As ICE appears to ramp up arrests in CT, state and local officials are in the dark

Stamford Advocate – Friday, June 27, 2025
By Joshua Eaton, Jesse Leavenworth

The first thing Clementina Lunar said she noticed was a gray car with heavily-tinted windows parked outside Danbury Superior Court.

Lunar, an activist with Greater Danbury Area Unites for Immigrants, had been up since 7:30 a.m. looking for agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Now, she was handing fliers to immigrants outside the state courthouse for an upcoming know-your-rights training.

Lunar said she gave one man a flier before he crossed the street towards the parking lot. That’s when she saw the gray car move. Soon, roughly half a dozen cars converged on where the man was, and a handful of federal agents — some wearing civilian clothes and with their faces covered by masks — got out to arrest him.

One officer took the papers from the man’s hands — including the know-your-rights flier Lunar had handed him — and dropped the documents to the ground, Lunar said. Activists later recovered those papers and used them to identify the man, she said.

“We were able to advise the person, basically by yelling at him, not to answer any questions,” Lunar said.

“They took him away,” she added. “It was just very difficult to see.”

That arrest was one of several in Danbury on Monday, according to the city’s mayor and local immigration rights advocates.

Experts say it may also portend more such arrests to come across Connecticut.

Across the country, enforcement activity by ICE has seemingly ramped up in recent weeks, with dramatic arrests — often including confrontations with activists or elected officials — making headlines, including in New York, Los Angeles and Massachusetts.

There had already been a noticeable string of arrests of immigrants facing criminal charges at state courthouses, according to government press releases.

ICE’s website includes press releases about the arrests of a handful of immigrants who were charged with, or convicted of, violent crimes — including: a Brazilian man arrested by ICE in Brooklyn, Connecticut, after serving time for sexual assault; a Honduran man arrested by ICE in Wethersfield after he was charged with child abuse; and a Guatemalan man arrests by ICE in Hartford after he was charged with sexual assault.

Now roughly half a dozen immigration rights advocates and attorneys who spoke with CT Insider said Connecticut has also seen a surge in such arrests by ICE in recent weeks. But it’s difficult to know how many people in the state have been arrested by federal immigration officials outside of high-profile incidents and anecdotes passed along by lawyers and activists.

The administrative warrants ICE often uses for arrests are not publicly available in the same way as the criminal arrest warrants generally used in state and federal courts. Likewise, immigration court records are less accessible to the public than are federal and state criminal court records.

ICE and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, did not respond to questions about how many immigration-related arrests they’ve carried out in Connecticut. A White House official referred questions to DHS.

That follows a pattern of silence from federal immigration officials in recent weeks over their activity in the state.

Meanwhile, state and local officials say they’re mostly in the dark. Connecticut law prohibits law enforcement here from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement officials in all but a narrow set of circumstances.

Fear has gripped many immigrant communities across Connecticut since President Donald Trump took office in January, vowing mass deportations. In recent weeks, experts say that fear has grown worse.

“The atmosphere for my clients is horrific,” said Erin O’Neil, an attorney based in East Hartford who specializes in immigration law.

More arrests — and more fear

Immigration rights advocates and lawyers braced for an immediate ramp up in deportations after President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January — after all, Trump and his advisors promised to start carrying out mass deportations “on day one.”

“Entering this country illegally is a crime, and we need to enforce those laws,” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, recently told The New York Times. “Because if we don’t, we send a message to the whole world: ‘You can go ahead and enter this country illegally. It’s a crime, but don’t worry about it. Keep coming.’”

“We’re prioritizing public safety threats and national security threats,” Homan added. “That is our priority. But I also said from day one, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table.”

The large-scale immigration enforcement actions didn’t immediately materialize after Trump’s inauguration, and some advocates said they assumed ICE did not yet have enough agents or detention space to carry out the administration’s plans.

For weeks, there was a sense among some experts in Connecticut that more was coming from the administration. June may be the month when the storm started to break.

“I would describe it as an aggressive ramp-up of enforcement action,” said Tabitha Sookdeo, executive director of the immigrant rights group CT Students for a Dream.

Like many of the over half a dozen advocates and other experts who have spoken with CT Insider since January, Sookdeo said the new administration at first seemed to be targeting people at courthouses who had serious criminal charges.

That appeared to change in early June, according to Sookdeo, after a series of high-profile immigration arrests in Connecticut. They include: a former Yale student who said he was tased in federal immigration court in Hartford while being detained by ICE; a Meriden high school senior and his father arrested during an ICE check-in weeks before his graduation; a New Haven mother arrested in front of her children; and four car-wash workers in Southington arrested during what ICE called “random worksite enforcement.”

The former Yale student was previously accused of sexual assault but was either acquitted or never charged over those accusations. It’s not clear whether any of the others who were arrested had previously faced criminal charges. Immigration-related offenses are generally civil, not criminal, violations.

Whereas ICE had been primarily targeting those charged or convicted of violent offences, Sookdeo said from what she’s seen in her work as an immigrant rights organizer, the arrests now feel “almost indiscriminate.” Many of those arrests in Connecticut follow a pattern seen across the country of ICE agents wearing masks and civilian clothes that do not always clearly identify what agency they are from, according to Sookdeo.

The apparent ramp-up in Connecticut follows similar reports from across the country.

According to The Wall Street Journal, top White House immigration advisor Steven Miller told ICE agents to forget about targeting primarily criminals and “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens” during a meeting at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in late May.

The White House is also demanding 3,000 arrests per day from ICE nationally, the news agency Reuters reported — up from an earlier quota of 1,000 arrests per day. And a recent budget request from ICE said the agency needs additional funds “to support the Administration’s strategy of 1,000,000 removals per year and 100,000 detention beds.”

By comparison, ICE made 170,590 administrative arrests — an average of less than 500 a day — in fiscal year 2023, the highest year under President Joe Biden, according to the agency’s online data dashboard. ICE has not updated that data since Dec. 31, 2024.

Sookdeo said she and many other immigrants in Connecticut are “terrified.” After the Meriden senior was arrested in early June, Sookdeo said, she got constant calls from people afraid to go to a check-in with ICE for fear of being detained, state and local officials trying to confirm rumors of an arrest and people who were accompanying someone to immigration court who were detained.

“My phone wouldn’t stop ringing,” Sookdeo said. “Well, more than usual. It’s always ringing.”

O’Neil, the immigration attorney, said many of her clients are afraid to go to court appearances or appointments with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for fear of being detained. Some are even afraid to drive, to drop their kids off at school or to go to work or a doctors’ appointment.

O’Neil said these are law-abiding people who are terrified to take the next step toward permanent residence and citizenship “because of what they see on the news, what Trump has promised and what they’ve seen in their communities.”

The majority of her clients are from South America, Central America and Mexico, she said. Many of her female clients have fled their home countries because they were victims of domestic abuse, gang violence and pervasive sexual assaults. Some are indigenous people who faced discrimination due to their religion, while others faced retaliation for reporting crimes in their native countries.

O’Neil said a mother and her two daughters, ages 10 and 14, came to her office recently and said they wanted to withdraw their case to stay in the United States.

“The fear they encounter every day made them want to withdraw and not appear in court, which could result in a detrimental removal order that they could never fix,” she said.

O’Neil said she persuaded the family to continue seeking a new home here.

“They are eligible for what they seek,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to see it through, because even in these turbulent times, we have to trust the process, and ultimately it will come to fruition.”

O’Neil said many of her clients are self-employed, running cleaning and landscaping businesses, while others are teachers or work in the food industry or construction.

ICE has taken some of her clients into custody, she said, and she has made many trips to a detention center in Louisiana to visit them.

Local, state officials in the dark

While advocates and attorneys worry about what they say has been a dramatic uptick in the number and nature of arrests by ICE in recent weeks, state officials and local law enforcement say they’re largely in the dark.

A Connecticut law called the Trust Act prohibits state and local officials from taking part in federal immigration enforcement activities outside of a narrow set of circumstances that include helping ICE apprehend people convicted of violent crimes in the state. State legislators expanded the law this year.

Asked about ICE activity in the state, the Connecticut State Police cited the Trust Act. A spokesperson for Gov. Ned Lamont referred questions to the state Department of Social Services and ICE. DSS referred questions back to the governor’s office. ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

After the incident in Hartford immigration court, Chief Judge Michael P. Shea of the District of Connecticut issued an order barring arrests in the state’s three federal courthouses except those carried out by court security officers. That order does not apply to the immigration court itself, which is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Asked whether there is any such order for state courts, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Judicial Branch said only that the state courts are bound by the Trust Act.

Some local law enforcement officials said their knowledge of what ICE does in their cities is limited.

Waterbury Police Chief Fernando Spagnolo said ICE has not shared any information with city police, and most calls to police about ICE agents in the city were unconfirmed. ICE did take a man into custody outside the local courthouse in February, he noted.

When Trump’s current administration began, Spagnolo said, there was a lot of concern in the city, especially about ICE agents entering schools and places of worship, but that has quieted down.

New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson said city police have had only a handful of dealings with ICE since the beginning of the year, and the federal agency has not asked police to hold any suspects charged with state crimes for possible deportation.

There has been a climate of fear among immigrants and their advocates in the city, Jacobson said, but the heightened tensions have also led to some false reports of ICE activity. One man reported his wife missing and then called police back and said she was deported to her home country in Central America, Jacobson said. Police learned, however, that the woman left of her own accord so she could reunite with her children in her native country, he said.

Another complaint “from people trying to raise the temperature about ICE” also turned out to be false, the chief said.

Confusion also has contributed to false reports, Jacobson said. People have called New Haven police mistaking local plainclothes cops for ICE agents, he said. Another call about ICE agents in unmarked SUVs turned out to be state police, the chief said. Adding to the confusion, some ICE agents wear unmarked street clothes and masks, Jacobson said.

Still, the chief said he did not want to criticize the federal law enforcement agency. He said he asks only for coordination with local police for any big operations.

“I would expect to be notified if they were going to do a major sweep, because it’s only safe for my people and their people,” Jacobson said, adding, “I’m hoping that doesn’t happen here.”

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