This article originally published at The Assembly.
Isabel Guzman dispensed with the niceties as she scanned the faces inside a church fellowship hall in Durham. The crowd of mostly immigrants had arrived in winter pullovers and windbreakers, anxious about the news, wondering how much the coming years would disrupt their lives.
It was January 19, the day before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The incoming administration had promised to “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers” against both undocumented immigrants and those with temporary authorization. There would be workplace raids, sprawling camps, and fast-track deportations that circumvented due process. And there would be consequences for jurisdictions like Durham County, which Trump’s allies had criticized as “sanctuary strongholds.”
What’s more, state legislators had recently passed a law requiring sheriffs to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). House Bill 10 targeted officials like Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead, who had refused to honor “detainers,” which are voluntary requests to hold undocumented inmates up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release so that ICE can collect them for deportation.
It was a perplexing moment for the 60 people who had gathered at the fellowship hall. So Guzman, an immigration attorney, came prepared with precise, distilled advice.
Above everything, she warned: Do not let federal officers into your home without a warrant signed by a judge. “I have been doing this since 2008,” Guzman said. “I have never seen an ICE officer with a real warrant. They may try to trick you with some sheet of paper with Mickey Mouse on it. That’s not a warrant.” Parents needed to prepare, she said, and “part of that is training your very, very trusting and innocent children to not open the door at 6 o’clock in the morning, when ICE enjoys surprising you.”
Toddlers crawled at the feet of their parents, who sat at circular tables and listened through translation earphones as Guzman acknowledged the “support team” in the room.
Standing in a corner were Ivan Almonte, a Mexican-born community organizer, and the Rev. Ricardo Santiago Medina, a priest originally from Cuba. Sharing the dais with Guzman was Sheriff Birkhead, a Democrat who was first elected in 2018 on a pledge not to voluntarily aid federal deportation efforts. Birkhead, dressed in a bow tie, told the audience that ICE agents could still stake out his jail and ambush inmates as they’re released—but he would not make it easy.
He described a strained meeting with ICE employees 11 days earlier, their first and only during his six years in office. “They asked me, ‘So sheriff, if someone is about to be released from your jail and the detainer is about to expire, will you call us and let us know?’” he said. “What was my answer?”
“No!” a few members of the audience responded.
“No,” Birkhead repeated. “Because that’s not what the law says. No, I will not call ICE.”
The lawyer, the organizer, the priest, and the sheriff: unified in their effort to buffer local immigrants from the new administration’s enforcement blitz. If any county could, it would be Durham, which gave Trump just 18 percent of the vote last year and has a 100-year history of civil-rights activism. While Durham’s local governments have not adopted formal sanctuary policies, which state law prohibits, its officials have been outspoken for years in their embrace of immigrants, who make up 15 percent of the county’s population.
But would moral conviction, teamwork, and supportive local law enforcement suffice?
The Captain
If the team had a captain, it would be Almonte, who describes himself as “the 911” of Durham’s immigrant community. Almonte founded and leads Respuesta Rápida de Durham, a rapid-response network that verifies and posts reports of missing children, school gas leaks, and police checkpoints. Its Facebook page tracks federal and state legislation and posts local announcements, too, like chicken-dinner fundraisers for funeral expenses.
Almonte fields late-night phone calls, often from individuals in distress. His first such call of the new administration came January 26, from the fiancé of an asylum seeker whom ICE arrested outside a discount store in Raleigh. Almonte also meets with organizers from across the state to strategize a response to the new state and federal policies. And he has stayed in close contact with Birkhead since the sheriff’s first campaign seven years ago. He’s still quick to point out that he views their ongoing discussions as a mechanism to hold the sheriff accountable. “There is no friendship here,” Almonte said.
This community organizing is volunteer work for the 46-year-old, on top of his paid job in mental health care.
It’s hard to miss Almonte in his Santa hat at Christmas posadas, or tending to his elaborate altar at Day of the Dead festivals each fall. A quarter-century of community service has garnered him a deep well of respect. “When Ivan asks, I jump,” says Guzman, the attorney.
In the week after Trump’s inauguration, Almonte had to navigate a whole new legal landscape. The president had signed a thick docket of executive orders and proclamations: declaring an “invasion at the Southern border,” shutting down asylum and refugee admissions, and deploying the military to repel illegal immigration. The Department of Homeland Security green-lighted arrests in “sensitive” areas like schools and churches. The media reported raids in Newark, Boston, and Chicago.
Amid this firehose of information, a rumor began circulating online that ICE had raided two Durham grocery stores that serve Latino shoppers. This turned out to be false: Someone had dressed up like an immigration officer and painted an SUV to resemble a Border Patrol vehicle. But the report was convincing enough to set off a panic. Customers jammed the phone lines at one of the stores. Almonte’s own phone pinged with calls, texts, and WhatsApp messages.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is not real,’” he said. “And people found out that it was a hoax. But that scared people off the streets.”
On January 29, Almonte logged into a virtual meeting of LATIN-19, a consortium of health professionals, educators, grassroots leaders, and others that originally formed to address health disparities in North Carolina during the pandemic. The threat of mass deportations, he told the 70 people online, was already proving corrosive. “People are canceling appointments,” he said. “People are not going to grocery stores. I have talked to a lot of Latino businesses and they say, like, it’s empty.”
Almonte had just returned from Charlotte. He had risen before sunrise to drive a Durham asylum seeker—who had fled gang violence in Honduras and was the sole caretaker of his 8-year-old daughter—for a routine immigration check-in at a government contractor’s office. It was an anxious trip: Trump’s new deportation policy meant the man could be arrested and detained at the check-in. The normally busy waiting room was nearly vacant. People were scared that obeying the law could get them deported.
They’d also passed a construction site near the office where there are typically immigrant workers. “That place is empty now,” he said. “They had to stop the construction, the labor there, because nobody’s showing up.”
As the LATIN-19 meeting progressed, it grew rawer and more personal. Some attendees were themselves in danger of family separation. “My husband works in construction,” said the mother of two young daughters. “And when he leaves, when he walks out the door, it’s like having Jesus in the mouth,” a phrase that suggests living with fear. “If they call you at a time when they don’t usually call you, your heart races, and a thousand things come to you in a second.”
“What we are living, for me, is not a life,” she said. “It is not the dream that I imagine.”
The Good Shepherd
The following Sunday, the congregants at Durham’s Iglesia Episcopal Buen Pastor (Church of the Good Shepherd) lined up to greet Father Medina. The bespectacled 56-year-old met each with a smile before wrapping them in his white vestment, whispering a blessing. Young children shouting in Spanish ran between the pews, corralled by their parents with varying degrees of success. Most members were dressed in button-downs and dresses, their hair neatly combed and sprayed or gelled.
More than 140 people had come to celebrate Día de la Candelaria, or Candlemas, which marks the day Mary and Joseph first brought Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem. As part of the festivities, believers brought in figurines of baby Jesus from their Christmas Nativity scenes. Several families dressed their figurines in new clothing, an annual tradition, and placed them at the altar for Medina to bless.
Medina moved to Durham in November 2022 after the church’s previous priest died of a heart attack. He recalled how difficult it was attracting people on Sundays, as many had grown accustomed to attending Mass online during the pandemic. Determined to change this, he tended closely to his flock—for example, visiting grieving families during the nine days of prayer that follow Mexican funerals. Over two years, in-person attendance increased roughly fivefold.
Recently, however, those numbers were trending downward. “People are very afraid,” he said. “Especially the people of our congregation. It is a truly immigrant congregation.”
Medina worries that the lower attendance at church and other shared spaces will isolate community members. It’s been a central theme of his conversations with Almonte, whom he met shortly after arriving in Durham. They had lunch, and Medina was impressed by Almonte’s work. “I told him: Look, don’t lose contact with me. I’m going to support you in everything I can,” Medina recalled.
After Medina concluded his sermon, he descended from the pulpit to make an announcement. The church would be moving communications away from its public Facebook page; instead, important messages would be transmitted privately through WhatsApp. Church leaders no longer felt it safe to publicize the location of services or weekly food distribution for fear of tipping off ICE. There had even been talk of shutting down their social media altogether, but they didn’t want to lose the record of the church’s history.
“I feel a lot of pain because we are working practically in a clandestine way,” Medina said. Secrecy in the face of persecution is familiar to Medina, who left Cuba for the United States more than a decade ago. His work there—organizing religious celebrations, maintaining an independent pharmacy, advocating for free speech, and distributing clothing—resulted in stiff fines and even death threats, and he was imprisoned in 2005 for protesting speech restrictions. He was released after 15 months, following advocacy from his family, international Catholic bishops, and foreign governments, including the United States.
Now Medina finds himself working in the shadows again. “I feel that I am living the same thing,” he said.
Medina recognizes he doesn’t have a choice. He and other priests have instructed the congregation to remove rosaries and religious images from their cars to prevent potential profiling on the road. The church is also working with notaries and immigration lawyers to develop free legal documents providing for children’s care in the event their parents are deported.
The Man of the Law
Durham’s first publicized sweep came early on February 13. Residents of Northgate Park noticed unfamiliar cars and trucks circling their mid-century neighborhood. The vehicles converged at a house where several immigrants from India were living, and neighbors watched as masked federal officers carrying guns and tasers led away three men in handcuffs.
One woman filmed the arrests and shared the video with a local TV station. “Do y’all have a signed order from the judge that I can see?” she called out as the officers led one of the men down the driveway. The officers didn’t respond, though one seemed to flash a thumbs-up.
Early news and social media reports suggested that the officers worked for ICE, which enforces immigration law in the country’s interior. But the following day, a different agency—U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which typically monitors the borders and ports—took credit for arresting 11 “illegal aliens” in a “targeted enforcement operation” in Durham. Those arrested, it said, were being held at a federal detention facility and awaiting deportation hearings.
Local officials were livid. The feds “quite frankly kidnapped members of our community,” said Durham City Council member Javiera Caballero at the next week’s meeting.
The sweep was a reminder of the restraints on a sheriff’s power in the face of conflicting federal policy. Birkhead said he didn’t learn about the arrests until his communications team saw the video on social media. Nor did he hear from Customs and Border Protection afterward. “We were in the dark like everyone else,” he said in an interview with The Assembly two weeks later. “To this day, I don’t have any reliable information on exactly what took place, who was apprehended or detained. None of that.”
No matter how much local and federal officials disagree, they are intertwined legally, technologically, and financially. When someone gets booked for a crime at a county jail, their fingerprints are automatically transmitted to the federal government, which checks them against an immigration database.
Moreover, localities can apply for federal grants from the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) to offset the cost of incarcerating undocumented immigrants with felony or multiple misdemeanor convictions. During the Biden administration, recipients were not required to cooperate with ICE—for example, by honoring detainers. But critics cautioned that the money might still encourage biased policing by making it cheaper for local law enforcement to detain noncitizens. In January, Biden’s Department of Justice awarded Durham County $124,000 in SCAAP funds.
Birkhead recognized that federal agents are not obligated to notify him about their actions in his county. Still, he wished someone had at least tipped him off with a phone call. “Frustration is an emotion that I’ll share,” he said. “And disappointment in our federal partners, who continue to refuse to communicate and even attempt to develop a relationship with local law enforcement.”
Customs and Border Protection spokesman Rob Brisley told The Assembly in an email that federal officers tried to call the nearest Durham city police station (but not the county sheriff’s office) before making the arrests, and no one answered.
The lack of communication also concerned Birkhead from a safety perspective. For one, the sheriff worried about “friendly fire” between uniformed officers from one agency and plainclothes officers or detectives from another if his deputies don’t know when and where the feds are making arrests.
Birkhead also worried about the impact on his agency’s work if immigrants fear coming forward when they experience or witness a crime. Brisley declined to comment on those safety concerns.
The sheriff has reassured residents that his deputies won’t ask people their immigration status, and that he won’t go beyond the narrowest interpretation of House Bill 10. But those promises offer limited comfort when masked federal agents can swoop into a neighborhood. “It certainly could drive a wedge between law enforcement and the community,” he said. “And that’s not good for public safety.”
The Immigrant Attorney
One of Guzman’s clients, an undocumented mother of two from Honduras, lives in Northgate Park. A week after the arrests, she arrived at the attorney’s office shaken.
Guzman does not do deportation defense. Her practice focuses on securing authorization for immigrants to remain in the United States legally. Some of her clients are sponsored by employers. Others have suffered domestic violence or trafficking. Guzman handles hundreds of cases involving “U Visas,” which are set aside for victims of crimes such as assault, rape, extortion, kidnapping, and stalking who have been (or might prove to be) helpful in the investigations and prosecutions.
The Honduran mother had been robbed at gunpoint at the tax service where she worked, but didn’t have a record of the case and didn’t know the report number. With Almonte’s guidance, Guzman submitted a records request to the Durham Police Department.
Before law school, Guzman had been a social worker working with HIV/AIDS patients. That training still comes in handy. “My clients come from a generational history of trauma,” she said. “They’re coming in hypervigilant.” Guzman understands firsthand what trauma can do to an immigrant family: She was born in Taiwan, where her parents had fled from mainland China as children only to suffer discrimination. After two relocations, her mother suffered from paralyzing depression. “I parented her, pretty much,” she said. “And then I raised myself.”
Guzman’s client had more on her mind than a visa. Her son had a soccer game coming up in Greensboro, and the championship would be held in Charlotte. She and her husband, who was also undocumented, drove to every single game, even though state law denied them driver’s licenses. Now she wondered how safe that was. “We’re scared to drive,” she told Guzman. “How do I explain that to him?”
Instead of a pure legal consultation, they talked mother-to-mother, immigrant-to-immigrant. They talked about faith. Guzman reassured her that, in the short term, it was appropriate to ask another parent to drive their son to games. “Some sacrifices are OK to make and still be a good mom,” she told her. “The best way to protect your kid is to make sure that you and your husband are still around.”
The next morning, Guzman called with good news: The Durham Police had sent a record of the crime, which would help the U Visa petition. Securing the visa would still take years and success was hardly assured, but a pending case gave her a chance for a work permit and Social Security number, which in turn would qualify her to apply for a driver’s license. At least the bureaucracy was in motion.
Rising Anxieties
After the Northgate Park sweep, Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams reassured residents that city police would not “extend their services to the federal government.”
“Once you walk in the borders of Durham, you’re a Durhamite,” Williams said at the February 17 City Council meeting. “We are an embracing community and we will continue to hold those values to be true.”
But external pressures persisted. In Raleigh, GOP lawmakers introduced several new immigration measures. The Criminal Illegal Alien Enforcement Act would require sheriffs to give ICE a two-hour heads-up when certain immigrants are about to be released from local jails. The North Carolina Border Protection Act would force four state agencies, including the State Highway Patrol, to collaborate with ICE and make it harder for cities, counties, and campuses to limit their cooperation. In Washington, Trump’s new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, instructed the Justice Department to investigate any local and state officials who impeded immigration enforcement.
“It’s been tiring,” said Almonte in late February. He and some colleagues had started meeting with families in private, rather than at advertised events. Day by day, he saw their anxieties rise. Some wouldn’t open their doors unless their partners called first and said they were arriving home. Adults were having hard conversations with their children about which aunt they’d live with if the parents got deported. Almonte noticed people crying more, and drinking more.
On March 3, Almonte interviewed Guzman, the attorney, on Facebook Live. The Trump administration had announced that it was creating a new registry, and everyone in the country illegally would be required to provide their fingerprints and current address. Those who failed to register risked fines or incarceration. The goal, according to the Department of Homeland Security, was to compel “mass self-deportation.”
Guzman had little concrete advice. The administration had offered no details of its registration process, and the history of registries was hardly reassuring. The last one was created by President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks and targeted people from 24 Muslim-majority countries and North Korea. (President Barack Obama deactivated it a decade later.) Of the 83,000 who registered, the government moved to deport 13,000 of them. None had been convicted on terrorism charges.
As with the Bush registry, there was no safe option this time around. “If you do not register when you’re supposed to, or if you do not carry proof of your registration, you can be convicted under federal criminal law,” Guzman said. “However, if you do register, then you are placed in a position of risk of arrest, detention, and placement in removal proceedings … You’ve got two options, right? Register or don’t register. But both choices carry very serious risk.”
‘We Are All a Family’
Seventy vehicles lined up in a Durham parking lot on a cold March morning. Half the drivers idled their engines; the other half sat behind frosted-over windows. Volunteers in puffer jackets and gloves unloaded a truck that had arrived with a crate of onions, a crate of carrots, boxes of lettuce, and bags of grapes. They placed the produce on tables and sorted it into black plastic bags for Buen Pastor’s food distribution. Father Medina, dressed in gray slacks and a zip-up jacket that revealed his clerical collar, shook hands, hugged familiar faces, and tied up the bags.
The earliest group had arrived at 5:30 a.m. to grab a spot in line. Anyone arriving after 7 was almost guaranteed to be sent home empty-handed. When the set-up concluded, Medina called the volunteers into a prayer circle. He closed his eyes and raised his hands to the sky.
Then everyone disbursed to their stations. Rapid-fire instructions came from a megaphone, directing the cars to drive single file. One volunteer guided the vehicles into their prescribed lanes. Two more approached each car, one opening the trunk and the other depositing bags in an efficient dance. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” said a volunteer after a vehicle stalled. “No one has eaten today.”
Medina observed the controlled chaos. “Here, we are all a family,” he said.
That family is straining, though. In late March, the federal government issued a notice terminating a Biden-era program that admitted 530,000 people with U.S. sponsors: Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans fleeing political instability and economic collapse. This generated considerable fear among Medina’s congregation, some of whom were given until April 24 to leave the United States. Many, he said, will face persecution in their countries of origin.
The church’s youth group, which meets weekly, was facing its own challenges. The kids, most of whom were born in the United States, expressed concern over having their parents drop them off outside normal worship hours. After no one showed up for two consecutive weeks, Medina called some of the members. “Father, we are afraid,” he recalled them saying. ”We do not want to expose our families.”
So far, he said, no one in the congregation had been detained. Medina was hoping to keep it that way. “That’s why we always keep the door locked,” he said.
Full Stop
As winter turned to spring, the priest, the organizer, the lawyer, and the sheriff had each doubled down on their commitment while also contending with the limits of their power.
In the four months after House Bill 10 took effect December 1, ICE issued 25 detainers for inmates at Durham County’s jail. Birkhead was required to turn them over under the new law, but ICE didn’t come to pick up anyone in the first three of those months. Birkhead released each inmate when the state-mandated hold expired, as long as they met the other conditions for release.
That changed in March, when the federal agency picked up three. “They followed the guidelines under HB10,” Birkhead said. “As did we.”
Birkhead maintained that he still only cooperates with the feds to the degree that the law requires. But he knew that the federal reimbursement he receives for jailing undocumented felons and misdemeanants made for bad “optics.” In late March, he told The Assembly that he was considering discontinuing Durham County’s participation in SCAAP. “Someone could say, ‘Well, you’re receiving these funds, so that means you’re cooperating with ICE,’ which is not the case,” he said. “These funds are useful, but as they say, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.”
Almonte remains satisfied that Birkhead is doing the best he can, given the current legal climate. Birkhead had always said he would obey the law, even if he didn’t agree with it, and House Bill 10 left him no choice but to turn the three inmates over to ICE. “I like that transparency,” the organizer said. Even though Birkhead couldn’t protect every noncitizen from the federal government, he continued to meet with immigrants, and that meant a lot to Almonte.
Beyond fielding calls to Respuesta Rápida, Almonte was trying to think proactively. He and some colleagues from across the state were putting the final touches on a training program for local communities, which included planning for family separations and preparing for various scenarios where ICE might show up. They were hoping to do their first grassroots training near the North Carolina coast later this spring. “At the federal level, I don’t see any hope soon,” he said. “But at the local level, we can do a lot of stuff.”
Guzman’s inbox kept filling with reports from her fellow attorneys, including the recent arrest of a Durham man outside a relative’s house by ICE officers with no badges or uniforms. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.) The news media were publishing accounts of seemingly random detentions of noncitizens nationwide. And on March 22, Trump announced a crackdown on attorneys, particularly immigration lawyers, who file “vexatious litigation” against the government.
Guzman’s work gave her purpose, but the news sapped her spirits. She also had a practical decision to make about whether to help new clients get on the Trump administration’s registry. (Her existing clients didn’t need to, because the government already had their data.)
“I struggled with it so bad,” she said. She couldn’t advise clients to break the law, but she also had her integrity to preserve. Ultimately, she decided, as the owner of a small practice, she gets to choose which cases to accept. She would not add registry work to her portfolio.
“I will not be a part of it,” she said. “I’m not helping ICE remove immigrants. Full stop.”