An organization that offers legal assistance to asylum-seekers in Vermont has created an online form for people to report immigration enforcement activity they see, or suspect they’ve seen, in and around the state — an effort, advocates said this week, to create a more comprehensive picture of how federal officials are operating across the area.
The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project’s “ICE tracker” form, so-called using the acronym for U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement, has been up on the nonprofit’s website for the past two weeks, aligned with the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Trump has taken sweeping steps to restrict immigration to the U.S. as well as cut off resources for refugees, including in Vermont, who’ve settled in the country legally. The president’s actions have sparked federal lawsuits and drawn condemnation from Vermont’s top Democratic leaders at the federal and state level in recent days.
At the same time, advocates in the state say they have received numerous reports that, together, show there’s been a corresponding uptick in local immigration enforcement actions, said Jill Martin Diaz, the asylum assistance project’s executive director. They cautioned that the reports were largely anecdotal, though, and they hadn’t confirmed many details.
Still, Martin Diaz said that Trump’s actions, including executive orders he has signed and comments he’s made, have sparked widespread uncertainty among Vermont’s immigrant population, including those whose immigration cases — such as for an asylum claim — are currently being adjudicated.
“Just the fear mongering alone is, actually, the really cost effective way of carrying out your mission,” they said. “Because everyone’s going to be scared into the shadows.”
Another attorney providing immigration law aid in the state, Brett Stokes, said he had also heard similar reports, calling the last two weeks “pretty alarming.” Stokes is the director of Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Center for Justice Reform Clinic.
“In Vermont there was, until pretty recently, almost no field immigration law enforcement activity, really, at all — except for maybe up closer to the border,” he said. “We’re now seeing — in the last couple of weeks, already — a significant rise in Immigration and Customs Enforcement being out in the field, as you would imagine a police officer would be, which was pretty rare here.”
At a Wednesday meeting of a task force led by state Treasurer Mike Pieciak that’s been reviewing the downstream impacts of Trump’s changes to federal policy, Shabnam Nolan — executive director of King Street Center, a social services organization for youth in Burlington — said she, too, has been hearing the same kind of reports.
The “ICE tracker” form had received five submissions as of Thursday afternoon, Martin Diaz said, though noted advocates had received numerous additional tips in recent days about potential immigration enforcement actions in emails and text messages.
Martin Diaz said their organization was able to confirm that a person was taken into custody by immigration officials at a Williston shopping center in recent days. ICE did not respond to VTDigger’s request on Friday seeking verification of that incident, or to a question about whether the agency has stepped up its operations in Vermont.
Another arm of the feds’ immigration enforcement apparatus — U.S. Border Patrol — has reassigned more officers, from other parts of the country, to a federal jurisdiction that includes Vermont in the past year, the agency has previously told VTDigger.
Federal government data shows sharp increases in the number of migrant apprehensions in that jurisdiction — which also covers New Hampshire and parts of New York State — in recent years, which officials said prompted the Border Patrol staffing surge. (To be sure, the overall volume of migrant traffic is far lower across the entire U.S.-Canada border than it is across the U.S.-Mexico border.)
By contrast, Vermont has few dedicated legal resources available for people who are seeking assistance with their immigration cases, such as for pursuing asylum protections. But research has shown that migrants can be up to five times more likely to win their claim for asylum if they have legal representation, versus if they do not.
Martin Diaz said Vermont, in contrast to many other nearby states, also has lacked a centralized database of immigration enforcement activities in the state that advocates and attorneys can access. This makes it harder, they said, for an already strained network of service providers to effectively direct their resources.
They said they hope the asylum assistance project’s tracker can help fill that gap.
“We want it to be a resource,” Martin Diaz said. “If the government are the only people who are reporting data, it’s problematic, right?”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Immigrant rights’ advocates launch public tracker of Trump-era enforcement .