When local police and immigration agents crashed into dozens of homes early in the morning in Long Island last September, dragging sleepy immigrants from their beds and depositing them in jail cells, the media coverage lasted an unusually long time.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were heavily criticized by Nassau County police officials (not to mention community members), who accused the agency of acting with a cowboy mentality and sweeping imprecision in their arrests, which picked up mostly peripheral figures unrelated to the gang sweep that allegedly motivated the raids.
The rarity of such open internecine feuding between law enforcement agencies kept the story in the news for a couple of weeks. But as with most news, the raids ceased to generate new material for the media to work with and therefore fell out of the public eye.
Today’s New York Times revives the story with a lengthy piece by Nina Bernstein who takes a deeper look at the community response in the aftermath of the raids.
In Greenport, NY, where 11 arrests were made, Bernstein found that many of the immigrants biggest advocates turned out to be the people they work for.
When they suddenly vanished into the far-flung immigration detention system, six of their employers hired lawyers to try to find and free them. Some went further, like Dan and Tina Finne, who agreed to take care of the 3-year-old American-born daughter of a Guatemalan carpenter who was swept up in the raid, if her mother was detained, too.
“This is un-American,” said Ms. Finne, 41, a Greenport native, echoing other citizens who condemned the home raids in public meetings and letters to The Suffolk Times, a weekly newspaper. “We need to do something about immigration, but not this.”
The Times found that many of those detained are still in jail. Others were deported and a few have been released on $10,000 posted by their employers awaiting court proceedings.
The examples of employers fighting to bring back workers may not be typical, but they illustrate the surprising ways that immigrant workers become integrated into communities, even when they are undocumented.
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