Boston taps into ‘spirit of rebellion’ as it resists ICE’s immigration crackdown

Any Lucia López Belloza will not be home for Christmas. The 19-year-old freshman was on a business scholarship at Babson College near Boston, when she decided to take a surprise flight home to Austin, Texas, to spend Thanksgiving with her parents and sisters.

Just before she boarded her flight at Logan airport on 20 November, she was arrested by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and within 48 hours was deported back to Honduras, a country she left aged seven seeking asylum, with chains on her waist, ankles and wrists.

She told the Globe from her grandparent’s house in San Pedro Sula that her American Dream felt over: “I’m losing everything.”

The east coast US city might be a little short on holiday cheer this year.

Masked men in dark cars roam the streets carrying out immigration raids at traffic stops, supermarkets and courthouses. Fear has emptied some classrooms as teachers report thousands of empty desks because immigrant families fear children targeted as they learn.

An Ecuadorian couple in Boston who suffered human trafficking in the US were arrested by ICE twice in the last four months. In August the 43-year-old mother, who the Guardian is not naming, was detained for two months and 10 days. On 9 December, her husband was also arrested and is currently held in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The mother cried when she said through a Spanish interpreter: “It has been very hard. It has affected my daughter psychologically, first her mother was arrested, then her father. She feels anxiety. She doesn’t want to go to school. I am scared to go to the store.”

The family, who have a seven-year-old daughter, entered the US illegally in 2021 seeking asylum, but by the time she was arrested in the summer, they had already submitted an application for T non-immigrant status, a four-year work visa for victims of human trafficking within the US. The husband claims he was labour trafficked in New York by a company that demanded he work 12-hour days, often unpaid, under threat of ICE. She said: “The truth is that I don’t know what will happen.”

The acting ICE director, Todd Lyons vowed to “flood” Boston as the city escalates its standoff with the Trump administration, since its mayor, Michelle Wu, testified in Congress in March about Boston’s “sanctuary city laws” that limit state and local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Last week, the agency announced that it had hired nearly 10,000 ICE officers in 2025.

An immigration enforcement operation called “Patriot 2:0” began in September and is the second crackdown in the city by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which started with “Operation Patriot” in May, resulting in 1,500 arrests.

Last month it claimed to have arrested 1,400 “illegal aliens” between 4 September to 30 September alone, including 600 alleged “murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational gangs”. Lyons said in a statement on 4 December: “Patriot 2.0 exposed the grave consequences of sanctuary policies and the urgent need for local leaders to prioritize their constituents’ safety over politics.”

But those claims have many in the city sceptical. Last month ICE swarmed a car wash in a student neighbourhood, Allston, and dragged away nine workers from El Salvador and Guatemala as they vacuumed, none of whom had criminal records, and some of whom had work papers in their lockers, after they were denounced by a British-born college student. They were missing for five days, during which they claimed they were shackled as agents tried to force them to sign their own deportations.Liz Breadon, a city councillor, said: “I would say it’s pretty close to the definition of kidnapping.”

Abdirahman Yusuf, founder of Boston’s Somali Development Center, which offers social and immigration assistance, said: “Just yesterday one of our colleagues, an Afghan refugee, was arrested and detained by ICE. He has six kids and a wife.” The 66-year-old US citizen, who came to the US as a student in 1979, added: “He worked with the US military on many highly dangerous missions, I’ve seen his scars.”

Boston, however, is again fighting back.

Wu has repeatedly stood behind the city’s immigrants and demanded transparency. Green card residents wrongfully arrested are suing. The Beyond Bond & Legal Defense Fund are offering Massachusetts and Rhode Island detainees $2,000 to $20,000 assistance. Donations for the “Allston nine” have raised more than $70,000.

This month the neighbouring city of Cambridge cut ties with a technology contractor, Flock Safety, because it installed two new Automatic License Plate Registration (ALPR) cameras without permission months after the city paused the scheme over concerns data could be shared with federal agencies.

Others have leaned into messaging around the festive season.

The Catholic church of St Susanna in the suburb of Dedham sparked a fight with the archdiocese after it replaced its traditional nativity scene with an empty cradle holding a sign: “ICE WAS HERE”, suggesting the holy family was arrested.

Father Steve Josoma refused to remove it. “It showed the context Christmas is happening in this year,” he said.

Underneath Josoma’s sign is the number for LUCE: the immigrant justice network of Massachusetts; a grassroots hotline for local ICE sightings that opened in March, run by 14 organizations including Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW), Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN) and Muslim Justice League.

“It came from strategizing resistance,” said Pietra Adami, 28, director of the Brazilian Women’s Group, a LUCE partner. Nine months after launch, the hotline receives 150 calls a day and has 4,000 volunteers who speak Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, French and Mandarin, and train people on their rights.

Adami, who moved to the US in 2023, said: “We now also offer support like housing, transport and groceries. There’s this beauty about LUCE, people are showing up for their community, saying: ‘hands off my neighbour’.”

One person monitoring ICE’s message is a misinformation researcher and immigrant living in Boston, who asked not to be named. “The ‘flood the zone’ approach creates this sheer quantity of information which leads to high levels of overwhelm, uncertainty and fear,” they said. “[The government’s] aim is to stop vulnerable people talking, so people comply in advance.”

The academic warned that the best defence was to “stay informed, consume high-quality news, cross validate, and don’t spread inaccurate information that could accidentally increase fear.” They admitted it was hard: “I still don’t know what’s safe. I’m not going home for Christmas, because I don’t want to travel with my visa that says I’m a misinformation researcher.”

On 4 December, about 21 immigrants were turned away from their own naturalisation ceremonies at Boston’s Faneuil Hall after a federal pause on 19 “high-risk” countries after an Afghan national was accused of the fatal shooting of two national guards in Washington DC.

At Faneuil Hall in 1764 Americans first protested against the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act, which helped spark the American Revolution.

On 16 December, activists in colonial costumes, carrying signs that said “No Kings”, marked the 252nd anniversary of the Boston Tea Party where colonists threw tea into the harbour protesting against unfair taxation. Organised by the non-partisan, grassroots groups Mass50501 and Boston Indivisible as an act of creative resistance designed to inspire new recruits, the “ICE Tea Party” marched to the waterfront and dumped 342lb of ice into the sea.

Nikki May, 40, a home healthcare worker whose ancestors left Ireland for America in the early 1900s, gave a speech at the Irish Famine Memorial. She added: “I see a lot of similarities with what happened in 1773; press gangs, tariffs, unchecked powers, but also the spirit of rebellion.”