The global movement of people seeking to flee tyranny, poverty, and violence, or to search for freedom in a distant land, is a continuum of human history. It is as ancient as the biblical Book of Exodus, and as modern as demonstrations this week at Vineyard Haven’s Five Corners in solidarity with the Brazilian community, amid fears of mass deportations.
Amid the Trump administration’s two-week onslaught of executive orders and hastily shaped policies, we are watching an organized approach to doing nothing less than taking full control of the federal government and transforming immigration policy in America. Let’s be clear: This is not the same as the ritualistic changes from one White House to the next. This is something far more extreme.
So let’s look at what exactly Trump has done on immigration in his first two weeks in office. He has signed 10 executive orders on immigration, and issued a stream of edicts that called for mass deportation and greater border security, and he has unleashed a torrent of fear among immigrant families, including among those right here on the Island.
Under Trump, officers can now arrest people without legal status if agents happen upon them while looking for migrants targeted for removal. These are known as “collateral arrests,” and were banned under Joe Biden and other previous administrations as a violation of due process.
Trump also has removed time-honored guidelines that restricted ICE from entering and making arrests at so-called “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches, or hospitals. That decision has worried many migrants and advocates — across the country and all around our Island — who fear children will be traumatized by seeing their parents arrested in the drop-off line at school, or that migrants needing medical care won’t go to the hospital for fear of arrest. Trump has also said he will target so-called “sanctuary” cities and states where local authorities have said they will welcome immigrants. There are new threats from the Trump administration to cut off federal funding for such places, and there is already pushback on that from this Island and the state of Massachusetts.
The green light for immigration enforcement agents to step up their efforts has had a direct impact on the number of arrests nationally, but we have not been able to confirm any locally as of yet. According to the Associated Press, ICE’s daily arrests, which averaged 311 nationally in the year ending Sept. 30, stayed fairly steady in the first days after Trump took office, then spiked dramatically Sunday to 956, and Monday to 1,179. If sustained, those numbers would mark the highest daily average since ICE began keeping records, and are about 10 percent higher than during the administration of President Obama, which was also aggressive in its enforcement of immigration law.
While some of these changes took place immediately, there are other strategies that will face legal challenges, such as targeting sanctuary cities. Some may take years to happen, if ever, but have nonetheless managed to instill widespread fear across immigrant communities in America.
Going forward, a great deal of this effort will come down to levels of funding. Congress is expected to consider additional support soon. The Supreme Court already ruled that Trump may use emergency powers to tap Defense Department funding for the border wall started in his first term.
An Island gripped by fear
This national news on immigration was also unfolding right in front of us here on Martha’s Vineyard over the past two weeks. In the MVTimes newsroom, police radios crackled all day last Thursday, and we had teams canvassing every corner of the Island. Our Island may be viewed as a liberal enclave of the rich, but those of us who live here know the reality: The year-round population of 20,000 is extraordinarily diverse, with a great heritage of African American families, a native American population known as the Wampanoag, and of course, hard-working families in the fishing and construction industries, some of whom trace their ancestry back many generations and some who are very recent immigrants. While the community swells to nearly 100,000 in the summer months, during the school year there are fully 20 percent who migrated from Brazil over the past 30 years. In some schools, an estimated 40 percent of the students speak Brazilian Portuguese at home — some, like the Tisbury School, are even higher.
In the Island’s Brazilian community this week, the fear was palpable and the expressions of it were complex, as our reporter Paula Moura, who is herself from Brazil, has shared in her coverage over the past two weeks. Workers fearing they might be deported were not showing up at job sites, and students were being kept home from schools by parents who were reacting to unconfirmed rumors that ICE agents were descending on the Island, and an erroneous report on social media that there were charter planes at the local airport that would be used for mass deportation. Our reporters on the ground did not see ICE agents, nor did they see any planes preparing to assist in deportations. The officials they spoke with confirmed the rumors were false, even if the fear was very real.
Rachel Self, who lives on Chappy most of the year, is a top immigration attorney, who gained notoriety when she stood up to the antics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022 when he led a cynical ploy to deceive approximately 50 Venezuelan asylum seekers into being flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard with false promises of jobs and housing.
Self serves as an attorney for these Venezuelan asylum seekers in an ongoing court case, and she was at the center of an Island response in which the Venezuelans were warmly received and helped by Island families and local advocates for immigrants, recognizing the asylum seekers were being used as pawns in a political game. Islanders, including Self, have remained in touch with the Venezuelan immigrants, who were among the 600,000 granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status under the Biden administration in recognition of the severe humanitarian and economic crisis in Venezuela under the dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro. The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security has just revoked those protections.
Amid the panic of the new Trump administration, Self makes a deceptively simple, but powerful statement: She says being undocumented is not illegal.
This week, Self stated, “I cannot emphasize enough: As of today, the act of being present in the U.S. without documentation is not a crime under federal law. It is a civil infraction. In fact, Congress refused to make undocumented presence a crime in 2005 … People in the U.S., regardless of citizenship, have due process rights.”
So it turns out the situation on the ground is far more complex than all of the simplistic hyperbole and the shouting in Washington that impacts the people in local communities like ours. As Moura has shared in our coverage, the Brazilian immigrant community on this Island is increasingly aware of their rights to due process. But their faith and their experience in life also mean they share some of the same political views as Trump supporters, and indeed many in the community have voiced support for Trump. It seems counterintuitive, and it is, but that is also what makes for good journalism. We hope our coverage can reflect all of the complexity that unfolds in the real world when real people are caught up in real problems, and we are always going to be on the lookout for anyone who is proposing real solutions.
Moura is from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, which most of the immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard still consider home, and she was reporting last week on the public schools, how parents who are immigrants are handling the rising fear, and what local school officials are doing to try to restore an atmosphere of safety. The school administration has made us all proud by being among those searching for practical solutions in helping students, and staying focused on its mission to educate and protect children.
Moura interviewed a Brazilian woman who was on an afternoon shift and nervously looking out the window of the shop where she was working. She eyed the streets outside, worried that ICE agents would soon be circling. She felt consumed with fear that if she were to be arrested, she could be separated from her 12-year-old daughter, who was home alone until her husband would get home from his job in construction. She said her neck was sore from all of the tension and worry, and she explained that she and her husband are undocumented, but that they work hard and serve the community.
If her family and other Brazilian immigrants are deported, she asked, “Who is going to serve the super-rich in the summer? We are mostly honest working people. Why spread terror?”
Her question and the dark cloud of fear that descended over the Island in the past few days is truly what authoritarianism is all about: Fear.
Democracy is built on trust; dictatorship is based on fear, keeping a community afraid, divided, and on edge. The challenge for local journalists like those in our newsroom is to serve our community by bearing witness to unjust efforts by Trump’s immigration agents to instill fear, to divide communities and fulfill his campaign promise for mass deportations. The job of journalism and the work in our newsroom right here on Beach Road is to, wherever possible, counter rumors with facts, to hold enforcement agencies accountable, and to do our best to present human stories, in all of their complexity, that challenge the climate of fear and try to help communities build upon trust.
A version of this essay was first published on Substack, where MVTimes publisher Charles Sennott’s GroundTruth newsletter can be found every week at charlessennott@substack.com.
Enough of the fear mongering. How many examples of ICE raids have there been at “sensitive locations” such as schools, churches, or hospitals.
“On January 20, 2025, the Trump Administration rescinded a Biden-era policy that protected certain areas—such as churches, school, and hospitals—from immigration enforcement, replacing it with an unreleased directive that gives ICE agents unbridled power to take enforcement actions in any of these spaces…”
From Texas– “A recent memo from Alice Independent School District (ISD) to parents highlighted that U.S. Border Patrol agents may board school buses to conduct immigration checks on students traveling for extracurricular activities.”
It’s a good thing trump just talks the talk, but never actually does what he says he’s going to do…And of course, simple logic can tell us that because it hasn’t happened yet, it’s not going to. Right ?
Also, let me remind you that the Vineyard is in the crosshairs of the radical right wing lunatics. We both know they would cheer a hurricane on if it was rapidly intensifying into a cat 5 and bearing down on this island. They would pray for it to wipe this demonic island
clean, and cleanse it of all the “woke” people on it . They would also howl with indignation if a nickel of FEMA assistance got here. I also find it quite ironic that you are railing against “fear mongering”, especially when the topic involves migrants.
If Trump just talks a talk and doesnt do what he says he will, no one on the island has anything to worry about . Isnt that right? It is hysteria to believe people want MV washed off the map with a hurricane
Oh, they’re coming. I worked in healthcare for 42 years and I remember ICE style raids in a few of the hospitals and other healthcare facilities I worked in. We had staff from countries all over the world who were in the US with work visas and green cards that perhaps had run past their expiration dates. Most of these people had appointments to renew their documents and many of them were waiting for appointments to go through the citizenship processes, that can take forever to actually get. And I will just say, most Americans citizens couldn’t pass the test these people were required to take to get their citizenship. The facilities would empty out in a New York minute before authorities could even enter. Of course there was communication from one facility to the next that immigration authorities were coming. I’m a citizen but even with that I experienced the bone chilling feeling of something evil about to happen. This is bad enough but do you want to visit this upon school children who are already deeply traumatized by the possibility of active shooters wandering their halls because the Republican Congress is owned by the NRA?? Our kids are a mess! How much do you expect them to bear? This country has plenty of room for productive tax paying immigrants who come in through the proper channels. We desperately need immigrants to keep our country going. Why all the hate?
If everyone who lives in severe economic and humanitarian conditions were allowed unvetted entrance into the US we would have a billion people at our doorstep.
No one is advocating for that, but the dissolution of USAid by Trump and his Deputy of Evil Elon Musk will surely contribute to the despair of people around the world who live in areas where fascist dictatorships thrive. That’s exactly where we’re heading if Trump’s fulfillment of Project 2025 is not stopped. Most of what he’s trying to do is illegal. Only the courts can save our democracy at this point.
Welcome Charlie Sennott! Your essays will add so much comfort to the current fear in our country, especially for the immigrant populations and those of us who are outraged by Trump’s latest actions. The immigration process must be fixed by Congress but until that time, we must let those who are already here , a lot of them with expired work permits and green cards, live in peace and remain in the fabric of America as all of our forebears did. Free from fear and sudden deportations. None of us want criminals roaming our cities and towns. American citizen criminals or immigrant criminals. These people come here to work. They succeed and add so much to our society and culture. I wish everyone could read your piece from the MV Times. The history and truth you tell would hopefully make those who are less tolerant of this situation perhaps feel a bit ashamed of their attitudes. We need some human kindness, especially now. We can’t let Trump’s hate and fear mongering prevail.
My apologies . . . but I must respond to your description of our “forebears” as people who peacefully allowed “others” to live free from fear and sudden deportations. None of that is true by any historical rendering — please review Native American history. The U.S.A. was founded on colonialism and imperialistic ideals — and it’s clear this viewpoint continues to thrive and motivate the current administration (and the people who voted for them). It is really hard to run away from history — it continues to determine all of our actions today, and the actions taken on our behalf.
I’ve struggled to make a company of legal workers on this island. Ive watched contractors hire people illegally, pay them less wages, take my work away. And then send all the money to their country via western union. This “American dream” gets to be lived in some other country while taking the work that would support me living in this country I was born in. We have fought for these rights to maintain this “freedom” if other countries are so bad that you would want to defend your rights please go back to your country and fight your oppressors as our forefathers had to do against an English monarchy. If you consider where you were from home. Go defend that home.
Why does everyone assume the Brazilian community is illegal? Most Brazilians are legal, productive citizens who voted for President Trump.
“The global movement of people seeking to flee tyranny, poverty, and violence, or to search for freedom in a distant land, is a continuum of human history. It is as ancient as the biblical Book of Exodus, and as modern as demonstrations this week at Vineyard Haven’s Five Corners in solidarity with the Brazilian community, amid fears of mass deportations.”
When you speak of island solidarity with the Brazilian community, likening the Brazilian struggle to biblical times about unnamed humans seeking freedom from oppression and violence, it is important to mention who those biblical Exodus-ers were– Israelites. They ended up in Canaan (today’s Israel, Gaza, West Bank, Jordan and part of Lebanon and Syria). Let’s not use the Bible for convenience, but leave out naming what matters, especially in these days of struggle. Thank you.
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