Advocates and lawyers that work with Vermont’s immigrant communities say President Donald Trump’s executive actions cracking down on immigration and an uptick in anti-immigrant rhetoric are fueling “fear mongering” and sparking rumors of increased federal immigration enforcement across the state.
“It's a scary time,” said Jill Martin Diaz, the executive director of Vermont Asylum Assistance Project, or VAAP. “My inbox is absolutely inundated with questions from people across all sectors, health care, education, early childhood, retail, production, manufacturing: ‘We need information. We need information, what do we do if ICE shows up?’”
But receiving clear information about actions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the wider Department of Homeland Security is a long-standing challenge, according to immigration lawyers.
“While we should be able to know how federal agencies are operating within state borders, in practice, it's often very difficult to know,” said James Lyall with the ACLU of Vermont. “It does, in fact, deny members of the public – all of us – information about what they're doing in our name.”
In response to this information gap, VAAP, which provides legal services for noncitizens, recently launched an online form where people can submit immigration enforcement they witness, including raids and arrests. Martin Diaz said it’s funded with a temporary grant from the Vermont Refugee Office for statewide asylum coordination.
“I think it's within our mandate to help be part of the solution, in coordinating data collection,” they said. “I hope to incorporate what I'm learning into talking points that we reiterate in our community, education in our systems, advocacy work … and to help let communities know what to look for.”
So far, Martin Diaz said they have confirmed at least one arrest by ICE at a store in Williston last week, through anonymous submissions to the portal that were corroborated by “community partners.”
Vermont Public has not been able to independently verify the incident with ICE, local law enforcement or other on-the-record sources.
Immigration enforcement is not new in the Green Mountain State. Deportations in Vermont reached a record high in 2023 under the Biden administration, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. (That doesn’t include data from 2024 – and the database has gone offline while it moves to a different domain, according to the TRAC website.)
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Generally speaking, one-off arrests that take place outside of ICE offices — like the one VAAP reported in Williston last week — predate Trump, said Brett Stokes, an immigration lawyer with the Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“What is new, or I would say, at the very least, much less common, is the rhetoric around the enforcement actions that is occurring now,” Stokes said.
Almost immediately after he entered office last week, Trump signed executive orders aimed at cracking down on immigration, including a plan to end birthright citizenship for people in the U.S. temporarily or without legal status. In the last week and a half, his border czar has threatened raids in cities like Chicago. Rumors about additional ICE raids and surveillance have been swirling in the days since Trump has taken office, in Vermont and beyond. ICE has begun posting what it says are daily arrest totals on its Instagram.
And last week, just the sight of immigration authorities was sparking fears. A procession of hundreds of law enforcement vehicles honoring slain U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland scared people, according to Marelyn Saam, a Spanish-language interpreter with the Vermont Language Justice Project. That project provides interpretation and translation services to Vermont migrant, immigrant and refugee communities.
Saam is in touch with immigrants without legal status.
“Several of my clients were so freaked out, they hid all weekend,” they said.
Officials respond
Attorney General Charity Clark’s office has joined 19 other states and jurisdictions challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in court. The order was temporarily blocked by a federal judge following a separate lawsuit from different states.
Clark also issued a statement with other states’ attorneys general rejecting the idea that state and local law enforcement could be dispatched to help enforce what she referred to as the president’s “mass deportation agenda.”
“I know these times feel chaotic and unnerving,” Clark said at a press conference Thursday. “I and attorneys general across this country have been preparing for months for this. I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what I am doing.”
Gov. Phil Scott’s office, in an email statement earlier this week, said it wasn’t aware of any arrests and that it planned to keep “the best interests of everyone living and working in Vermont at the forefront.”
“It’s important to distinguish between violent criminals who have illegally entered the country from those who are law-abiding with families and jobs and are contributing members of our society and communities – they are not the people who are contributing to public safety concerns,” the statement read.
Earlier this month, State Treasurer Mike Pieciak convened a task force to parse through the federal transition and identified immigration as a priority focus, “given Vermont’s tight labor market and the important contributions new Americans make in many sectors of the state’s economy,” according to an email sent to reporters Thursday.
That group is sponsoring a webinar next week to help Vermont employers know what steps to take “to prepare for a worksite visit” from ICE.
Vermont Public’s Bob Kinzel contributed reporting.
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