In early March, just around supper time, two men went up and down a block in my Brooklyn neighborhood knocking on doors. Both were in plainclothes, although one was also wearing a tactical vest and a weapon on his belt. Viewed from the front, neither man’s clothing identified them as immigration agents, but it is probable they were. They tried repeatedly to get folks in one apartment building to buzz them in, claiming they were “police” looking for video evidence of a crime involving gunfire. 

Their story might have convinced people to let them in, but that would have been a mistake: opening the door can be construed as granting police or federal agents permission to enter. Once inside, agents would be free to go on a fishing expedition, using “probable cause” as a reason to detain people they encounter in the lobby or who might open their apartment doors to them. “Probable cause” can include having an accent, looking foreign, or seeming nervous. 

Luckily, people in the apartment building did not open the front door. Some residents had attended “know your rights” (KYR) trainings where they learned that immigration agents are trained to lie in order to gain information and/or access to a space they would otherwise need a judicial warrant signed by a judge to enter. ICE calls the lies these agents tell “ruses,” and, according to the Immigrant Defense Project, the ruses agents come up with “are subject to almost no restrictions.” Lately, for example, there have been reports of ICE agents donning Amazon vests or posing as Grubhub delivery workers to gain access to homes.  (For more on ICE’s ruses, visit immigrantdefenseproject.org/ice-ruses/)

A few days later, at another apartment building several blocks away, an elderly woman, expecting a repairman, accidently buzzed in two men in plainclothes who claimed, when she met them in the hallway, to be “police” investigating burglaries in the area. When the woman, who had also attended a recent KYR training in the neighborhood, asked to see identification, the “officers” refused, saying they did not have to show it. Knowing that NYPD officers are required by law to give their name and badge number when asked, the resident went back inside her apartment, closed her door, and alerted others in her building via email that they did not need to talk to or let the two men into their apartments. A few minutes later, seeing that the men were now knocking on the door of a nearby building, the woman called the NYC ICE hotline (229-304-8720) in the hopes that rapid responders could be summoned to the block. Just as she was making the call, however, the two men disappeared.  

These local incidents of recent ICE activity illustrate two larger points. The first is that knowing our rights and also ICE’s ruses is not just an academic exercise; it can help us take the right actions, during moments of high stress, to meaningfully protect ourselves and our neighbors. The second is that the Trump Administration is holding fast to and, in some places, even ramping up its anti-immigrant efforts. This ramping up is not obvious, partly because national attention is focused elsewhere and partly because ICE, in an effort to avoid public opposition, has changed tactics, switching out showy raids for quieter, more “under-the-radar” moves like the ones just undertaken in my neighborhood.  

In early March, as ICE was knocking on doors in my neighborhood and elsewhere, there came a bit of good news: a YouGov poll found that 50 percent of Americans support abolishing ICE, including an astounding 23 percent of Republicans. A few days later, ostensibly for other reasons, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was fired. As Trump, no doubt worrying about how the growing public repudiation of ICE will affect the fall elections, makes a showy pretense of change at the top and agents on the ground do their best to look invisible, it would be easy to get lulled into thinking that ICE is losing steam or backing off.    

The good news from my neighborhood is that we are not falling for the Administration’s latest ruse. Instead, like many communities across the city and the country, we are staying organized, vigilant and vocal in sharing what is happening on the ground. 

That’s why, at a recent meeting of our KYR group, we began working on a plan to counter ICE’s deceitful tactics to gain entry. So far, we’ve created a flier people can post in apartment lobbies and translated it into five other languages spoken in our community—Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Korean and Mandarin.  Now we are figuring out how best to get that information out to the community. 

Step by step, people across the country are coming up with ways to resist ICE and its ruses. In the process, we are not only helping our own communities, but as the recent YouGov poll suggests, we are also changing the way the nation is beginning to view ICE and the stories it tells.   

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