The New York Times reports:

President Trump may be ending the surge of immigration agents in the Twin Cities, but his mass deportation effort has already extended well past large, liberal cities like Minneapolis, to small communities where the national spotlight does not exist but the impact can be at least as acute.

In places like Cornelius, Ore., Danbury, Conn., Biddeford, Maine, and Coon Rapids, Minn., where moderation, not partisanship, might predominate, the arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and the more aggressive tactics ICE officers often use — have been jarring. In small towns, resources may already stretched, and even a single incident can shatter the tranquillity of neighborhoods unaccustomed to turmoil.

ICE is proud of its reach. The agency is using “data-driven intelligence” to deploy its agents, the agency said in an email, declining to identify a spokesman. It added, “ICE operates everywhere — rural, urban, and suburban.”

In Coon Rapids, an exurb about 15 miles from downtown Minneapolis, Bill Carlson recently watched federal agents as they waited across the street for hours to take away a Vietnamese family he called his neighbors.

“There is a fear here,” he said. “I didn’t think anything like this would happen in America, let alone Coon Rapids.”

Last month, ICE “surge teams” from Philadelphia were sent into West Virginia, hitting the towns of Martinsburg, Moorefield, Morgantown, Beckley, Huntington and Charleston. None of those places have more than 50,000 residents and Moorefield has less than 3,000. Federal officials boasted of arresting more than 650 undocumented immigrants.

At a coffee shop in Hillsboro, Ore., deputies and local police in Washington County responded in October to multiple 911 calls that reported 10 armed men wearing masks who approached a car filled with high school students with weapons drawn in a crowded drive-through lane. Only after a tense encounter — and after the armed men got in their van and left — did the local officers understand they’d been in a standoff with federal immigration agents.

“You’ve got people in that parking lot who want us to arrest the ICE agents,” said Sheriff Caprice Massey, adding that she is worried her deputies could wind up in an accidental gunfight with federal officers. “And you’ve got ICE agents who want us to help them or get out of their way.”

Emergency responders have also fielded a rash of 911 calls about abandoned vehicles. “ICE will just take someone and leave their car, windows smashed, in the middle of the road,” Sheriff Massey said. [Continue reading…]