On the Lookout for Immigration Raids

Reeling from work-site raids that have jailed thousands of illegal workers, immigration organizations are quietly assembling informal networks to gather advance information about federal enforcement operations and to help locals and laborers prepare.

Students, union officials, waiters and others are volunteering to call in tips about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents checking into hotels or renting facilities, about the sudden appearance of out-of-town cars and about a surge in action at the local courthouse.

"Is ICE going to tell us when they're coming? What they're doing? No," said Socorro Leos, a community organizer for Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance. "You have to be working with the grass roots, on the ground, training them to be alert, to be very, very conscious, to open their eyes and senses."

The spontaneous development of these intelligence networks stems from the scale of recent ICE raids: hundreds of agents and vehicles plus a major infrastructure.

"These are huge paramilitary operations," said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "They use helicopters, jeeps, mobile homes for processing people. They have to have jail space lined up. It's very hard to do that in secrecy."

Still, ICE raids rely on the element of surprise.

Immigrants' advocates say they do not use warnings to block raids or urge workers to flee; rather, they say, they try to soften the blow. They liken the effect of a raid to a natural disaster.

"We cannot tell people, 'Don't go to work,' " Leos said, adding that the networks cannot know for sure when or where ICE agents will appear.

Organizations hold "know your rights" sessions and encourage workers to set up phone trees for rapid information sharing. Activists arrange legal help for those who are detained and make sure court-appointed lawyers have access to experts who can explain the complexities of immigration law. Groups ensure that food pantries are stocked, that caregivers are ready for any children left unattended, and that funds are collected for families that lose breadwinners.

The effort has parallels to the sanctuary movement of the 1980s, when churches brought Central American refugees to the U.S. to protect them from political violence. More recently, churches have offered shelter to illegal immigrants facing deportation.

"The sanctuary movement is certainly an appropriate precedent" to the networks, said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University. "Both arose out of a sense that the immigration law and its enforcement are fundamentally unjust and illegitimate."