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NEW BEDFORD — Video footage captured the moments U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took Augusto Lopes Vemba into custody on the afternoon of Sept. 22.
The video showed Lopes Vemba, 40, an asylum-seeker from Angola, calmly step out of a white SUV after masked ICE agents in camouflage gear opened his door. Then, suddenly, he made a run for it.
“Go! Go!” the bystander filming the incident at the intersection of Acushnet Avenue and Sawyer Street shouted as Lopes Vemba fled before agents tackled him to the ground. On the video, agents can be seen aiming a taser at his neck for 15 seconds after subduing him.
ICE agents conducted multiple arrests on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford on Sept. 22.
Lopes Vemba was among the about 40 people that Gov. Maura Healey said were detained during ICE operations in the city last week. The governor said she’d also heard reports of U.S. citizens being briefly detained.
“That’s an awful lot,” she said. “Those are 40 families without dads and breadwinners.”
The Light identified 35 of those detained and reviewed habeas corpus petitions filed by a team of 20 volunteer attorneys from the Habeas Project of New England at U.S. District Courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Light was able to review statewide court records for 23 of the men and found that 19 — including Lopes Vemba — had no criminal charges on their records, excluding misdemeanors related to entering the country without inspection or overstaying visas. Of the remaining four, only one had a felony charge.
That tracks with data compiled and analyzed by Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse Immigration, a non-partisan data analysis think tank, which found that almost 71% of ICE detainees as of July 2026 did not have any criminal convictions.
Agents detained five men at Cumberland Farms in the city. Another four were taken at the New Bedford Market Basket, where Light reporters observed agents patrolling the property. Five men were arrested near fish houses and another had his car window smashed while getting coffee at the Dunkin’ on Nauset Street.
It appeared to be part of a nationwide strategy targeting immigrant-heavy municipalities.
“We are continuing to see this disturbing trend of ICE arbitrarily arresting members of one community,” said Christy Rodriguez, senior immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and coordinator of the New England Habeas Project. “It is not about targeting individuals, but targeting entire cities and towns.”
ICE operation trends
Advocates who spoke to The Light said that since the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January at the hands of immigration agents, the agency has moved to mostly subtler arrest tactics, such as concentrating on immigration courts and criminal courts. They theorized that the high proportion of immigrants in Massachusetts, around 18%, and recent efforts such as the state’s PROTECT Act, may have attracted the agency’s attention.
“We’ve been expecting Massachusetts to be a target for this, but why now?” said Sarang Sekhavat, the chief of staff at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “Why New Bedford?”
A recent New York Times report backed this up, finding that the agency appeared to be attempting to avoid the bad press of previous surges as in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Massachusetts. But the aggressive nature of the New Bedford operation appeared to buck those trends.
Slightly more than 18% of New Bedford’s population is foreign born, according to the 2020 Census, and about 57% of those are not U.S. citizens, but hold a variety of documented and undocumented statuses. In Fall River, also targeted heavily by ICE last week, more than 26% of the population is foreign-born and about 63% hold a status other than U.S. citizenship. According to some advocates, ICE detained up to 20 people in Waltham Friday, where about 31% are foreign-born, of which almost 62% are not U.S. citizens.
Some advocates who spoke with The Light hypothesized that the local response from civil society motivated ICE to move on quicker to locations where voices from advocacy and coverage by local media would be less.
“I think the organization and response of the community in New Bedford played a role in making them move on,” said Lucy Pineda, director of Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts, an Everett-based organization, in Spanish. “They moved on to Fall River because they don’t like noise.”
Sekhavat said it’s difficult to see patterns in the agency’s attention and arrest operations. He also said there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason as to who gets detained.
“It’s really hard to get in the minds of this administration and what they want to do,” said Sekhavat. “The one pattern we are seeing is that it’s not what this administration keeps publicly saying: They’re not the worst of the worst.
“From everything we’ve been seeing in this administration,” he continued, “we think racial profiling plays a very large role in these actions.”
The detained
The habeas corpus petitions, filed by a team of 20 or so lawyers led by the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and obtained in court by The Light, revealed much about the lives of detainees and the circumstances surrounding their detentions.
Some petitions were thin and lacked detail. Such was the case for Florencio de León Olmos, an undocumented man from Guatemala who received a final removal order in August 2025, according to court records. (Available documents do not show why he received the removal order and do not show a criminal record). When The Light attempted to find his whereabouts through the ICE Detainee Locator, his name could not be found. Last week, The Associated Press reported that ICE has stopped including the locations of those with final removal orders on the detainee locator.
Olmos voluntarily withdrew his petition on Sept. 23, according to the court docket.
Other petitions included documents that raise questions about ICE’s methods, including whom it chooses to detain. Such was the case of Kenchino Pierre, a 20-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti detained in New Bedford on Sept. 21. According to the federal court documents, an administrative warrant for his civil immigration detention was issued the same day ICE took him into custody. Pierre had a hearing scheduled at Boston Immigration Court for Sept. 29 prior to his detention.
Only one person identified by The Light faced felony charges in Massachusetts courts, according to The Light’s review: João Ferreira, 50, a Portuguese legal permanent resident detained in Dartmouth on Sept. 22. In 1992, Ferreira was charged in Fall River District Court with two counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14 and two indecent exposure charges. Records show the case was continued without a finding, then closed — a disposition that generally results from completion of probation.
In 2009, Ferreira was found guilty of two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and was sentenced to probation, Fall River District Court records show.
Documents obtained from U.S. District Court Massachusetts also showed that agents detained a 40-year-old Guatemalan man while he was working as a Doordash driver on Sept. 22. Records showed that he is documented, having received deferred action for labor enforcement protections, a valid work permit through 2029, and is in the process of obtaining a U-Visa — a status given to those helping law enforcement with criminal investigations.
His criminal record included three entries. The Light uncovered a 2007 assault and battery charge that was dismissed, and a 2010 charge for disturbing the peace dismissed upon a $100 restitution payment. He pleaded guilty to a 2016 charge for operating under the influence, for which he paid a $500 fine.
But the narratives from the petitions reinforced the idea that past charges were not a decisive factor in whether or not a person was detained.
Other habeas petitions’ narratives were more extensive. According to one petition on behalf of a 21-year-old Brazilian man in Fall River, ICE arrested him at 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 23 while he was commuting to work at a garage in Somerset. A court search by The Light turned up only traffic violations under his name in Massachusetts.
During the arrest, ICE agents asked him directly if his name matched one they had on hand. He said yes and gave them his license.
When the agent returned, they told the man he would be detained for overstaying his visa. The petition said he cooperated and opened his door.
“But the ICE agent reacted swiftly,” the petition read. The agent reached around the man, unbuckled his seat belt and dragged him out of the vehicle. “Petitioner did not resist and was not using any strength,” his attorney wrote in the petition. “The ICE agent dragged him across the ground. Petitioner heard several ICE officers say ‘Taze him! Taze him!’ Terrified, petitioner exclaimed that he was not resisting and to not taze him.”
He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa at age 11 in 2016, according to the documents, and graduated from Diman Region Technical High School in Fall River. A background check turned up a speeding ticket in Somerset and a citation for backing his vehicle up in a prohibited space in Smithfield, Rhode Island. On June 6, 2024, he married his U.S. citizen wife in Cranston, Rhode Island. She was one of dozens to submit letters to the court calling on the federal government to release the man.
“He is not someone who poses a danger to our community,” she wrote in a document filed with his habeas petition. “Instead, I know him as someone who consistently tries to do good, support others, and be a positive presence in the lives of people around him.”
The Brazilian man is currently in custody at Plymouth County Correctional Facility.
The pattern
Representatives from LUCE New Bedford said during a livestream on social media Monday that they had observed an uptick in ICE activity locally in the days leading up to the raids. They said they observed agents planning out routes throughout the city. Later, LUCE representatives said they saw the agents racing along the same routes in an effort to find immigrants and arrest them before calling too much attention to themselves.
“At about 7 a.m. last Saturday, we spotted ICE on Union Street,” a woman who only identified herself as Carrie said. “They were casing the city.
“Then on Sunday morning, the agents were spotted really early, casing locations near bus stations, the health center, churches, and schools,” she added. “On Hathaway Road and Acushnet Avenue they seemed to be practicing a route.”
Since then, most of the habeas petitions have moved forward. On Tuesday, federal Judge Angel Kelley ordered the federal government to grant Lopes Vemba a bond hearing within the next 10 days. A filing that same day from the Office of the U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts did not contest the decision.
After the ICE arrests, many immigrants have chosen to stay home, leaving some businesses, especially those catering to immigrant communities, with empty shops.
In the eyes of Adrian Ventura, executive director of the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, a local group that helped some of the families obtain legal and financial aid following their loved ones’ detentions, the ICE tactics awaken suppressed memories for many immigrants.
“This reminds me of the death squads in Guatemala [during the civil war],” Ventura said in Spanish. “They want people to think they can be anywhere.”
And now, that fear has spread elsewhere.
“This does cause fear in places like Lowell, Worcester, Lawrence, and people are wondering what is the next target,” Sekhavat said. “I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say they’re ghost towns, but people are noticing it’s a lot quieter.
“They want to make it so uncomfortable for people that they leave on their own,” he added. “It’s not just targeted at people who are undocumented. It’s targeted at everyone.”
Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
