The South Coast is facing another surge in ICE activity. Lawyers say this time seems different.
Below is the full text of a Boston Globe article from 09/23/2026.
By Globe Staff,
NEW BEDFORD — They could have been scenes from last year’s immigration enforcement surges: Roofers arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside Cumberland Farms. Workers grabbed near the seafood processing plants downtown. Someone cuffed at the Market Basket after dropping off a relative.
But these arrests happened this week, as ICE agents swarmed the South Coast, arresting more than two dozen people in New Bedford alone, according to lawyers, in what appears to be a coordinated operation in an area with a large immigrant population and a memory of intense enforcement. And the arrests, lawyers and advocates for immigrants say, appear more indiscriminate than even in the height of the operations of last year.
In 2025, the Trump administration spun up a deportation machine capable of efficiently arresting, processing, and deporting. But now, ICE is currently operating without a permanent leader and some Republicans have begun to criticize the agency’s most aggressive tactics.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment about the enforcement on the South Coast. The agency’s social media continued to focus on the “worst of the worst” — dangerous criminals the agency says it’s detained nationally.
But here in New Bedford, at least, Mayor Jon Mitchell — a former federal prosecutor — said there’s no evidence the people arrested Monday had criminal records more serious than traffic issues. And, according to lawyers, those arrested didn’t seem to have been specifically targeted ahead of time.
“It doesn’t seem that there are any particular targets,” said Heather Perez Arroyo, an immigration attorney with the progressive Mass Law Reform Institute, or MLRI. “This is something we anticipated with the start of this administration, but that we had not seen.”
The MLRI oversees a coalition of lawyers who respond quickly to reports of ICE arrests and file petitions for release. Arroyo said Wednesday morning that they were working on behalf of at least 24 people arrested in New Bedford. Attorney Todd Pomerleau, who filed multiple petitions for the coalition, said he had heard of 31 arrests on the South Coast through Tuesday and heard reports of more Wednesday in Fall River.
“The pace in which they’re acting is breakneck,” Pomerleau said.
In 2024, after four years out of power, Donald Trump ran for president with a clear focus: If elected, he would oversee a massive immigration crackdown in the name of public safety.
After he won, the crackdown came, including in New England, during two major surges. Many arrests were done in plain view. People were pulled out of cars or grabbed by masked men on the street.
The tactics were cheered by many supporters, decried by opponents, and feared by many immigrants, including many here legally or with open immigration claims. Trump’s administration touted the arrests of violent criminals, and those did happen, but many of those arrested didn’t have criminal records. During the first surge in Massachusetts last year, about half of the 1,461 people ICE arrested had convictions or pending charges, according to data from the agency.
The strategy of keeping arrests in the public eye escalated into the winter. The administration targeted Minnesota and Maine — places with large Somalian communities, which had then drawn Trump’s particular ire — with huge influxes of agents, including many who’d recently joined up in a massive federal hiring spree funded by Congress last year. Clashes with protesters and immigrant targets turned violent. ICE agents shot and killed multiple people.
As bystander video of the violence spread widely, public opinion seemed to turn. The administration, which had been resolute, changed its tack — it shook up leadership, sidelining the most troubled unit and commander.
The arrests became less visible, but they did not tail off. Data through this July show monthly numbers that fluctuate but remain much higher than they were at any point under the Biden administration.
There was less “pull the guy out of his car on his way to work type stuff,” immigration attorney Jeff Rubin said. “They’re being more strategic.”
That meant arresting people in controlled, less public settings: those who’d come in for immigration appointments, who were on their way into the country, or who had come to state court.
In New Bedford, a city where roughly 10,000 people are in the country illegally, fears of immigration enforcement aren’t new. This week’s action dredged up memories of the 2007 raid of a factory in which 300 workers were detained.
In that vein, some of the newer arrests seemed to focus on one of the seafood processing plants that forms the economic spine of the city. But others seemed more scattershot.
Friends, family, co-workers, and passersby scrambled to figure out what happened, and find anyone who could help.
“This is all over the place,” said Corinn Williams, a local nonprofit leader who said she fielded calls from people saying their friends, their family members, or their co-workers were picked up on their way to work each day. “It’s created a sense of chaos and panic.”
In court documents, lawyers wrote they were concerned that multiple men near a seafood-processing facility who had previously applied to a federal program designed to protect noncitizen workers who report workplace violations being deported.
“I’m very concerned that people who are supposed to be protected are now being targeted by ICE,” said immigration attorney Kerry E. Doyle.
Elsewhere, Wilson Yac Chach, 30, was arrested at a Cumberland Farms, according to his brother-in-law, Fernando Lucas.
“They were just trying to get coffee,” Lucas said. He wasn’t there when it happened, but he heard that ICE agents arrested Yac Chach and another roofer shortly after they left their work van. Attorneys have filed a petition for his release.
On Tuesday afternoon, Yac Chach’s family got in touch with him; Lucas said he’s heartened, but can’t stop thinking about Yac Chach’s 5-year-old daughter, who’s so attached to her dad.
“Very sad, very sad,” Lucas said.
Another detainee, 20-year-old Joselito Mateo Sam, was picked up while walking down the street, his lawyers wrote. Previous records from probate court said he entered the country as an 18-year-old in 2024 so as not to ”be a burden” to his aunt and uncle who he lived with in Guatemala.
“My aunt and uncle took me in and did the best they could for me, but my life here is much better,” Mateo Sam said, according to court records. Here, he moved in with two uncles and began working at a fish house.
That story — an immigrant landing in New Bedford and working in the fishing industry in search of a better life — is a common one on the South Coast.
Take Hector Grave, 43, who sells fishing nets. The Guatemalan, who was brought to the US as a child and has legal status, said he has been running his business since 2012.
The specter of an ICE crackdown scares him. He worries he’ll be racially profiled if he goes out. But he can’t afford not to work.
“It’s a mess now, with inflation and now this,” he said. “It seems like it’s going from bad to worse.”
Scooty Nickerson of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
