On Monday, Juliana Soares Martins responded to a suspected sighting of federal immigration officers in Danbury, just up the street from the federal court house. When her rapid response team got to the reported location, they were too late.
“A woman was taken,” Soares Martins said the woman’s car was left behind. “There’s a child seat in the car, there's receipts, there's toys. It was a remnant of a life that she was just ripped away from.”
Soares Martins was one of many activists with the collective of immigrant-led organizations Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, who were responding to reports of ICE activity in Danbury on Monday.
Activists said they were distributing Know Your Rights cards and alerting community members of potential ICE presence since 6 a.m.
According to community leaders with Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, ICE agents had been actively taking individuals off the streets since Saturday. Based on eye witness accounts and recorded videos, group members allege that between 10 and 15 community members were taken by ICE agents between Saturday and Monday.
Federal immigration officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves issued a statement on Tuesday.
"While I am aware of ICE activity in Danbury yesterday and over the past weekend, neither the City nor the Danbury Police Department was informed,” Alves said. “We do not coordinate with these agencies, and they do not coordinate with us."
Soares Martins joined the immigrant-led group a few months ago, but she said the experience she had Monday in her city left her feeling both uneasy and angry.
“The most unnerving thing was the amount of ICE vehicles that just stay parked and lurk in our cities without knowing, like, who's in it, what they're doing,” she said. “They'll literally park for hours on a street and just watch us live with the excuse that it's investigative work, but we don't really trust that.”
At one point Monday, Soares Martins said an apparent ICE agent rolled down the tinted window of an unmarked vehicle to show that she was being recorded while she was walking down the street.
“They're like snakes slithering around in our neighborhood,” Soares Martins said, “because they park, they wait, and they just disappear with people.”
“ICE out of Danbury”
Over 100 activists and allies in Danbury gathered in front of the court house Tuesday to denounce the presence of ICE in their city.
As they stood listening to community members speak, white roses were being passed around. On the stems were little slips of paper that read, “Father kidnapped by ICE” or “Daughter kidnapped by ICE” or similar statements.
Many attendees also held signs that had silhouettes of adults and children with writing underneath that read “Kidnapped by ICE on June 16.”
Karen Hunter, one of the leaders with Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, shared that she was giving out red cards to people who passed by on the street.
Hunter said she handed cards out to two young women who were walking down the sidewalk talking and laughing. She said she found out a short time later that the two women were detained, or in her words “kidnapped”, down the road.
“This is heartbreaking, and it's wrong,” she said. “The image of this is never going to go out of my head.”
Hunter joined other speakers in encouraging attendees to continue showing up to rallies, but to get involved with the pro-immigrant organizations in the area.
Chanting “no fear, no hate, no ICE in our state” and other anti-ICE rallying cries, the crowd walked up and down Moss Ave that’s across from the court house where an individual was seen allegedly being taken by ICE.
After the short walk, they held their white flowers up high in the air and then placed them at the base of a utility pole in honor of the unnamed individuals that were taken.
Standing tall despite heartbreak
It’s rare for La Mexicana Bakery of Danbury to be empty of hungry patrons, but Yesenia Bernabe, whose parents own the bakery, said that’s all they saw on Monday.
“We had people calling and asking if it was safe to come, and asking if there was something that we could do,” Bernabe said. “There was nobody in the bakery.”
The bakery is right next to Moss Ave, one of the streets on which apparent ICE agents were seen taking an individual.
“It's heartbreaking to see these families being scared to get their daily necessities. And it's overwhelming,” Bernabe said. “I'm scared for the people that have to go out and they might be taken away from their families and they never come back home.”
According to Bernabe, a customer recently came into the bakery and shared that their cousin never returned home. Bernabe said the customer was almost certain that federal immigration officers took their cousin.
“I feel like there's nothing I could do,” Bernabe said. “So, it hurts.”
Although all the ICE activity and its impact on her community has left her feeling raw with emotion, Bernabe said she just reminds herself of what her father always tells her.
“My dad has always stood on the idea and the belief that as a community, and as specifically Latinos, we are very valuable, and our voice is very powerful,” Bernabe said. “We're showing that we're not going to close, or we're not going to be scared, or we're not going to just completely shut out everything… We're still open, we're still here. Nothing's going to bring us down.”
Learn more
Visit ctimmigrants.org to find resources including:
- Know Your Rights videos and apps for iPhone and Android
- Printable red cards in nearly 40 languages
- An immigration preparedness toolkit
For more information on local immigrant-led community groups, visit:
