14-02-2025
Apparent immigration arrests raise concern, questions in Durham neighborhood
Alisa Cullison was out walking her dog at 7:30 a.m. Thursday when she said she saw three vehicles 'casing' a section of her north Durham neighborhood. One was a Nissan with tinted windows, another a pickup with Georgia plates.
They seemed out of place in Northgate Park, an older middle-class neighborhood of modest homes. Her suspicions were confirmed two hours later, when the vehicles converged on a car with two of her neighbors, both young men from India.
It was a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid, said Kelly Morales, a co-director of Siembra NC, an immigrant worker organizing group that has been advising immigrants and others how to respond to federal agents. She, Cullison and others spoke about the incident at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Another neighbor, Emily Ingebretsen, said she saw a dozen men, in tactical gear and wearing masks, exit the vehicles and take the young men along with a third Indian native from their home and drive away. They said little, but one of them wore a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol badge, she said.
'Why are you wearing that mask, I can't see your face, why aren't you identifying yourself?' Ingebretsen said she asked one of them. 'And he said, 'If you were doing something in your community you might want to cover your face too.' To which I said, 'There's nothing that I would do in my community where I would ever hide my identity.''
None of the speakers at the conference would identify the men, saying they were concerned for other family members in the neighborhood. They do not know why the men were arrested, if the officers had a judicial warrant, or where the men were taken, they said.
'We know that the goal of this as Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have both said is to inspire people to self deport by creating an environment of panic and chaos,' said Nikki Marin Baena, Siembra's other co-director. Homan was appointed 'Border Czar' by President Donald Trump and Miller is Trump's homeland security adviser.
ICE didn't respond late Thursday afternoon to questions about who the men were, why they were taken into custody and where they were taken.
Durham Mayor Leonardo Williams said no authorities provided information to him before or after what happened.
'I'm looking into it,' he said by phone Thursday evening. 'I'm in discovery mode myself right now.'
Siembra NC says it has trained more than 400 people to be 'ICE Watch verifiers' in nine counties over the last two months. It has two trainings scheduled in the next two weeks, in Durham on Feb. 22 and in Greensboro on Feb. 27.
Trump made illegal immigration a top issue during the campaign and has promised to purge the country of millions of immigrants who are in the U.S. without proper authorization. Critics say the president's plans will lead to overly aggressive tactics across the country that will create fear and chaos in neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.
Cullison and Ingebretsen, who have been trained by Siembra, said what they saw Thursday morning made them feel less safe in their neighborhood.
'It does scare me, it felt like those offices were acting outside the bounds of law,' Ingebretsen said.
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