In late March, a series of targeted raids rocked the community as national politics intruded on a region typically off Washington’s radar.
“Well, about a month ago – I think the specific date is Wednesday, March 19th – ICE came to the Berkshires. They took away 13 members of our community. They took away fathers, they took away brothers, sons. They violated due process. They went into a business without a warrant. They took people that have working permits," Fernando Leon of Berkshire Interfaith Organizing, who works directly with the families impacted by the detentions, told WAMC. “We have one person that has come back. We have four people that have been granted bond. It’s extremely difficult to navigate the process, because people are being moved around extremely fast. So, from people that were at Plymouth, they have been moved to Louisiana, then they have been moved to New Mexico. It’s incredibly challenging to keep up with it legally.”
ICE refused to comment on the activity in Berkshire County when reached by WAMC. The agency’s aggressive incursion into the region is part of President Trump’s broader crackdown on immigration, which the Republican has framed as an effort to root out criminals from the U.S.
If there’s any evidence of that claim, Leon says the raids proved the opposite.
“It doesn't hold any water," he said. "From all the people that I have been working with, one has charges, but that's about it. The rest of the people were extremely hard working, people that, they've been trying to do everything legally. Like I mentioned previously, two of them have working permits. They were valid. They were still taken away. So, I think it's a huge contradiction, to say the least, to say that you are pushing against criminality when you are not following your own legal system.”
Leon says since March, federal agents remain in Berkshire County.
“There has been some ICE activity," he confirmed. "They are around. Fortunately, people are well educated on their rights, so people have not been taken away because they know better to just open the door. They have said they have not opened the doors, they have asked, do you have a warrant? They didn't have a warrant, so they have to leave.”
For the region’s immigrant community, things have permanently changed.
“Ripples of what has happened can be felt in every aspect of daily life," said Leon. "We're talking about people just not living life, not leaving their homes, people not being able to access basic services, people taking kids out of school. So, it's terror.”
Every detainee taken away has left a Berkshire family facing dire and immediate needs. While the immigrant community quickly assembled a network of apartments for impacted families to stay in after the raids, a larger, long-term strategy was necessary.
“We're talking ICE taking away the breadwinner in the family," Leon explained. "So, wives are being left alone with three kids that are like four and six years old, and now that family doesn't have any ways to sustain themselves. They don't have any money to pay for rent, they don't have money to pay for groceries. These women left behind with their families are incredibly brave and hard working. We have seen in the family someone that is getting up at three in the morning to go work and save money for a bond. I think I'm in awe about the resilience of this family, and also, it breaks my heart when I heard stories about kids that are asking, where is my dad? Kids that cannot go to sleep because they just cannot understand yet what's going on, what kind of injustice their family has been subject to.”
While the chaos of the March raids left some local organizations scrambling, other groups well versed in ground-level activism leapt to the fore.
“Roots & Dreams and Mustard Seeds is a working-class empowerment org. We don't want to empower just one person- It's all of us who don't own and control the economy. We want to give us a shot at making more decisions here," said co-founder and board director Michael Hitchcock. “This was extremely serious for us from the very beginning, because Latinos are part of the working class, just flat out, and we can't afford to just watch one section of the working class be divided and conquered from us. It's people that we work with every day. Either they're customers at the food pantry or they're in our cooperative development programs or they're in one of our other education programs. We hire people from the community to run different programs.”
Hitchcock and Leon joined forces and went to Northern Berkshire progressive group Greylock Together – a local chapter of the nationwide Indivisible movement – to lay out the situation in no uncertain terms.
“Greylock Together really responded to our message," Hitchcock told WAMC. "We went to a meeting together and really gave them a bit of the full scope and the full seriousness. One of the things all these groups needs to respond appropriately is to see on our faces, respectable men with nice haircuts, to see on our faces that this issue is absolutely serious and traumatizing and not to be ignored. And once they saw that, they really saw that, they went to work for us and for themselves and for the community,”
Between seed money raised by Roots & Dreams and Mustard Seeds after Trump’s reelection and donations from Greylock Together, Hitchcock and Leon had $14,000 in hand to commit to the cause.
“First, we brought three people, three of the representatives from the families to the lawyer in Boston," explained Hitchcock. "And as we spoke to the lawyer, he was moved, and he gave us half price bond representation for families with no criminal record, which is pretty unusual- And he's very good at his job, his firm is very experienced. So anyway, that doubled our reach and watching people respond to our message and take it seriously is really rewarding, sometimes bringing me to tears, because these things are designed for- They are easy to ignore because they don't affect you, so you can put your head down and just let a couple people disappear and have a quiet life. So, by putting out this message together about how serious it is, and seeing people become offended at the lack of due process, offended at the cruelty, offended at the broken, traumatized families and the crying kids, and see the human element of actual people, friends, neighbors, coworkers who are being disappeared or traumatized by these disappearances- People are responding to that message once you give them a chance and a direction to respond.”
Hitchcock says one of the most vivid examples of that is how Berkshire locals have rallied to support on the ground efforts to respond to ICE appearances.
“We've seen a lot of people get excited about their chance to ask ICE if they have a warrant, to assemble when we have a report of ICE or a potential report of ICE," he said. "People have been on the scene within five minutes to verify or say they're gone or say it was a rumor. A lot of people really are disgusted, and they want a direction. As for ICE itself, no offense to these guys – or plenty of offense, whatever – but it just seems like they're going around having fun terrorizing people, but there's no real order or structure to it. It seems like they're a little bit overwhelmed by the speed and amount of things they attempted, and we've seen several of our bond hearings get delayed. It seems like they've gummed up their own works. They don't even know how to proceed. They're just terrorizing people with no real plan.”
Leon says that the belated response from many Massachusetts elected officials to the raids underscores the need for communities to protect themselves.
“We cannot wait anymore for politicians to save us," he said. "We are doing the groundwork because we are close to these families. These are our friends. These are people that we know and that we have interacted with every day. You are taking someone that I love away from me, so I’m going to do the work.”
The two activists offered their takeaways from a darkly remarkable spring.
“I think first of all, organize, do not obey in advance," offered Leon. "We are definitely facing an authoritarian regime. Don't give your power away, don't get stuck in fear, because there is something that you can do. Be as courageous if you as you can, do the work, get together with people that are doing the work, and we'll find a way.”
“We've got to lean on the relationships we built, not only during this emergency, but before, and we have to lean on those and strengthen those," Hitchcock told WAMC. "It's actually terrifying to stand up to police alone. Very few people I know have done it, and I don't blame anyone if they can't do it, but it is so easy to stand up to police when you have nine people with you. It's just so much easier.”
Leon says that penetrating the dehumanization of the immigrant community is the bedrock of their mission.
“If you have time to build a relationship with an immigrant, to actually have a conversation with an immigrant, to get to know them, you're going to realize that you have more in common with that immigrant, that with Elon Musk or with Trump," he told WAMC. "So why are you fighting us? You should be fighting the oligarchs, not us.”
