Nikki Marín Baena writes:

In 2017, following a previous set of Trump executive orders, immigrant families in North Carolina were inundated by misinformation and rumors about ICE agents hidden in grocery store parking lots and supposed substations near after-school facilities, leading some people to avoid leaving home. There was no Spanish-language rumor verification hotline here in Greensboro, so our organization — which was just a handful of volunteers at the time — created one, giving more people the ability to talk to a live human and ask whether an undated Facebook post they’d seen shared by someone else was real. We also trained hundreds of volunteers with driver’s licenses to participate in an ICE Watch neighborhood watch program, giving immigrant parents a way to verify the rumors people forwarded them in WhatsApp.

Sometimes the hotline reports we received were not paranoid suspicions. After we began offering trainings in immigrant neighborhood parking lots and circulating Spanish-language videos with tips for how to spot ICE agents, our volunteers came into contact with federal agents. After a volunteer confirmed an officer’s identity, they would alert neighbors to the agent’s presence, and our dispatch team would send a text message to our contacts in the area. ICE agents almost never carry judicial warrants giving them the authority to enter private homes or businesses without permission, so they often wait to make an arrest when the person they’re looking for leaves their home or car. And in every case we worked on, when the agents realized they were being watched, they abandoned their stakeout.

When ICE did make arrests, the majority of people detained whose families we supported were the family’s primary wage earner; the detention created an economic crisis as much as an attack on the family’s psychological and emotional stability. Additionally, there was often little public assistance, beyond food banks, for which the remaining family members qualified. So we started an emergency cash-assistance fund to provide small grants, usually between $300 and $2,000, to help the family stave off eviction and afford the first payment to an immigration attorney. The fund also became a way for local immigrants who were not targeted by ICE to provide support. [Continue reading…]