Back in 2017, one of Bryan Maccormack’s family members was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
"They detained him in front of his children," he said recently, "and we didn't have any experience with a case like this."
At the time, Maccormack’ was just about a year into his work with the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement. He’s a co-founder of the group, which today provides a variety of resources to immigrants and their supporters. They do big things, like holding legal clinics, organizing voters to support pro-immigrant legislation, and running a mutual aid fund that helps people buy groceries. They also do little things, like hosting soccer tournaments, driving people to appointments at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and helping families that are new to the region find furniture.
But back in 2017, they didn’t have all of that set up yet. And when Maccormack’s family member was deported, he and his co-founders realized how urgent their work was becoming.
"We learned a lot," Maccormack said. "We created our hotline so that in the future, we could receive calls when something was actually happening and potentially have a meaningful intervention."
Almost 10 years later — last week, in fact — that’s exactly what happened. As Maccormack alluded to, the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement now has a rapid response number people can call if they’re approached by ICE agents. On May 6, a little after 7 a.m., a group of construction workers was driving a truck to their jobsite when ICE vehicles surrounded them. Agents approached the truck and started ordering them to get out. But they didn’t. Instead, one of the workers called the hotline.
Maccormack answered the call.
"Myself and another rapid responder were on the scene in approximately six minutes from when the call was placed, and we witnessed approximately eight ICE agents and six ICE vehicles surrounding a construction vehicle," Maccormack said. "There, we immediately started filming and asking the agents if they had a judicial warrant. They claimed to have a warrant, [but] they wouldn’t say whether or not it was a civil administrative warrant or a judicial warrant. And neither were produced to the individuals being pulled over."
WAMC reached out to ICE to confirm these details, and didn’t receive a reply. But Maccormack can be heard in video of the incident posted by the Albany Times Union asking to see the warrant.
Maccormack said the agents repeatedly threatened to break the windows of the truck. CCSM representatives continued shouting from a distance to the workers. More volunteers arrived, filming the interaction from multiple angles. The agents left without detaining anyone.
That wasn’t the end of the story, though. Part of CCSM’s work is caring for people involved in ICE encounters after the encounter is over. They took the workers to a nearby religious center and served them food. A few hours later, they got back in their truck and went to work. For Maccormack, this is a story not just about a successful intervention — but about how far CCSM has come since 2017. What’s important, he says, is that the workers knew to call the hotline in the first place.
CCSM holds regular trainings with companies around the county, and they hand out pocket-sized cards with the hotline printed on them. People can also just hand the card directly to law enforcement. It’s printed, in English and Spanish, with a brief paragraph, which reads, in part: “I do not wish to speak to you or have any further contact with you. I choose to exercise my right to remain silent and to refuse to answer your questions. I want to speak to my lawyer.”
Maccormack said he welcomes Gov. Kathy Hochul’s attempts to prevent ICE agents from wearing face coverings and block 287(g) agreements, which formalize collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement. But he doesn’t think these provisions go far enough. He’s concerned that there will still be informal collaboration.
"So when somebody gets pulled over for a traffic violation and they call ICE or they call Border Patrol, that's the informal collusion that we're talking about. We have members who have been arrested, for example, in the past, for a loud muffler, or driving without a license, arrested and held at their police station until ICE came to take them," Maccormack said. "The state can easily say that you're not allowed to do that. They're continuing to say that they're protecting immigrant New Yorkers, but in the most vulnerable situations, which is this informal collusion, they're not stepping up to actually protect them."
When asked what he makes of people who disapprove of ICE's methods but believe in the underlying mission of enforcing existing immigration laws, Maccormack paused for a long time before replying.
"I would say people who hold that opinion really need to question their principles and their values," he said. "The fact of the matter is that our immigration system is working exactly how it was designed to work, which is a system rooted in racism and capitalism. If you're a white person and you have money, you're welcome here, and if you don't meet those categories and criteria, then you will be repressed, prosecuted, deported, detained, tortured, and separated from your family and killed. And so if that's the system that you want to support, then you need to live with that."
