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NEW BEDFORD — Federal agents appear to be targeting mostly male breadwinners as part of a plan to encourage immigrants to leave the U.S., according to community advocates and experts.
Experts say that this has been the pattern, though they hesitate to call it an explicit strategy. As of Friday, June 13, the latest data tracked by The Light shows that 30 immigrants have been detained in operations in New Bedford and its environs since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20. All but one of those arrested have been men.
The Families Left Behind
A special reporting project
“What is happening here in New Bedford is they are targeting families, breadwinners,” said Ondine Gálvez Sniffin, an immigration attorney, during a chat on immigration operations in the city hosted last week by The Light. “They’ve used wellness checks as an excuse to pick up people as well.”
“They’re not going after the criminals,” she continued. “They’re going after people like you and me who are just trying to make a living and provide for their families.”
In many cases, the men were the main source of income, leaving women to stretch their now-single incomes to provide for themselves and their children.
Julia, an Indigenous Guatemalan woman with four children, is one of those women. Her husband, Miguel Tzunux Pérez, 43, was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 11 during a check-in at the ICE Field Office in Burlington. He was deported to Guatemala in early May.
She said in K’iche’ through a Spanish interpreter that she is now three months behind in rent, $3,000 in debt and facing eviction. Her $15 hourly wage — a total of $600 a week before taxes — cannot stretch to pay for both food and a home.
“I don’t know if I can even stay here anymore,” said Julia, who asked that only her first name be used due to fears around immigration status. “My children are residents, so the two eldest will stay. But right now, we’re thinking I may have to go back to Guatemala with the youngest two.”
“We’re thinking she’ll come in eight or nine months,” Pérez, her husband, told The Light in Spanish in a phone call from Guatemala. “I would like to return to the U.S. soon to help out, but that’s not possible now.”
He added they had some savings, but those were eaten up by the $5,000 in fees they paid to lawyers in Massachusetts and Texas during the approximately one month he was held in at least five different detention centers.
“I earn $5 a day,” he said, referring to his current work as a farmer on a family plot with his mother in Guatemala. “I wish I could help but what can I do? It saddens me and the situation really hurts.”
Workers at the Community Economic Development Center (CEDC) of Southeastern Massachusetts said Julia’s predicament is a strong example of the phenomenon.
“We’ve seen so many cases like hers,” said Lucía Mateo, community outreach coordinator at the CEDC. “It’s so much worse now, though.”
Result of circumstances
Whether or not the federal government is intentionally targeting men in its immigration enforcement operations, experts say they see a pattern.
“Even though immigration laws are not written to target men, the way that these laws are enforced tends to be highly gendered and highly racialized,” said Heather Silber Mohamed, a political scientist focused on immigration policy and Latino politics at Clark University.
She referred The Light to a study published in the academic journal Latino Studies in 2013 that shows the trend toward targeting men over women in immigration enforcement is relatively recent and the result of social and economic trends.
The study argues that the shifting economy — from production-based to service-based — markedly changed work opportunities for immigrant men, who were once recruited to fill expanding labor needs in the U.S.
The study suggests that a labor market that increasingly relies on service jobs and offers diminishing numbers of construction and manufacturing jobs deems male immigrants “disposable and redundant.”
The study also argues that social changes — immigration law, the war on terror, law enforcement’s racial profiling of Latino men, and the male joblessness crisis in the U.S. during the Great Recession — have produced this deportation crisis.
Another study, published in American Behavioral Scientist in 2019, points to the 287(g) program — which empowers local and regional police to act as immigration enforcement officers — as an example of profiling Latinos for low-level driving offenses.
“Let’s call this what it is,” said Sniffin, referring to New Bedford specifically. “It’s racial profiling.”
Of the 30 New Bedford immigrants detained since Jan. 20, 19 are from Guatemala, one is from Ecuador, another from Mexico, and the only woman — Yury Melissa Aguiriano-Romero — is from Honduras. Only two — Rui Murras from Portugal and an unidentified Haitian man — were confirmed as not from Central or South America, and the rest are unknown.
Marlene Cerritos, co-director of Mujeres Victoriosas, a local nonprofit focused on empowering women and supporting families affected by ICE operations, said she also sees a pattern.
“Some of the folks that have been detained were males that have jobs in construction, landscaping — jobs that tend to be higher-paid and male-dominated,” Cerritos said. “We saw that on Sawyer Street, where folks had their contractor uniforms on.”
Although construction jobs on the whole are fewer, Cerritos speculated that it’s a job sector authorities have set their sights on.
“We have seen a lot of that,” she said. “New Bedford is not unique. We’ve seen that in Chelsea and other areas with large immigrant populations.”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons did not acknowledge a question from The Light during a press conference in Boston on June 2 about whether agents were targeting men to pressure families to leave of their own accord. ICE Boston Field Office Communications Director James Covington did not respond to the same question at the conference or in a follow-up email.
Community activists say that stories such as Julia’s have become common in recent months as immigration enforcement operations have made their mark in New Bedford. One activist said he has seen the gender dynamics play out on raids in his community.
“If there are, for instance, women who say they have kids at home, [federal agents] will release them and take the others,” said Diego Low, director of the Metrowest Worker Center, a Framingham-based organization that advocates for immigrant and labor rights.
“I was in Milford the other day and I saw two vans going to the same [construction] site and from that they took 10 people,” Low added. “I don’t know the explanation of [the gender disparity], but my suspicion is these are the easiest targets.”
The disparity in work and earning power is partly due to patterns of immigration to the U.S. from Central American nations, according to Lisa Maya Knauer, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She said those patterns perpetuate themselves once families are settled in the U.S.
“Most of the women are obviously working,” said Knauer, who also volunteers with the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores. “People come to the U.S. not to keep house, but to work.”
“One partner, usually the man, comes first, works, and then sends for the other,” she continued. “Taking them leaves women with half the family income, perhaps more, all of a sudden gone.”
‘One by one or two by two’
Local immigration advocates such as Corinn Williams, director of the CEDC, said New Bedford immigrants have been feeling the stress of the situation, even if they’re not the ones being detained.
“Everybody is kind of feeling the impact of what’s going on,” she said. “Even if they’re not at risk, they’re feeling the stress of the current environment.”
Activists have noted physical and mental changes in many of the families left behind. Some have begun to exhibit extreme paranoia, fearing that an ICE agent is on every street corner ready to take them away.
Sniffin, the immigration attorney, said one of her clients started to experience intense migraines after her husband was detained.
Alicia López, co-director of Mujeres Victoriosas, said many children “do not want to go to school because they’re afraid of not seeing their parents again.”
One of the teenagers present for a violent ICE raid in March, in which agents used a battering ram to enter his home on Viall Street, told The Light that now he can’t sleep unless the lights are on in his room and there is a family member present.
“I’m worried they’ll come back,” he said.
Knauer contrasted current trends with the massive Michael Bianco raid in 2007, in which 361 immigrants were arrested. She said the strategy for mass deportation under the Trump administration appears to be more piecemeal.
“It’s a strategy of picking people up one by one or two by two,” Knauer said. “Except for the car wash, it’s different from workplace raids. It’s more violent in some ways to take people in isolation.”
Williams said the current operations have created a sense of omnipresent fear within the community. She added that there is an element of public relations to the targeting of men as well.
“It’s all about the optics and theatrics of it all,” she said. An arrested woman with a small child at home might attract more public sympathy than a man, she suggested.
López, of Mujeres Victoriosas, said during The Light’s chat that the language used by the administration — like that at ICE’s press conference in Boston — is an attempt to paint all immigrants as a threat.
“They’re even talking about everyone in our community being a criminal when we know we’re not,” she said. “They’re using languages to confuse community members and to divide.”
The administration’s language about immigrants fits a paradigm shift that began with the 2002 Homeland Security Act, according to the Latino Studies article. The act, written and passed in a climate of fear after the 9/11 attacks, abolished the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and created the Department of Homeland Security. It placed two new agencies, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and ICE, under DHS to carry out immigration law.
The act refocused immigration policy on national security and the border, rather than labor and the interior, according to the Latino Studies article. In that context, men have become easier targets, because society views them as more threatening, regardless of their character.
“While immigration enforcement may have increased significantly over the last few months, the broad trends in terms of who is targeted are not new,” Mohamed said. “These trends are also consistent with Trump’s language from his first term about ‘bad hombres.’”
Children react with fear
According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a child who suffers a traumatic event, such as a threat to the physical security of a loved one, can often manifest physical symptoms.
Marilú Domingo Ortiz, 28, said that her son, Abidal, lost his appetite shortly after federal agents seized his father in a violent enforcement operation on Tallman Street in April.
“He was just eating a little,” Ortiz said. “And he said he would start eating again when his dad came home.” He finally began to calm down two weeks later, when Ortiz brought him to visit Méndez at the detention center in Dover, New Hampshire.
Victor Emilio Murillo-Avila and Yury Melissa Aguiriano-Romano are a couple from Honduras with three children, ages 3, 5, and 13. Federal agents took Aguiriano-Romano into custody on June 3 during an immigration check-in.
On June 10, ICE requested permission from Judge Brian E. Murphy of U.S. District Court Massachusetts to move Aguiriano-Romero from the ICE Field Office in Burlington to Delaney Hall, an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey, according to court documents obtained by The Light. But an escape on June 12 by four immigrant detainees in protest of poor conditions led Delaney Hall to stop accepting new detainees.
On June 13, ICE informed the judge and Aguiriano-Romero’s lawyer, Joanna M. Golding, that it intended to move her to the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, Vermont. Murphy granted permission for the move.
“I don’t know why they took her instead of me,” Murillo-Avila said in Spanish. “I suspect that maybe it’s because they thought I had no family support in the area, so I’d just leave.”
Murillo-Avila told The Light his children — the youngest of whom is a U.S. citizen by birth — have been inconsolable since then. He said he has to sleep by their side so they stop crying enough to fall asleep.
“A child needs their mother,” Murillo-Avila said.
The teenagers who experienced the violent ICE operation at their Viall Street home have had to learn to organize themselves. Leticia, the oldest of the teenagers left behind after agents took Miguel Ordoñez Socop and José Antonio Garcia Garcia from their home, was thrust into the position as head of the household.
The 19-year-old now has the responsibility of making sure the two minors — a brother and a cousin — still get to school and other appointments.
“I tell him, ‘Look, go to school. Keep studying, OK? Because it’s good for you,’” she said. “Even if he’s not my brother, I still give him the same advice I give my own siblings: Don’t do bad things. Do things the right way.”
Leticia was looking for work when the raid happened. Since then, she’s found part-time employment at a fish house processing seafood, but it’s not enough to keep the home afloat.
“Now I tell myself: whatever job it is, morning or night, as long as it’s work, I’ll take it,” she told The Light several months after the raid.
Though many immigrants say they will stay, advocates say they’ve definitely noticed people starting to throw up their hands.
“Regardless of gender, people are noticing,” Williams said. “The shock and awe that they advertised, it’s having a ripple effect and some people are now starting to ask, ‘should we go?’”
People like Julia.
“To tell you the truth, I’m very worried now because of the housing situation,” Julia said. “This whole situation saddens me, especially when I think about the president. Does he not see that we’re hard workers? Why does he treat us like this?
“Does he not see that I have children to feed?” she continued. “And how hard I struggle to support them?”
Then she inhaled deeply, and sighed.
“I don’t even know anymore if I even want to stay.”
Kevin G. Andrade can be reached at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org
All of this could have been avoided if only people would immigrate to the US legally. Legal immigration works and makes this country and the immigrant stronger. How about making legal immigration a topic of one of your articles, for example, define the process and steps of legally coming to the US from a foreign country instead of trying to justify something that is wrong?
Newbedford light could help these people by doing articles and stories on the application process , and how about doing a application process story for some of these countries that the people are fleeing from would b very interesting?
If the Democrats had taken an aggressive, pro-active stance like the other party is doing, their credibility for progress in America wouldn’t be as hollow! Legal is legal! Criminals are there! Do something other than talk!
There are very few avenues for legal immigration for ordinary people from Central America. The U.S. visa system is based on “preferences”, which gives priority to: (a) relatives of U.S. citizens, (b) wealthy investors offering to start a business in the U.S., and (c) highly educated professionals with special skills (“Einstein visas”). So regular folks are way down at the bottom. And there is a several-year-long waiting list for most countries in Latin America (25 years in the case of Mexico). Employers, of course, can do the paperwork and bring workers to the U.S. to fulfill jobs where there is a need. There is nothing preventing a seafood processing company from filing an application and paying all the fees (including travel) for the legal immigration of workers. But, they have to do the paperwork and pay the fees, as well (obviously) make sure that there are jobs for the immigrants to do.
Maybe the New Bedford Light can interview some of the local business owners that rely upon undocumented immigrants to explain why they don’t try to bring workers over here through the legal channels. I’d be curious to see if any of them would agree to be interviewed.
Great points “A person”!
It’s heartbreaking to see how these families are torn apart. While the article highlights the deep emotional and economic impact, it’s also a reminder of the everyday struggles they face—like simply finding a stable house for rent in a safe neighborhood after such trauma. Communities need to come together and offer real support, not just words.