detention facilities, accused by the federal government of nothing more than a civil immigration offense. They include Jose, who came to the state from Chiapas, Mexico, about a year and a half ago.
Jose — Vermont Public is not using his last name because of his immigration status — works on a farm in Franklin County. Immigration agents showed up at his house in the spring, arrested him, and flew him to a detention center in Texas.
“It was sad at first with the uncertainty, and thinking that we were going to be deported,” he said, speaking through an interpreter.
He was released on bond and came back to Vermont. The federal government’s deportation case against him is still pending. Jose said being locked up for those two weeks changed him. He doesn’t leave his home anymore, and lives in fear of another arrest. But he said the experience has only cemented his resolve to build a more prosperous and secure life for his family in Vermont.
He has a wife and a 13-year-old son in Chiapas whom he hopes to one day bring to the U.S.
“They should know that as a community we’re united,” he said. “And we’re committed to being here and defending our rights and continuing to progress as a community.”
Rossy, the organizer with Migrant Justice, said when she first arrived in Vermont, most immigrants were working on farms. Now they’re also mainstays in the construction and hospitality industries.
The Vermont Department of Labor said it doesn’t have any data on the number of undocumented people in the state’s labor force. Migrant Justice estimates the number of Latin American immigrants working without authorization is somewhere near 3,000.
Trump’s deportation campaign notwithstanding, Rossy said most of them still want to make a life here.
“This isn’t about the fight today. It’s not about the fight tomorrow. It’s for the long term,” Rossy said. “And maybe I’m not going to be the one who benefits from this struggle, but maybe it’s going to be kids, or the next generation after them.”
Rossy said it’s been gratifying to see so many Vermonters protest against ICE, and sign court petitions in support of detained immigrants.
“I think here in the state of Vermont a lot of people do see us and they recognize our fight for human rights,” she said. “We know there are people here who have our backs.”
Then she paused and began to cry.
What’s also become clear over the past 10 months, Rossy continued, is how many people want them gone.
“We also know there are a lot of people who don’t want us here, who are racist, who discriminate against us, who are happy about what’s happening to us,” she said. “So to those people, I want to say that we’re human beings as well and we deserve the same things as everyone else.” ■
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