An Independent-minded calendar of arts and events for Outer Cape Cod

Advertise in the Indie.

Reach more readers from Eastham to Provincetown.

Unchained news for Outer Cape Cod

The Provincetown Independent

Let us bring you the paper.

Your subscription supports real community journalism.

ICE

    THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

    ICE Arrests Defendant Outside Orleans Courthouse

    Biden-era limits on arrests at criminal courts were canceled in January

    By

    ORLEANS — Thiago Bastos, 27, who lives in Hyannis with his children, ages 4 and 5, his girlfriend, and her toddler, was arrested by state police on Saturday, May 10 in Orleans. He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, failing to stop for the police, negligent operation of a motor vehicle, and a marked lanes violation.

    Thiago Bastos, 27, was arrested by state police for driving under the influence on May 10, entered a plea of not guilty at Orleans District Court on May 12, and then was arrested by ICE agents just outside the courthouse a few minutes later. (Photo courtesy Bastos family)

    He pleaded not guilty to those charges at Orleans District Court on Monday morning, May 12, and a public defender, Brendan Burchell of Centerville, was appointed to represent him.

    Only a few minutes later, Bastos was arrested in the courthouse parking lot by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

    Burchell was still in the courtroom when a court officer pulled him aside and said that ICE agents had arrested his client, he told the Independent. By the time Burchell made it outside, Bastos and the agents were gone.

    Cape and Islands District Attorney Rob Galibois told the Independent that ICE does not inform his office when it arrests people he is prosecuting, and that his prosecutors typically learn about ICE arrests from defense attorneys who mention it before or during scheduled court dates.

    “None of our employees witnessed [Bastos’s] arrest,” Galibois said, adding that “the prosecutor that was handling that case was advised of it by the defense attorney.”

    Galibois said that, besides Bastos, he has not heard about any other arrests of defendants at criminal courts on the Cape and Islands this year.

    A member of Bastos’s family who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal told the Independent that Bastos called at 9:18 a.m. while he was still speaking with the agents. He had not initially realized that the officers, wearing plainclothes, were ICE agents; they had waved Bastos over and made light conversation before identifying themselves and asking for his identification documents and immigration status, the family member said.

    Bastos told the officers he was applying for a green card, and he called his relative to get the “alien number,” or A-number, connected to his application.

    The agents told Bastos that his A-number wasn’t appearing in their system, and they needed to take him to the ICE Boston field office in Burlington to check his status, the family member said.

    When the family member next heard from Bastos it was two days later, May 14, when Bastos called from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility — the only jail in Massachusetts with a contract to house ICE detainees. Bastos said that ICE had confined him at the Burlington field office for two days, where he slept on the floor.

    Bastos had come to the U.S. from Brazil when he was 11 years old and has not been there since, his family member told the Independent. He attended Kennedy Middle School in Woburn and Barnstable High School and has worked as a carpenter. His children, who are U.S. citizens, believe that he is on an extended work trip, and that when he returns, they will move to a bigger house. But without his income, the family is being evicted from their home.

     

    Sensitive Locations

    ICE arrested Bastos during “Operation Patriot,” a month-long immigration enforcement operation that swept through Massachusetts in May.

    A wide variety of criminal and civil cases are tried at Orleans District Court. (Photo by Chloe Budakian)

    According to a June 2 press release from ICE, the operation targeted “transnational organized crime, gangs and egregious illegal alien offenders” and resulted in nearly 1,500 arrests — although the Boston Globe reported that only 17 percent of those arrested had a criminal conviction, 37 percent had pending criminal charges, and 46 percent had no criminal record at all.

    According to records at the Barnstable and Orleans district courts, Bastos had multiple previous motor vehicle charges — including driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, and using an electronic device while driving — all of which had been dismissed.

    Thomas Rugo, an attorney hired to represent Bastos after he was arrested by ICE, told the Independent his client has no prior criminal convictions.

    Before his arrest, Bastos had not been worried about immigration enforcement, his family member said.

    “He never thought ICE would approach him — he came here when he was 11 years old — and I asked him, ‘Have you lost your mind, thinking you’re an American?’ ” his family member said.

    Whenever local or state police arrest someone, the home address and fingerprints in the arrest report are run through Dept. of Homeland Security and FBI databases that ICE can also access, according to the National Immigration Law Center.

    “Even a minor encounter with local law enforcement may trigger ICE involvement — even if criminal charges are later dropped or never even filed,” Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell wrote in a guide to immigrant families released on May 29.

    According to Oren Sellstrom, the litigation director of Lawyers for Civil Rights, courthouses are one of several “sensitive locations” where ICE traditionally has not conducted federal immigration enforcement, along with schools, health-care facilities, and places of worship.

    ICE activity around courthouses ramped up during the first Trump administration, Sellstrom said. In 2019, Lawyers for Civil Rights challenged ICE’s courthouse arrest policies in court.

    In April 2021, the Biden administration set tighter standards limiting immigration enforcement at criminal courthouses. “As law enforcement officers and public servants, we have a special responsibility to ensure that access to the courthouse — and therefore access to justice, safety for crime victims, and equal protection under the law — is preserved,” the April 2021 memo reads.

    The Biden administration then published a longer list of “protected areas,” including playgrounds, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, and political rallies, in October 2021.

    In January 2025, the Trump administration canceled the Biden limitations and issued a new directive that removed restrictions on immigration enforcement at courthouses.

    Now, the Trump administration has become “much more aggressive in undertaking federal immigration enforcement in a number of different sensitive locations, including courthouses,” Sellstrom said.

    ICE presence at courthouses has a “chilling effect,” Sellstrom said, because victims, defendants, witnesses, and family members may no longer feel safe showing up in court.

    “What we want to encourage in this country is that people follow the rule of law and feel like they have access to the judicial process,” Sellstrom said. “That’s what our country is built on. Equal justice for all.”

     

    Due Process

    On May 29, Bastos had an immigration bond hearing at which Judge Donald Ostrom considered whether to release him from ICE detention while his removal proceedings take place. Bastos was denied bond, his family member said.

    Bastos and his two children, who are U.S. citizens, last Christmas. (Photo courtesy Bastos family)

    That same day, ICE transferred Bastos from Plymouth to FCI Berlin, a medium-security federal prison in northern New Hampshire that is among a handful of federal prisons nationwide that house ICE detainees.

    “It is harrowing to imagine that people facing civil — not criminal — charges are being sent to a medium-security federal prison in the northernmost city in the entire state, isolated from their family, advocates, and potential legal services,” Gilles Bissonnette, legal director at the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a March 6 press release. “We have strong concerns about the conditions that will exist for hundreds of these immigrants and how they will be treated in this prison.”

    On June 24, Bastos’s new attorney for his DUI case, Rugo, appeared at a pretrial hearing in Orleans and told the court that Bastos was in ICE custody. Bastos was not at the hearing, and Judge Robert A. Welsh III submitted a writ of habeas corpus the next day requesting his presence at a rescheduled Aug. 26 pretrial hearing to be conducted online.

    “The rules provide that a hearing shall be conducted within 30 days, and trial shall be conducted within one year,” Rugo told the Independent. While pretrial hearings can be held online, Rugo said that the trial must be in person. “At the ultimate trial he has a right, under the Constitution, to confront his accusers,” he said.

    As for the possibility that Bastos could be deported before his trial date, Rugo said, “We don’t know where this is going. I don’t know what will happen. I haven’t had this experience until now.”

    Bastos also has an online “immigration merit hearing” scheduled for Sept. 5 at which Judge Natalie Smith of the Chelmsford Immigration Court will decide whether he will be deported or granted relief.

    Although the arrest of Bastos is the only one that Galibois had heard about that was in or near a Cape Cod courthouse this year, Bastos is not the only criminal defendant who has been taken before his trial was finished, Galibois said.

    “We’ve had several defendants who were picked up during the pendency of their case,” said Galibois.

    “In the cases where defendants have been picked up by ICE and deported, we have to go back to the victims and say we can’t proceed, we can’t seek justice on your behalf, and that’s incredibly frustrating,” Galibois said. “Every defendant is entitled to a trial by jury, and there’s due process that needs to be followed, so the removal of a defendant during the pendency of a case obviously denies them those rights.”

    For now, Bastos’s family is struggling to pay legal fees and care for his children, who ask to call their father every day. Sometimes, family members pretend to call Bastos, knowing that he is out of minutes, so that the children can leave him messages.

    Both children keep getting sick, his family member said, adding that sickness is the way they express their feelings: “Because with no explanation, their father has disappeared.”

    Paul Benson contributed reporting.

    IMMIGRATION RAIDS

    ICE: Only 2 of 38 Arrested on Islands Committed Serious Crimes

    Agency said it targeted ‘egregious offenders’ on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Thirty-six of the 38 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket more than three weeks ago have still not been identified by ICE. When asked for details by reporters, a spokesman for the agency provided some answers. Not all of them could be confirmed by fact-checking.

    FBI agents in sunglasses and masks arresting an HVAC technician on Martha’s Vineyard on May 27. (Photo courtesy Circuit Arts)

    ICE agents swept through the islands on the morning of May 27, conducting simultaneous raids resulting in the arrest of “around 40 illegal aliens,” according to an agency press release.

    Officers arrived unannounced, pulling people from their cars, homes, and job sites with little explanation. Over the next few days, fear gripped the area. Many in the immigrant community refused to leave their homes — missing work and relying on others for food — worried that they could be next.

    In the immediate aftermath of the raids, state officials called on ICE to be more transparent in its operations. Gov. Maura Healey slammed the agency in a press conference one day after the raids.

    “This is part of the problem that we’re seeing with ICE across the country and certainly here in Massachusetts,” Healey said. “People are being picked up, and we have no information about their circumstances. We need to get answers.”

    But ICE officials have remained tight-lipped. They put out a press release on June 2 saying the island raids resulted in the arrest of “one child sex predator and a member of a violent transnational gang.” The raids were part of Operation Patriot, a monthlong enforcement operation that was described as targeting “transnational organized crime, gangs and egregious illegal alien offenders,” according to the press release.

    An ICE official, who spoke on condition that he not be named, told the Independent on June 14 that only two of the 38 arrested on the islands had committed crimes against people.

     

    The 38 Arrested

    Asked for further details, the spokesperson on Sunday identified the two people who had committed the crimes specified in the June 2 press release as Luciano Pereira DeOliveira and Juan Humberto Vasquez-Villalta.

    DeOliveira has been charged with statutory rape of a child in Edgartown and with possession and dissemination of child pornography. He was indicted by a grand jury in December after pleading not guilty, and the charges are still pending.

    But the ICE spokesperson at first told the Independent that DeOliveira had been “convicted” of those crimes. Asked for documentation, the spokesperson acknowledged that the original statement was inaccurate.

    Vasquez-Villalta, according to the spokesperson, is a verified MS-13 gang member who has been convicted of assault. The Independent could not confirm Vasquez-Villalta’s involvement in MS-13 or find evidence of his having been convicted rather than charged with a crime.

    Information about the remaining 36 people arrested for immigration violations remains scarce. Their names and whereabouts have not been released by ICE. Ten had previously been ordered to leave the country, according to the ICE spokesperson, and two others had illegally re-entered the U.S. after having been deported.

    The number of people who have already been deported and the locations of those who are still being held in custody have similarly not been disclosed.

    The spokesperson confirmed that all have begun facing removal proceedings and they “will have a date with a DOJ immigration judge” but did not specify when or where those hearings would occur.

     

    Healey’s Rebuke

    Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order on June 10 seeking greater transparency from federal immigration officials. At a press conference that day, she said Boston would pursue more information about who ICE is arresting and why.

    Wu also took aim at the agency’s increased activity in the state, telling ICE officials to “take a time out.”

    “Reassess what you are doing and how you are doing it,” she said.

    But ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons defended the agency’s operations and accused Wu and Healey of siding with “lawlessness over law and order” in a June 15 statement.

    “Their prioritization of criminal aliens in communities across the state should speak volumes to their constituents,” Lyons wrote.

    In a sharp rebuke, Healey wrote that “ICE should be focusing on those with criminal backgrounds, like they said they were going to do.”

    Healey also denounced ICE’s detaining Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, an 18-year-old from Milford who was arrested while driving to volleyball practice. Da Silva has since been released and spoken extensively about his experience in a Burlington facility.

    “Nobody should be in here,” he said to reporters.

    An ICE spokesperson disputed allegations that Da Silva was mistreated. In a June 5 statement, the spokesperson wrote that people in custody are given “ample food, regular access to phones, showers, and legal representation as well as medical care when needed.”

    But one young woman detained in the May 27 raids was given nothing but a small bottle of water for 24 hours and pressured by agents to voluntarily deport herself, according to her employer.

     

    ‘Far From Home’

    The woman was arrested on her way to work after being pulled over by ICE officers. Her employer, who asked not to be named for fear or retaliation, said she entered the U.S. on parole from Brazil in 2003 and that she does not have a criminal record.

    During her arrest, the officers repeatedly referred to her by the wrong name, and she continuously tried to correct them, according to her employer.

    The woman, her employer said, was moved to a detention facility in Texas, where she is still being held — despite having been arrested in Massachusetts.

    Manfredo Felipe Castanon Perez, who was taken by ICE in the same raid, as reported by the Nantucket Current, is being held in a facility in Adams County, Miss. He was moved there from the ICE facility in Plymouth.

    In recent months, moving detainees arrested by ICE in the Northeast to facilities in the South has become an increasingly common practice.

    Immigration lawyer Ian Campbell said that while determining the motivations for such moves is difficult, decisions appear to be reflecting political opinions. “I would be unsurprised if they’re more likely to get a removal order in Southern states compared to blue states.”

    A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the movement of detainees to the South.

    Immigration judges in Texas and Louisiana are among the least likely to grant asylum applications. And from late January to late February this year — just after Trump took office — out-of-state ICE transfers were the highest they’ve been in at least 13 years, according to a Bloomberg investigation.

    Harvard Law School lecturer and former immigration lawyer Pedro Spivakovsky-Gonzalez said that the movement of detainees can detrimentally affect their chances of legal victory.

    “Detention itself is a very alienating experience, but if you’re far from home, it’s much more strained,” he said. “You can’t rely on the same type of support from your lawyer, your family, or others as you try to keep hope alive in your immigration case. It essentially has the effect of limiting meaningful access to justice for many of these litigants.”

    DISAPPEARING IMMIGRANTS

    ICE Targets Contractor Vans on Vineyard, Nantucket

    Federal agents have not released the names of 40 arrested people

    By

    This article includes excerpts from published reports in the Vineyard Gazette, the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, and the Falmouth Enterprise, reprinted with permission.

    A series of immigration operations in Massachusetts — including simultaneous mass arrests on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard on the morning of May 27 that removed 40 people from the islands — have set Cape Cod’s already anxious immigrant communities even more on edge.

    FBI agents in sunglasses and masks arresting an HVAC technician on Martha’s Vineyard on May 27. (Photo courtesy Circuit Arts)

    Contributing to the fear is that the tactics used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and related federal agencies have changed markedly in recent weeks. After widespread public education campaigns on the difference between administrative and judicial warrants, federal agents have in many cases stopped allowing people — including landlords, family members, and elected officials — to see the warrants they claim to have.

    The agents have also begun concealing their faces and names, giving only the name of the agency they work for. A week after the May 27 raids, the agencies had still not released the names of the 40 people they arrested.

    Perhaps most important, instead of seeking specific individuals with known criminal histories (and then also arresting other undocumented people they might find at that location), agents appear to be targeting contractor vans: stopping them on public roads and demanding that everyone inside prove their legal status.

    According to the Vineyard Gazette, these developments have led even legal immigrants to stay home from work, school, church, and medical appointments to avoid being taken away from their families.

    ‘Everyone Is at Risk’

    On May 27, the Vineyard Gazette’s Ethan Genter wrote the following:

    Reports of officers in unmarked vehicles making stops in down-Island towns spread across social media in the morning, and witnesses said they saw masked officers stopping vehicles to question their occupants….

    Thiago Alves, the owner of L&R Electrical Services, confirmed one of his workers was stopped by officers that were with the FBI and ICE….

    “My guy said they are stopping all the work vans,” Mr. Alves said. “It’s nothing against [us], it’s pretty much everyone….”

    One Island woman, who asked to be anonymous for fear of reprisal, was driving along State Road at about 7:30 a.m. when she saw officers arrest a man across the street from Vineyard Grocer near the cemetery.

    While on her way to work, she saw more stops at the Barnes Road rotary, including by officers wearing Drug Enforcement Administration garb.

    “They were just grabbing people out of their cars,” she said.

    Emily Moehnke was driving her daughter to the 7 a.m. ferry and also saw someone stopped near the Vineyard Haven cemetery. A little later in the morning, she saw an MV Mini Splits truck pulled over by officers on Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road….

    Immigration attorney and Chappaquiddick resident Rachel Self, who did not know the particulars of Tuesday’s stops, said she has seen a shift in ICE’s focus in the last four months.

    “While under the previous administration, people with serious criminal records might have been prioritized for arrest, now absolutely everyone is at risk of being detained,” she said. “There are no more priorities. ICE is going after the low-hanging fruit: people who show up to their immigration court hearings and check-in appointments, and people who have otherwise placed themselves on the radar by following the rules.”

    Cyr: ‘It’s Shameful’

    On May 29, Kaie Quigley of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror wrote:

    Federal agents were seen around town throughout Tuesday morning, pulling over vehicles and arresting their occupants. Several individuals in handcuffs were later transported off the island via Coast Guard cutter.

    It was not immediately clear whether the ICE activity was a targeted operation looking for offenders facing criminal charges or a general sweep seeking undocumented immigrants, although an alleged member of the notorious El Salvadoran MS-13 street gang and at least one alleged child sex offender were apprehended, according to a press release from ICE.

    “Many” of those arrested had criminal histories, according to the release. It is not yet clear how many of the people arrested did not have any criminal history. None of the arrested individuals were identified.

    The idea that non-criminals may have been detained is of concern to [Cape and Islands state Sen. Julian] Cyr. ICE activities on the island used to only target violent and egregious violators of the law.

    “That’s what should be happening, from a public safety perspective,” Cyr said.

    That appears to no longer be the case. Federal officials including President Donald Trump’s “Border Czar,” Tom Homan, have said that any undocumented immigrant in the country is eligible to be arrested and deported regardless of their criminal history.

    “We have a federal administration that has no respect for the rule of law, or due process,” Cyr said.

    “This sort of sweeping enforcement is designed to provoke and instill fear in immigrant communities. This is not just about law enforcement and keeping our community safe. It’s about a political agenda to provoke fear and demonize the very people who are essential to the fabric and workings of our community,” Cyr said….

    “It’s shameful to see the immigrants that literally make our islands function, particularly in these most busy summer months, be targeted, harassed and forcibly removed from their families and their work,” Cyr told the Inquirer and Mirror Wednesday. “The indiscriminate pulling over of multiple work vans, basically profiling vehicles in a drag net, to capture people who may be assumed to be immigrants, demanding documentation of their status.”

    Men in Masks

    On May 22, Michael J. Rausch of the Falmouth Enterprise wrote:

    Immigrants’ rights advocates have voiced outrage over the arrival of agents from the US Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Falmouth late last week. At least one individual was arrested by the federal agents who, the advocates say, did not present a warrant for the man’s detention or offer any reason for their actions.

    The arrest took place in a West Falmouth neighborhood last Friday, May 16, and an account was originally posted on Facebook.

    According to the report, a Brazilian house painter who was on his way to work was confronted by ICE agents, who demanded to see his passport; agents drove him back to his rental and, once inside, arrested him.

    When the owner of the home asked to see the agents’ badges and their warrant, she was ignored.

    The agents drove off with the man in custody….

    Jerry F. Lanson is with the group Falmouth Immigrant Rights Coalition. Mr. Lanson is also a writing consultant for Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and a professor emeritus at Emerson College in Boston, where he chaired the journalism faculty….

    Lanson said there are serious questions being raised about the manner in which arrests are being carried out by ICE agents “throughout the state and throughout the country.” He said that the tactics used during these incidents — men in masks, carrying weapons, clad in heavy vests — is being purposely deployed to incite fear….

    “It’s important for us to learn about it as citizens,” he said, “so we can understand the facts, and we can understand how we should react. That will take not only behind-the-scenes leadership — local, state, federal — but also on-the-scenes leadership. In other words, elected officials who are willing to speak out.”

    Hard on the Children

    On June 2, Ethan Genter of the Vineyard Gazette wrote:

    “On Tuesday, when this started, people went home,” said Vilmar Rodrigues, a Brazilian immigrant who now works as a tax preparer in Vineyard Haven. “On Wednesday, nobody went into the streets.”

    Eateries closed, appointments were cancelled, Brazilian churches decided to forgo services, and people hid out on farms.

    “Even the people who are documented here, with a green card, are very scared,” Mr. Rodrigues, who previously worked as an attorney in Sao Paulo, said….

    The climate of concern can be especially hard on the children of immigrants, even if they were born in the country and are American citizens, said Paula Reidbord, a Brazilian immigrant who moved to the U.S. more than 30 years ago and now works at MV Mediation.

    The Island schools have many children of immigrants — about 30 percent of public school students speak Portuguese at home.

    On May 30, Kaie Quigley of the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror wrote:

    None of the 40 people arrested on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard Tuesday have been identified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement….

    It remains unclear how many of the people arrested had no criminal history. It has also not been confirmed that all of the people arrested were in the country illegally….

    “Our hearts go out to the families of those detained, and our concern for the direction of American democracy is palpable. Particularly important are root principles of American democracy that assumes innocence until proven otherwise and habeas corpus, which assures the right of the accused to challenge their detention in a court of law. It is our hope that every person taken be afforded the right to defend themselves in a court of law, as quickly as possible,” Nantucket religious leaders Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor, Reverends Max Wolf and Althea Smith, Father John Murray, Reverend Carr Holland, Rev. Derek Worthington and Imam Abrar Qureshi said in a statement Friday.

    ENFORCEMENT

    As Immigration Raids Rise, Truro’s Leaders Look for Guidance

    Town officials want clarity on how staff should respond to ICE warrants

    By

    TRURO — With federal immigration enforcement raids on the rise across Massachusetts, officials in Truro are weighing how staff should respond if one should take place at a town building such as the school or library.

    While such scenarios are for now hypothetical, worries about how to protect staff prompted the select board’s then-vice chair, Bob Weinstein, to request a discussion of the town’s responsibilities at the board’s May 14 meeting.

    “He was concerned — and I think all of us are concerned — about immigration raids going on throughout the state and elsewhere,” said chair Sue Areson on May 14. The board was still “trying to determine what we as town officials and people in the community can do,” she said.

    (Weinstein had requested the item be added to the agenda before the town election on May 13, at which he was defeated by former select board member John Dundas. As a result, Dundas was a board member on May 14 while Weinstein was not.)

    The discussion came after a May 8 immigration raid in Worcester during which a group of protestors, including a city council member and a school board candidate, attempted to block ICE agents from arresting a woman after the federal agents refused to produce a warrant for her detention.

    The agents ultimately detained the woman, Rosane Ferreira De Oliveira, after which the Worcester police arrested her teenage daughter and the school board candidate, Ashley Spring, for disorderly conduct and other charges.

    On May 14, the day of Truro’s meeting, U.S. Attorney Leah Foley issued a warning to public officials in the state against interference with immigration enforcement, stating that “I will not stand idly by if any public official, public safety officer, organization, or private citizen acts in a manner that criminally obstructs or impedes ICE operations.”

     

    Police Dept. Rules

    Truro Police Chief Jamie Calise told the board that under state law, civil immigration detainers — ICE requests that local authorities hold someone for up to 48 hours past their scheduled release from custody — are not enforceable.

    Citing the 2017 Mass. Supreme Judicial Court decision Lunn v. Commonwealth, Calise said that honoring such detainers would constitute a false arrest. “That’s the law of the land, and that’s the direction officers have received,” Calise said.

    “We’re in the executive branch, we follow the law, and the law is that civil detainers are unenforceable,” said Calise. “Officers cannot go outside the scope of their authority — doing so would open them to personal and town liability.”

    Calise said that criminal detainers, which are more like traditional court-issued warrants, are treated differently and are enforceable like any other criminal warrant.

    Although local police are not obliged to assist ICE’s civil enforcement actions, “at the same time, you can’t interfere,” Calise said. “That would be considered obstruction.”

    Calise also told the board that Truro police do not ask about immigration status during stops or arrests, and that a five-year review of department records turned up no ICE detainers or arrest warrants in town.

    “This is not an issue that we’ve seen in Truro,” he said. “But with that said, we prepare for what we might have to do rather than what we do.”

     

    Library Guidance

    The question of staff obligations came to the fore at Truro’s public library in recent weeks, where staff, with the approval of the library trustees, offered guidance from the American Library Association (ALA) on how to handle law enforcement encounters, including those involving immigration authorities.

    “When they started to see raids in New Bedford and on Cape Cod, people asked what the library could do to inform the community about what their rights are,” Areson said.

    Though there have been no reported immigration raids in libraries so far, the ALA guidance encourages librarians to understand the distinction between judicial warrants and civil detainers and to know when they need to give access to public and nonpublic parts of the building.

    The advice has been updated several times in recent months in response to new enforcement patterns — although not yet in response to the Worcester raid, during which federal agents allegedly refused to produce any kind of warrant.

    The select board asked KP Law attorney Janelle Austin to review the ALA guidance. “This is a matter that communities across the Commonwealth are currently considering,” Austin told the board.

    The ALA is a nongovernmental body, and its guidance is not legally binding, Austin said, adding that “the Commonwealth has offered it as a resource, but it is not Commonwealth guidance.”

    Even so, many towns are using the recommendations as a baseline for internal procedures and staff training, Austin said. If federal agents were to show up at a municipal building, the response of town officials would depend on which documents the agents present, she said.

    Dundas worried about staff relying too heavily on such unofficial guidance. “I do not want any misunderstanding that could lead to obstruction, because that’s a problem for our employees,” he said. “I wouldn’t want them to be in a situation like that.”

    Austin and Areson agreed. “We don’t want to be in a position — given the federal law requirements and the increased Dept. of Justice enforcement — where any town official or employee is obstructing or hindering an operation,” Austin said. “There is certainly always the option to consult with the town manager’s office or legal counsel in the event that there are specific questions regarding documentation that has been presented.”

    If the idea is for staff to consult KP Law during an immigration raid — and try to avoid obstruction — that still raises the question of what staff should do while waiting for an answer. Library Director Chris Kaufmann told the Independent that her staff would not provide information to law enforcement without first contacting acting Town Manager Kelly Clark and KP Law.

    In response to a question from Areson, Clark said the town does not have a written policy for staff to follow.

    “I think setting up some procedures could be the most effective way to go,” said Clark. The select board writes policies, but since immigration enforcement is changing rapidly, “we don’t want to have to wait for a policy to follow a best practice,” she said.

    Clark asked if KP Law could provide written guidance developed in other Massachusetts towns.

    “We hope we don’t have to act on any of this,” Areson concluded.

    IMMIGRATION

    In Dennis Port, an ICE Raid Draws 20 Witnesses

    A 13-hour standoff included four agencies, a digital warrant, and a battering ram

    By

    DENNIS — At 5 a.m. on March 4, eight federal agents converged on a house in Dennis Port where Roberto Jonathan Tejada, a 40-year-old Salvadoran, was asleep with his family. Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations had come to arrest Tejada for re-entering the country illegally.

    They had brought only an administrative warrant, and when they knocked, Tejada’s partner denied them permission to enter her home without a signed warrant from a judge. A standoff began that lasted more than 12 hours.

    The family’s friends, schoolteachers, and immigrant-rights activists began to gather. By afternoon there were about 20 people at the scene, along with more than a dozen federal agents, according to Janet Emack and Anne Walsh of Brewster, volunteers with Building a Bigger Table, a committee of the Brewster Unitarian Universalist Church.

    It was one of the first ICE raids on Cape Cod since President Trump returned to office.

    Just before 6 p.m., Robert Piepiora, the supervising ICE agent, received a digital copy of a judicial arrest warrant signed by federal Magistrate Judge David H. Hennessy.

    Video footage obtained by the Independent shows Piepiora pressing his phone screen against a window to display the warrant to Tejada’s partner while ordering, “Open the door.” She took a photo of the phone and sent it to the people gathered outside but did not open the door.

    Fifteen seconds after Piepiora’s command, agents used a battering ram to break down the door and entered the house with weapons drawn. They knocked Tejada’s partner to the ground and handcuffed her; she was taken by ambulance to Cape Cod Hospital that evening with chest pain, neck pain, a minor head injury, and bruises across her body, for which she was treated and discharged that night.

    Tejada was in the attic, according to Piepiora’s testimony in federal district court on March 12. He had tied the attic door shut; when Tejada emerged, he tried to charge past six agents, Piepiora told the prosecutor.

    “It was a scrum,” Piepiora said. “It took two individuals on each arm to place him into handcuffs.”

    Emack had been on the phone with Tejada’s partner before the warrant arrived, explaining in Spanish the difference between administrative and judicial warrants. She said the agents had given Tejada’s partner almost no time to read the warrant before breaking down the door.

    Ken Amoriggi, legal director of immigration services for Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Fall River, told the Independent that judicial warrants are supposed to be on paper. “It’s pretty well settled that judicial warrants need to be presented in their original form,” he said. “That means the paper copy as signed by the judge.”

    When it comes to immigration enforcement, “the ‘who’ has changed, the ‘how’ has changed, and the ‘why’ has changed,” said Hemanth Gundavaram, director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Northeastern University.

    To Anne Walsh, the “where” was surprising, too. “We never dreamed that ICE would move on to Cape Cod,” she said.

    Piepiora confirmed under cross-examination on March 12 that Tejada first saw a physical copy of the judicial warrant around 8 p.m., when he was booked at the Plymouth County Jail — the only jail in the state that has a contract with ICE to hold people the agency is seeking to deport.

    Tejada’s Record

    According to court filings, ICE does not know when or where Tejada entered the U.S., but he applied for Temporary Protected Status, which is granted to people fleeing severe instability in their home countries, in November 2001, when he was not yet 18.

    Tejada received Temporary Protected Status in 2002 and held that status until June 2008, shortly before he pled guilty to three felonies in Nantucket.

    According to a series of reports in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, on Oct. 8, 2006 Tejada got into a dispute outside the Muse nightclub. A passenger in his car was punched through the car’s open window, and Tejada put his foot to the gas pedal and tried to strike the assailant with his vehicle. He missed, instead running over two bystanders and pinning a third between his vehicle and another car. Two victims suffered major head trauma and had to be taken by helicopter to Boston hospitals.

    Tejada fled the scene, turned himself in the next day, and eventually pled guilty to three counts of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He was sentenced to two and a half years in the Barnstable County Jail: two 364-day sentences and a six-month sentence, served consecutively.

    “The three sentences of each less than one year puts you in a better position” with immigration authorities, Nantucket Superior Court Judge Paul Chernoff said at Tejada’s sentencing. “That’s no guarantee the immigration authorities are going to act favorably, but I’m willing to try to put you in a position where it’s at least discretionary and not an automatic deportation.”

    Tejada was married to a U.S. citizen and they had a child together, his lawyer had told the court.

    ICE tried to deport Tejada after his release from jail, but he posted $10,000 bail and was contesting his deportation in court when he was arrested again in Boston in 2011.

    Tejada was charged in Suffolk County Criminal Court with the statutory rape of a child: the 15-year-old daughter of a family friend. After two days of deliberating, on Feb. 3, 2012 a jury acquitted him of three counts of rape of a child and one count of indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or older. ICE took Tejada into custody that day, and he was deported in May 2013.

    That deportation is the basis for his current charge in federal court: unlawful re-entry of a foreign alien, which is a felony.

    Back to Cape Cod

    Tejada’s wife filed for divorce shortly after he was deported, and Tejada started a new relationship in El Salvador, a friend of his family told the Independent. He had a daughter and ran a small shop there until gang violence, extortion, and death threats forced the family to flee, the friend said.

    Tejada crossed back into the U.S. about eight years ago, followed by his daughter and wife, who was pregnant with their second child. They settled in Dennis Port about six years ago, where Tejada painted houses, as he had done on Nantucket.

    Several people told the Independent that Tejada is a devoted father and hard worker. The agents who arrested him on March 4 repeatedly told the gathered friends, teachers, and activists that he was a rapist.

    “They kept saying that over and over,” Emack said. “ ‘Do you know who this is? This is a rapist.’ ”

    Four witnesses told the Independent that one of the agents told people gathered around the home that Tejada had raped his own children.

    Piepiora told Judge Hennessy that he had arrived at the stakeout in Dennis Port around 4 p.m. and that federal agents had “possibly” discussed Tejada’s criminal record with members of the public. “I did not personally hear that,” he told the judge.

    Rod MacDonald, an activist with the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, saw Tejada arrested in Dennis Port. “He was loudly protesting — I heard him say in English, ‘I did nothing. I did nothing,’ ” MacDonald said.

    The federal agents had also put Tejada’s partner’s brother — who has both developmental and physical disabilities and was scheduled to have spinal surgery this month — in handcuffs and into a van around 10 a.m. on the day of the stakeout. He was in the van without food, water, or a bathroom break for almost 10 hours, Piepiora confirmed, while the agents tried to persuade Tejada to turn himself in to secure the brother’s release.

    “We hadn’t targeted” the partner’s brother, Piepiora told Judge Hennessey on March 12. “Prior to the stop, we didn’t know anything about his status.” Piepiora said that ICE is now seeking to deport the brother.

    At the detention hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Tobin argued that Tejada was a flight risk, citing his resistance to arrest and his supporters in the community, whom he called potential “accomplices.” Public defender Julie-Ann Olsen countered that Tejada had followed legal procedure and presented evidence of his community ties, including 11 letters of support.

    Judge Hennessy acknowledged Tejada’s community ties but ruled against his release, calling him a “very significant flight risk.” Tejada remains in custody at Plymouth County Jail and stays in touch with his family by phone when possible.

    “It’s truly instructive to see how this plays out,” said Emack. “It’s important for people to know what’s really happening.”

    “It was unsettling, to say the least,” said former Dennis Selectman Wayne Bergeron, another activist with the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities. “These people are well known. They’re part of the neighborhood.

    “We are just trying to make sure that people know their rights,” Bergeron said. “Even if they’re not citizens or documented here, they still have rights in our country.”

    The Immigrant Legal Resource Center introduced “red cards” in 2007 to help people assert their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. (Courtesy Immigrant Legal Resource Center)

    IMMIGRATION

    Sheriff Says Her Staff Will Not Act As ICE Agents

    287(g) agreement won’t be revived, but ICE is notified when people with detainers are released

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Despite a Jan. 21 memo from the federal Dept. of Justice directing U.S. attorneys to crack down on state and local officials seen as uncooperative with immigration enforcement, Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley’s office will not participate in a 287(g) contract or any other voluntary agreement that deputizes her staff as immigration officers, she told the Independent last week.

    Buckley, who was elected sheriff in 2022, campaigned on ending the office’s 287(g) contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Those agreements authorize state and local law enforcement agencies to interrogate and lodge official detainers against people suspected of immigration violations and to access ICE databases to determine the immigration status of people in custody.

    The Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office was the last sheriff’s department in New England with an active 287(g) agreement when Buckley ended it on her first day in office in January 2023.

    “I have complete respect for the role that ICE plays,” Buckley said last week. “My decision to end the 287(g) agreement was not an indictment of the work that they do; it was related to the operational capacity of the sheriff’s office.

    “There’s nothing in the law right now that requires me to enter into a 287(g), and I don’t have any intention of doing that,” Buckley said, adding that she’s “focused on doing the work of the sheriff’s office and doing the work that keeps the people of Barnstable County safe.

    “I am committed to not voluntarily doing the work of ICE,” she went on — including “using personnel to determine someone’s immigration status and lodge ICE detainers.”

    Buckley said that an inauguration day executive order from President Trump on enforcing immigration laws and the Jan. 21 memo from acting Assistant Attorney General Emil Bove had clearly changed the federal government’s approach to immigration and deportation.

    Bove’s memo said that the Dept. of Justice would investigate state and local actors “resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration related commands and requests” for potential prosecution.

    “I’ve been in office for two years, and no one has called me to have conversations about anything related to immigration, because it wasn’t a priority of the previous federal administration,” Buckley said. “There wasn’t much contact with ICE. That has changed.”

    Even without a 287(g) agreement, communication between the sheriff’s department and ICE still exists, Buckley said.

    When inmates are booked into the county jail, the sheriff’s office is notified if ICE has issued a detainer for that person, Buckley said. The current policy of the sheriff’s office is to notify ICE when that person is ready to be released.

    That notification would take place whether ICE had proactively asked about that person’s release date or not, Buckley said. “We are doing it in both circumstances,” she said. “We did that before the 287(g) agreement existed, and we will continue to share appropriate law enforcement information with ICE.”

    After speaking with reporters last week, the sheriff’s office sent a clarifying statement to the Independent. “We will, to remove any ambiguity concerning the legal responsibilities of our officers, respond to DHS/ICE informational investigative inquiries in the same manner as we do for all law enforcement partners, including providing DHS/ICE with information concerning an already incarcerated individual’s scheduled release from BCSO custody,” the statement said.

    “We communicate with ICE when we have an ICE detainer on file when individuals are leaving our facility. That is all they are requesting from us,” Buckley wrote.

    Buckley also said that a very small number of people in the jail are subject to detainers — as of Feb. 3, five of the 270 people imprisoned there.

    She said the national conversation about immigration and sheriffs’ departments did not comport with the facts.

    “People are spreading misinformation to elevate people’s fears and create levels of attention and concern around these efforts, which aren’t actually even happening,” said Buckley. On Friday, Feb. 7, she had received three phone calls about ICE raids that were allegedly occurring in various parts of Cape Cod, she said — none of which turned out to be real events.

    It was the first time she had ever received phone calls of that nature from worried constituents, she said.

     

    Database Access

    By ending the 287(g) agreement, the sheriff’s office lost access to the ICE databases that would allow it to proactively check the immigration status of people in its custody besides the few who have detainers.

    That is not unusual — many law enforcement agencies have said they can do their jobs better if they aren’t also trying to enforce federal immigration laws.

    “Historically, law enforcement have been the strongest proponents of disaggregating local policing from immigration enforcement,” said Dina Haynes, the director of Yale Law School’s human rights center and co-author of Understanding “Sanctuary Cities.”

    Local police have supported that separation of responsibilities so as not to deter victims or witnesses of crimes from coming forward, Haynes said, citing a push by police in Virginia to protect witnesses of the 2002 sniper attacks from immigration inquiries.

    It is not only immigrants themselves who might be deterred from speaking to local police but also their relatives, Haynes said. Mixed-status families are common, and “many more people than we realize are making these calculations” about whether it is safe to call on law enforcement, she said.

    According to Buckley, since the end of the 287(g) agreement, the Barnstable Sheriff’s office is notified of the immigration status of a person in custody only if they have an ICE detainer — a specific kind of administrative order.

    To issue a detainer, ICE must demonstrate “probable cause” that someone is “removable,” said Leah Hastings, an attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts who specializes in issues facing immigrants. “ICE gets that wrong sometimes,” she said.

    Detainers are issued by an immigration agent, not a judge, and they are not a warrant, Hastings said. “Even for immigration advocates, that’s a multi-step process to figure out whether someone is likely removable or not.”

    Many people who have entered the country illegally or have overstayed their legal visa do not have ICE detainers on file.

    “Notifying ICE about people being released isn’t a new practice,” Hastings said. “There’s just more of a political appetite in this new administration for putting pressure on state and local law enforcement to act beyond the scope of their responsibilities when it comes to immigration enforcement.”

    CLIMATE OF FEAR

    Schools React to Federal Moves on Immigration

    Catholic Charities and Provincetown businesses are also watching new rules

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — In response to the Trump administration’s decision on Jan. 21 to lift restrictions barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers from making arrests in “sensitive locations” including schools, churches, and health clinics, schools across the Outer Cape moved to reassure students and parents about their privacy and safety policies.

    Following guidance from Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell to school leaders on Jan. 24, the superintendents of the Provincetown, Truro, and Nauset Regional school districts all sent similar letters to parents.

    Families needed to know what he would do to protect their children, said Provincetown Schools Supt. Gerry Goyette, adding that he tried to put himself in parents’ shoes.

    “If I were a parent and a migrant and didn’t have papers, and I dropped my kids off at school, what would I do?” said Goyette. “What would I want Gerry to do?”

    The letter that Goyette issued on Jan. 27 outlined the schools’ policies if ICE agents were to come looking for students. Staff must notify him and the student’s parent or guardian immediately to allow time to consult the district’s legal counsel. ICE agents must have a criminal warrant signed by a state or federal judge to have contact with students, the letter says.

    The letter also describes the school’s obligations under the Family Education and Privacy Rights Act of 1974, which prohibits sharing student information with any third party, including ICE, without parental consent.

    The letters from Truro Central School and the Nauset Regional School District were similar. They all affirmed the districts’ commitment to a “welcoming and inclusive environment for all students and families,” echoing the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which guarantees a child’s right to public education regardless of immigration status.

    “The intent of the letter was to alleviate any fears from families who were concerned about immigration officials coming into the schools and taking kids,” said Truro School Supt. Stephanie Costigan, who sent her letter out on Jan. 29.

    “There was a lot of angst,” added Goyette. “The chatter among some of the superintendents was not only are parents nervous, they’re keeping their kids at home.”

    Ensuring Student Safety

    Provincetown and Truro schools already had transportation policies in place meant to ensure that students are not left unattended. Bus drivers have emergency contact information for each student and are instructed to bring them back to school if no one can meet them at their stop. From there, school staff are instructed to locate a trusted adult.

    “That’s just normal operating procedure,” said Goyette. “We don’t drop kids off to an empty bus stop.”

    Goyette, Costigan, and Nauset Schools Supt. Brooke Clenchy urged families to update emergency contact information and designate alternative caretakers. Their letters also referred to Attorney General Campbell’s emergency planning guide for families, which is published online in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole and which outlines legal options for child custody in the event of a parent’s detention or deportation.

    Ken Amoriggi, legal director of the immigration department at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fall River, told the Independent that proactive planning is essential, including power-of-attorney arrangements. It’s also important for children to have passports in case they need to travel outside the country to reunite with family members.

    “These are steps that families should be taking now to alleviate some of the real and tragic consequences of detentions and deportations,” said Amoriggi.

    Counselors and other school staff are also alert to the new pressure on families, Goyette said. Schools do not track students’ immigration status or that of their families, he said, but the Outer Cape is an immigrant-dependent community.

    “We’re a country of migrants,” said Goyette. “In my lifetime, I never thought I’d have to deal with this. But here we are.”

    Businesses on Alert

    School administrators and parents are not the only ones trying to learn more about immigration law and make plans. On Feb. 4, the Provincetown Business Guild held an information session for business owners led by attorney and former board of health chair Steve Katsurinis, with Assistant Town Manager Dan Riviello and Deputy Police Chief Greg Hennick also on hand to answer questions.

    “We wanted to educate people in neutral terms about the law currently,” said Katsurinis. “It was focused on why ICE might come to your business, what authority they have on your property, and what rights and responsibilities you have as a business owner.”

    Katsurinis said the Fourth Amendment guarantees protection from unlawful search and seizure for all people in the U.S. regardless of citizenship. He also described the distinction between public and private spaces within a business.

    “If the space is one where the public goes, then it’s public,” said Katsurinis, while “if it’s a space where the public is excluded regularly, then it’s private.”

    A restaurant’s dining room is a public accommodation, for example, but its kitchen and offices are not.

    “People just want to be informed,” said PBG Executive Director Rachael Brister. “Their level of concern brought them to this meeting.”

    “We talked about the current state of the law,” Katsurinis said. “If things change — either in the law or in the way the executive branch is interpreting the law — then we probably need to come back and reconvene.”

    Amoriggi, who said he tracks executive actions and state and federal ordinances daily, also said that staying informed is key.

    “Some of the threats are more perceived than real,” he said. “We haven’t seen any evidence yet of mass raids in churches, for example.”

    There will also be continuing judicial review, including “court decisions from as high up as the Supreme Court,” Amoriggi said.

    Executive orders are not actual laws, he added. “Presumably, or hopefully, there are going to be actual laws passed that will tailor how the rest of this goes.”

    IMMIGRANTS

    Legislation to Abolish 287(g) Agreements Gains Support

    The Safe Communities Act is a progressive priority, but ‘politics’ gets in the way

    By

    Barnstable County’s detention agreement with the Dept. of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arm won’t expire. It’s in place permanently until either ICE or Barnstable Sheriff James Cummings takes steps to terminate it.

    That’s true even though during the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Joe Biden pledged to end all 287(g) agreements. The Biden administration has yet to take action on that pledge.

    But state advocates and legislators are taking the case against 287(g)s into their own hands. Two bills on Beacon Hill this session attempt to address the three 287(g) agreements in the state. Two are with Barnstable and Plymouth counties; one is with the Mass. Dept. of Corrections. There are no other 287(g) agreements in New England.

    A 287(g) contract allows local law enforcement to receive training from ICE and then enforce federal immigration law in their community, in many cases effectively beginning the deportation process for ICE.

    While advocates for the 287(g)s say they reduce the number of criminals at large, those opposed question the reasoning behind the agreements. Between October 2009 and February 2020, more than half of the foreign nationals deported from Massachusetts had no criminal conviction, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

    One bill on Beacon Hill, the Safe Communities Act, “would ban those agreements outright,” said Amy Grunder, director of legislative affairs for the Mass. Immigration and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition. The bill doesn’t change anything about policing, she said, it just stops “those extra things” local law enforcement does for ICE.

    The second bill would end the use of state and local money for 287(g) agreements, “which means, basically, that they go away,” said Grunder. That’s because the 287(g) statute prohibits the use of federal money. Per the agreement, Barnstable County covers any costs associated with processing or holding inmates, or carrying out any of the other duties folded within the 287(g).

    Although the Safe Communities Act has repeatedly died in the state legislature and been refiled the following year, “every time it fares better,” said Grunder. “Generally, what we’ve been told is that it takes 8 to 10 years for a bill to get passed.”

    Many of the 287(g) contracts have been around for a long time, Grunder said. The focus of the Trump administration on immigration meant that more people paid attention to the work of immigration advocates than had paid attention during Democratic administrations. That meant that, over the last few sessions, the bill got further along each time. It helped when the Mass. Medical Society, along with some other organizations, endorsed the bill.

    The Safe Communities Act gathered extra support when it was identified by the Mass. Progressive Caucus as one of the four pieces of priority legislation for this year.

    The caucus wants Massachusetts to be a “welcoming state” for immigrants, said caucus chair Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier. Although the bill was nominated by caucus members as one that’s progressive and has a shot at passing, some members are concerned that it’s politically fraught, said Rep. Farley-Bouvier. “The issue is politics,” she said.

    The next step for the bill is for it to be “referred out,” meaning it goes to the House Ways and Means Committee, said Grunder. From there, it will go to the floor for a vote only if it’s expected to pass. “We’re trying to get our numbers up” to the necessary 107,” said Grunder, and “we’re cautiously optimistic — it does seem that there’s openness to the bill on behalf of the legislature.”

    Rep. Sarah Peake of Provincetown, a member of the House speaker’s leadership team, did not return calls asking whether she will support the bill.

    Tom Ryan is chair of the Migrant and Refugee Committee of the Cape Cod Council of Churches, which brings together three key groups concerned with immigration rights: lawyers, advocates, and leaders of the immigrant communities themselves.

    Ryan said he understands politics can lead to change. But he’s more interested in the way morality works. “The spirit of justice has everything to do with equity and is bound up with morality,” Ryan said. “Justice is that right-ordering of human relations.”

    COLD CASE

    Sheriff Cummings’s Contract With ICE Is Renewed Again

    Data show the program affects Jamaican men disproportionately

    By

    Last summer, at the end of the fiscal year, Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings’s detention agreement with the Dept. of Homeland Security lapsed. He renewed it.

    But this year, the contract bringing the county into DHS’s 287(g) program — which allows for selected officers to act as ICE agents — carried through June 30 without any effort on the sheriff’s part.

    In fact, that agreement could now continue indefinitely because of changes made by the Trump administration in October 2020. Now, the 287(g) contracts end only if they are terminated by either the county or DHS.

    Barnstable County’s 287(g) dates to 2017, when Cummings became one of just three Mass. sheriffs to enter into this type of agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an arm of DHS. (The other counties with ICE agreements at the time were Bristol and Plymouth, though Bristol’s was terminated in May 2021 after allegations of mistreatment of detainees at the jail in Dartmouth.)

    The contract enables local authorities to enforce federal immigration law by interviewing people about their immigration status, checking DHS databases, entering data into ICE’s database, making recommendations for detention, and detaining individuals so as to place them in ICE custody.

    At the sheriff’s jail, the work of those deputized “is mostly key punches,” said Cummings in a phone interview on July 13. Four members of his staff have been trained by ICE, and their work involving the 287(g) “squeezes into their regular tour of duty,” he said.

    The four deputies enter information into ICE’s database during normal workdays, he said — no overtime is required, he added. The county’s 287(g) is the so-called Jail Enforcement version of the program.

    The effect of that deskwork, said Cummings, has to do with public safety. “I don’t want to be the one to release somebody from the correctional facility here,” he said, “and have them go back to Provincetown and kill somebody or commit a serious crime.”

    The real effects of the program are unclear. Some say that 287(g) programs have not resulted in an increase in the number of deportations by ICE. “To my sadness, there were many, many deportations during the time of President Obama,” said Tom Ryan of Eastham, chair of the Migrant and Refugee Committee of the Cape Cod Council of Churches. “And there were many, many deportations during the time of President Trump.”

    Ryan said he hasn’t observed an increase in deportations since the Barnstable County 287(g) was signed.

    Nationwide statistics bear that out. Although 287(g) agreements still exist in 148 jurisdictions, only 6 percent of ICE arrests in fiscal 2018 came from 287(g) jails, according to the TRAC Immigration Report, a research initiative at Syracuse University.

    That low number reflects the fact that a 287(g) doesn’t give ICE access to information it wouldn’t otherwise have, explained Amy Grunder, director of legislative affairs for the Mass. Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition. When a person is arrested, Grunder said, the suspect’s fingerprints are entered in a database to which ICE and the FBI both have access. The 287(g) is, she said, “duplicating what the federal government already does.”

    Sheriff Cummings reports the demographics of and charges against those his office refers to ICE each month. That information, posted on the sheriff’s website, shows Barnstable County’s 287(g) disproportionately affects Jamaican men, according to a recent analysis by the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, which advocates for immigrants’ rights.

    The analysis, which was obtained by the Independent, shows that of 262 people the sheriff’s website listed as reported to ICE from January 2018 through May 2021, 117 were from Africa and the Caribbean; 79 from Mexico, Central America, and South America; 46 from Europe; 16 from Asia; and 3 from Canada.

    The largest group of immigrants on Cape Cod is Brazilian — by a large margin, said Ryan, whose estimates of different groups’ populations here are based on his work with local churches. “It’s an open question” why Jamaicans are the most affected, said Ryan.

    Cummings said the information about individuals posted on his site is mislabeled “Barnstable County Inmates Referred to ICE.” Instead, he said, what is posted there is information about any foreign-born person sent to his department by the courts, and it’s made public to demonstrate that the 287(g) creates only minimal work for his department.

    The sheriff’s website states that, under the 287(g), the “following Barnstable County Correctional Facility inmates have been identified as likely residing in the United States without authorization and the BCSO has provided information on these individuals to ICE for further action.”

    That’s not correct, said Cummings. “Just because they’re on that website doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re reported to ICE,” he said. “Some of those folks are actually citizens.”

    With the former administration’s rule change, the future of Barnstable County’s 287(g) is dependent on Sheriff Cummings and ICE continuing to engage with each other — but not entirely so. The Mass. legislature could intervene. One bill on the docket for this session is the Safe Communities Act, which has been filed unsuccessfully in the past. This year, advocates are “cautiously optimistic,” said Grunder of the MIRA Coalition.

    The bill, she said, would not change policing, but it would stop “those extra things” the sheriff’s officers are doing for ICE. This time, Grunder added, “It does seem that there’s openness to the bill on behalf of the legislature.”

    Massachusetts is the only state in New England engaged in 287(g) contracts. One is between ICE and the Mass. Dept. of Corrections. Only four other departments of corrections in the country are engaged in 287(g)s: those in Florida, Georgia, Alaska, and Arizona.

    IMMIGRATION

    Efforts Mount to End Sheriff’s Deal With ICE

    Lawmakers and civil rights lawyers work to scrap 287(g) agreements

    By

    Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings continues to defend his partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as political and legal moves to overturn the controversial agreements, which deputize local officers as federal agents, gather momentum at the state and national levels.

    Within days of taking office in 2017, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order to build up the partnerships, known as 287(g) agreements, as part of his high-profile crackdown on undocumented immigrants. As a result, the number of participating sheriffs more than doubled. Cummings, one of only three sheriffs in New England to sign on, joined in late 2017.

    The decision was Cummings’s alone to make. County sheriffs are elected to six-year terms, and they have the power to make unilateral decisions. They answer only to the public at the ballot box. Cummings is currently serving his fourth six-year term, which goes through 2022.

    In December, the Lawyers for Civil Rights-Boston filed suit in the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court against the Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph MacDonald, who also signed a 287(g). It asks the court to nullify the agreements that allow the sheriff’s office to arrest, interrogate, and transport undocumented immigrants, arguing sheriffs don’t have the authority under state law to enforce federal immigration law.

    Sheriffs and their staff are state employees, the lawyers argue, and should not be spending money enforcing federal law.

    The suit was filed on behalf of 28 taxpayers including Juan Cofield, president of the New England chapter of the NAACP. In a statement, Cofield said, “It’s time we stand together as a Commonwealth to protect our communities and to stop illegal expenditures grounded in racism, bigotry, and xenophobia.”

    “If we win in court, the ruling would apply to all the sheriffs in the state,” said Oren Nimni, a staff attorney for Lawyers for Civil Rights.

    Legislation Awaits Action

    The state legislature could eliminate the 287(g) agreements under the proposed Safe Communities Act, which it failed to act on by the January close of the last legislative session. It was recently refiled for the current session, with state Rep. Sarah Peake of Provincetown as one of its co-sponsors.

    “I strongly believed state resources should not be used to subsidize federal programs,” Peake said in an email. “More importantly, everyone in this nation is entitled to all of the rights and protections of the U.S. Constitution. This includes due process and the presumption of innocence. ICE detainees are afforded neither.”

    While President Joe Biden has expressed interest in improving conditions for immigrants, Laura Rotolo, staff counsel for immigrant rights for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mass., said the state doesn’t have to wait for federal action.

    The Safe Communities Act would end the agreements,” Rotolo said. “Last session it was delayed due to Covid. This is the year to pass it.”

    Concern about the 287(g) program is nationwide. Mass. Democrats Ayanna Pressley, James P. McGovern, and Seth Moulton were among 60 U.S. House members who sent a letter to the newly appointed secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security in February calling for the termination of the program and the use of ICE detainers.

    “Law enforcement leaders across the country have urged that immigration enforcement should be solely a federal responsibility, particularly in light of strained local budgets and resources,” the House members said. “It is time to discard these broken programs of yesteryear.”

    What Is a 287(g)?

    The 287(g) program became law as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It authorizes the director of ICE to enter agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies that permit designated officers to perform limited immigration law enforcement functions.

    Four such officers are deputized in the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Dept. Under the program, officers undergo four weeks of training at the ICE academy in Charleston, S.C. As deputies, they can interrogate prisoners in their jails about their immigration status, scour Dept. of Homeland Security databases for information on those inmates, hold a suspected person for 48 hours after the scheduled time of release from jail so that ICE can assume custody, enter data on an individual into the DHS database, and issue a document called a Notice to Appear that starts the deportation process.

    Even those who have been found not guilty, or who have served their sentences and are eligible for release, can be turned over to federal authorities under the program.

    County budgets pick up personnel expenses, including salaries and benefits, and overtime.

    Proponents like Cummings argue that the program enhances public safety. Over the last three years, Cummings’s mantra has been that the program is important because it can help prevent the release of a dangerous criminal back into the community.

    But at a public meeting on the 287(g) program in Bourne in February 2019, Acting ICE Field Office Director Todd Lyons contradicted many of Cummings’s assertions about the program, and told a reporter who asked how the enforcement of federal immigration laws in Barnstable County was different after the signing of the 287(g) agreement, “It’s the same.”

    “We have been advocating for elimination of these contracts for a very long time,” said ACLU attorney Rotolo. “It’s time for us to join other states in New England and stop these agreements.”

    Pushback

    When Sheriff Cummings applied for the ICE partnership, he was supported by the Barnstable County commissioners. But Brian O’Malley, Provincetown’s member of the county Assembly of Delegates, proposed a resolution opposing the sheriff’s application. It failed.

    “Clearly, this was a federal incursion that was not invited,” O’Malley said this week. “My perspective was there had been no public input whatsoever. We knew we couldn’t stop it.  My point in the resolution was to allow for a discussion.”

    O’Malley said most of the people who attended hearings on the subject were opposed to the sheriff’s application.

    The sheriff’s agreement makes a difference on the Cape, which relies heavily on foreign workers during the tourist season, O’Malley said. “This is the kind of thing that will cause people to keep clear.”

    Being undocumented is not a criminal offense. It’s a civil infraction. Under the 287(g) agreement, “the sheriff is allowed to hang onto somebody after their legal troubles are resolved,” O’Malley said. “What happens is they are handed over to a process that is administrative, not judicial.”

    In an email, Cummings said the pushback against his participation in the 287(g) program “is from a small group…. I have received strong support for the 287(g) program even from people who would not say anything publicly who have whispered to me ‘You’re doing the right thing.’ Unfortunately what should be a public safety issue has become a political issue.”

    Mark Gabriele, former chair of the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, said the fact that only three of the state’s 14 sheriffs signed on with ICE “illustrates it’s not necessary.”

    A Supreme Judicial Court judge ruled in 2017 that it was illegal for state and local authorities to hold someone beyond the time they would have been entitled to be released solely on the basis of a federal civil immigration detainer. But recent changes to 287(g) agreements offer a work-around.

    The ability to hold an individual is achieved through a federal immigration warrant and arrest, which can be done by the ICE-trained deputies in local law enforcement agencies.

    “The agreement with the new language is what our sheriff signed in March 2020,” Gabriele said. “In the contract is the definition of what federal custody is. The contract stipulates that if an inmate is in custody of a 287(g) officer, that’s federal custody.”

    Opponents say the program serves only to divide communities and generate fear among immigrant populations.

    State Sen. Julian Cyr of Truro pointed out that most of the towns in his district have designated themselves as sanctuaries, resolving not to use local law enforcement resources to check or report immigration status of those they encounter during a routine interaction.

    “Local law enforcement, including the sheriff, should be in the business of building trust in the communities they serve and protect,” said Cyr, “not deputizing for enforcement of failed immigration policy.”

    IMMIGRATION & COVID

    Immigrants at Risk, yet Left Behind

    Undocumented communities find little support in a time of crisis

    By

    The Mass. Dept. of Public Health reports that people of color are disproportionately affected by coronavirus, with Latinos and blacks accounting for 23 and 18 percent of Covid-19 cases despite making up only 12 and 9 percent of the state’s population respectively.

    While detailed statistics for Barnstable County are not yet available, it’s clear that immigrants and undocumented people are especially vulnerable. With less access to safety nets and working essential jobs that are impossible to do remotely, immigrants are generally at higher risk of becoming infected, according to the Washington Post.

    Rallying support for immigrants is proving difficult. Driving Families Forward is a coalition working to pass state legislation to allow anyone, regardless of immigration status, to apply for a driver’s license. The Outer Cape’s Sen. Julian Cyr and Rep. Sarah Peake are both sponsors. But not much is happening now.

    Many immigrants without drivers’ licenses opt to take public transit or carpool, potentially putting themselves at risk. Marginalized communities are receiving too little attention during the pandemic, said Natalicia Tracey, co-chair of the coalition. “We’re concerned that the most vulnerable communities are being made the last priority again.”

    In overcrowded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, maintaining social distancing is impossible. As Vox recently reported, detainees at the Bristol County ICE facility claimed they were put in solitary confinement without medical treatment after exhibiting symptoms and lacked basic essentials like soap and toilet paper.

    Dr. Roger Shapiro, an infectious disease researcher at Harvard Medical School, said that decreasing the number of people in ICE detention centers is critical to limiting the spread of the virus.

    “We need to keep people safe first and foremost,” Shapiro told the Independent. “Detention centers are places where the virus could spread quite easily.” An outbreak in an ICE detention facility would spread through officers, affecting public health beyond the facility.

    Despite these concerns, the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office is still referring detainees to ICE.

    Special Sheriff Jeff Perry told the Independent that the county’s relationship with ICE has remained unchanged since the pandemic began: officers continue to refer inmates without legal status to ICE.

    The sheriff’s office referred 102 people to ICE in 2019, up from 79 in 2018. A total of just 15 were referred to ICE in all of 2016 and 2017, before Sherriff James Cummings secured one of the few 287(g) ICE collaboration agreements in New England.

    © 2025 The Provincetown Independent, all rights reserved.

    terms of service