The call came into the hotline one afternoon in March: A group of officers, masked and in plainclothes, were taking away a young woman in a hijab.
“‘Someone is being kidnapped!’” the caller said to Danny Timpona, the operator who answered the phone. His group, the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts, had been preparing for such a moment.
Within minutes, Mr. Timpona sent out volunteers to verify the report in Somerville, a suburb northwest of Boston. When they arrived to empty streets, they began knocking on doors, looking for anyone who could help them piece together what occurred. One neighbor offered footage from a home security camera.
The video, which has since racked up millions of views, captured agents from the Department of Homeland Security surrounding Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen and doctoral student at Tufts University who spent the next six weeks in detention. It gave the nation one of the earliest scenes of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.
A crop of grass-roots immigrant rights networks like Mr. Timpona’s has been rising across the country to try to halt President Trump’s agenda of mass deportation. They aimto quickly corroborate the presence of immigration officers. They document apprehensions that might otherwise go unnoticed. And they spread the word on social media about people being detained.
These groups have recently been most visible in Los Angeles, where an immigration raid at a clothing wholesaler prompted a rapid response from activists who confronted federal agents. Days of protests followed.
This latest iteration of immigrant rights battles could bring more intense confrontations. Trump administration officials have sought to cast many actions of immigrant rights lawyers and activists — from protests to know-your-rights presentations — as enabling illegal immigration and threatening to national security.
In Colorado, Homeland Security officials have said that social media posts from the immigrant rights network in Denver allowed an undocumented man wanted in Italy for child sexual assault to escape. In Maryland, Baltimore police officers have been placed in the middle of tense face-offs, as activists and residents have accused them of actively cooperating with federal immigration officials.
In cities like Boston and Los Angeles, some residents have rushed out of their homes to join activists who film and shout at immigration agents splitting up families, and some are concerned the flare-ups could worsen as tensions rise. The newer activists point to masked agents who are taking away friends and neighbors with more aggressive tactics and not enough due process.
“We are not trying to use violence,” said Ron Gochez, the leader of Unión del Barrio, a group that has been organizing protests in Los Angeles. “We don’t want to use violence, but what is happening to our community is completely violent.”
Evolution of a Movement
In the heated civil rights fights of the 1960s, some of the nation’s oldest immigrant advocacy and Latino civil rights groups drew on tactics from groups like the Black Panthers to monitor police brutality and protect their communities from racial and ethnic profiling. Over the next two decades, a few went on to expand their reach and become established institutions, with influential arms in Washington, as they fought anti-immigrant sentiments that rose with the increased migration from Mexico and Latin America.
The new breed of activism is rooted in those old strategies, some of them later tested and expanded through immigration crackdowns in California, Arizona and across the Sun Belt.
The groups are now sprouting up in places large and small across the country. They tend to be decentralized and more nimble. They communicate through encrypted channels and share strategies through virtual meetings.
In Colorado, newer immigrants rights groups have joined forces with larger and more well-established organizations to form a statewide network. Members of the coalition have trained as many as 4,000 volunteers to confirm or dispel rumors of raids and alert residents of their rights. As in Los Angeles, they have at times arrived to scenes with bullhorns in hand.
Another group south of Portland, Ore., has mobilized hundreds of people to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids solely by sending texts to its volunteers.
In North Hollywood, Calif., Immigo, a tiny group serving the San Fernando Valley, counts four paid staffers who work with Latino students, influencers and online clothing brands to amplify its reach. It now has a roster of 800 volunteers, many of them first-generation Americans, who have said they are willing to rush to verify reported ICE sightings.
“The idea is to get folks to patrol their own neighborhood because it’s more efficient that way,” said Magy Mendez, the group’s founder.
In Arizona, which became a center of pro-immigration protests and counterprotests in 2011, similar rapid response networks are drawing from past experience.
Salvador Reza, a longtime immigrant rights activist in Phoenix, recalls experimenting with different models of organizing when Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, was in power and cracking down on illegal immigration.
Those efforts led to “barrio defense” committees, or neighborhood-based organizations where families helped one another prepare for raids. Residents made plans to help one another maintain access to their bank accounts and or care for children if parents were detained.
The committees waned after Sheriff Arpaio left office, but Mr. Reza and others are now working to revive them through weekly trainings.
“You can break up a nonprofit or an organization, but we organized as families,” Mr. Reza said. “You can’t break apart a family.”
The Next Generation
Federal immigration officials argue the groups are making their jobs harder. Todd Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has defended the tactics of his agents, including the masks they wear, saying agents and their families have received death threats and been labeled “terrorists.” This week, federal officials rejected legal and administrative challenges filed by civil rights groups, saying they vilified law enforcement.
In interviews, activists said the violent apprehensions of immigrant workers and longtime community members are fueling their growth. Some groups have stepped up as larger nonprofits have come under scrutiny. A Republican House panel last month started an investigation into whether more than 200 nongovernmental organizations, including top immigrant rights groups, enabled illegal activity.
In Georgia, Daniela Rodriguez, 30, created an informal group in 2010 that officially became a nonprofit about a decade later called the Migrant Equity Southeast, or MESE. With the election of Mr. Trump, the organization, which serves the fast-growing Latino population in Savannah, Brunswick and other towns in southern Georgia, shifted to educating undocumented community members about their rights and involving people who support immigrants to assist.
Like other groups, MESE has been recruiting and training Americans to be “ICE trackers,” who rush to places where federal agents have been spotted. They also provide immigrants rides to the grocery store and medical appointments for people who fear being pulled over if they drive themselves.
Eduardo Delgado, 26, who was born to Mexican immigrants in Vidalia, Ga., has hosted clinics to help undocumented parents fill out forms to establish power of attorney, in case they are separated from their U.S.-born children.
“There are thousands of kids like me,” said Mr. Delgado, MESE’s civic and advocacy coordinator. “We’re fighting for our parents to be safe, when they are being indiscriminately targeted.”
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States.
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