For the nearly 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, businesses on the South Fork of Long Island run full tilt—caterers, builders, landscapers, restaurants. The workforce behind all of that is largely immigrants. So this year, amid President Donald Trump’s ICE crackdown, locals are fearing for their families, their livelihoods, and for the local economy.
“We are on a countdown to Labor Day—it’s actually a day-to-day countdown,” says one owner of multiple restaurants in the Hamptons. “If we can make it to Labor Day with the staff we have we’ll survive,” this source says. “They literally hold the keys.”
“I kept all my staff,” the owner says. “But many of them were nervous about being deported.”
In June, fear over the nationwide deportation crackdown reached a fever pitch out East. Would such stern measures come to the Hamptons? Erika Padilla, the legal advocate for the advocacy group OLA (Organización Latino Americana) of Eastern Long Island, says if they did, the economy, already struggling to find workers, would collapse. She estimates that 75% to 80% of workers here are Hispanic and that more than half of them are undocumented or in the process of becoming documented.
According to some employers, there’s a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” mentality regarding immigration status. “They have to be on my payroll,” the restaurant owner says. “They have to provide us with a social security [number].”
Early in the summer, in response to the fear, some businesses considered closing for a day in case of a raid. Restaurant owners worried that nobody would show up for work, forcing closures in the high season. Some people stopped driving after dark, fearing that a burned-out taillight would get them pulled over. Nextdoor, the hyperlocal networking service, and social media were rife with reports of raids—at a grocery store, Sag Harbor’s local movie theater, a men’s shelter in Riverhead. But Damark’s, a local market, posted that rumors of the ICE raid there were untrue. East Hampton town Police chief Michael Sarlo told The East Hampton Star the rumors of ICE activity in Sag Harbor were “unfounded,” while East Hampton Village mayor Jerry Larsen said, “we’ve had no rumors of ICE activity in the village itself.” The Riverhead Police Department also released a statement about the rumored raids. They never happened.
But as the end of the summer nears, it seems ICE doesn’t need to kick down the front door of the South Fork of Long Island to deport undocumented workers. Padilla says they’ve been quietly and “methodically” entering through the back.
Much of the immigrant workforce in the Hamptons lives hours away in less expensive areas of Long Island and sometimes in less-than-ideal conditions like encampments in the woods. But, unique perhaps to the Hamptons is that many also actually live locally—in the same neighborhoods in some cases—as the people they work for. They own popular restaurants and other businesses. They are part of the fabric of the community—shopping at Red Horse and having pizza at Sam’s. In some local school districts, more than half the student body is Hispanic or Latino. Everyone enjoys the same spectacular ocean beaches and bay sunsets.
Lady Peralta felt like a part of that community. In 2019, she illegally immigrated to the United States, eventually making her way to Long Island from Ecuador. A manicurist back home, she worked cleaning houses until one of her clients connected her with the owner of Salon Xavier, a Sag Harbor spa. She was hired to work a few days a week, continuing to clean houses when she wasn’t doing nails. She was so good at her job, and skilled labor was so tight in the Hamptons, that within weeks, the salon owner hired full time.
From then on, Peralta worked as a nail tech to the power players of the area: “Singers, actresses, business people, Hollywood models, and fashion designers,” she tells Vanity Fair of her clientele through translators. “I’d never met people who were so famous.”
Peralta briefly returned to Ecuador to retrieve her young daughter, and after paying $31,000 for an assisted passage for the two of them, spent about one month taking buses and walking across the Mexican-US border illegally. She applied for asylum in January 2023 while she was on US soil.
She says she used what she made at the salon to pay back the people who had loaned her the money to come to the United States. Like many Ecuadorians who arrived in the Hamptons, she says, “We dreamed of working and getting ahead.”
She was denied asylum in May 2023, and after an appeal, denied again that September. But by that time, through the help of a lawyer, she had also helped her daughter, now 13, apply for Special Immigrant Juvenile status.
Sandra Melendez of SM Law Group is a local immigration lawyer who handles many cases using this classification. Established by Congress in 1990, the SIJ classification provides protection to immigrant children who have faced abuse, abandonment, or neglect from one or both parents and gives them a path to permanent US residency. A juvenile court judge must determine that it’s in the child’s best interest to stay in the United States. US Citizenship and Immigration Services generally issues a decision within six months, and then, if approved, they get in line for residency.
By February 2024, Peralta’s daughter’s SIJ status was approved and Peralta was appointed her legal caregiver.
“I had been doing everything right,” she says. With a now legally documented daughter, and documentation that she was appointed her caregiver, Peralta thought she was safe from deportation.
“Before Trump, that was a reasonable assumption,” Melendez says. “You have children, status, or ties.…people could happily report.” Caregivers do not need to be documented to be appointed, but they can’t gain legal status based on the SIJ classification either. Now, Melendez says, undocumented guardians of children with the status don’t know what will happen when they present themselves to authorities.
“This administration, if they don’t care about US citizens who have cancer and are still deporting their parents, what do you think they’re gonna do about the SIJ [caregivers] who are illegal here as well, and their kids don’t even have a residency? There’s no empathy.”
Melendez says this is the administration’s backdoor way of deporting people.
During the Biden administration, she says, the appointed caregivers were frequently allowed to remain even without legal status. Immigration judges would often dismiss or close removal proceedings, Melendez notes, if the removal would result in a minor being left alone in the United States. ICE attorneys were also instructed to focus their enforcement efforts on matters of national security, public security, and border security under Biden’s prosecutorial discretion policies.
Peralta says she checked in monthly by phone as directed. She had no legal standing in this country, but had remained without issue as ICE prioritized resolving high-priority cases. That’s why, in February, after receiving an email and a phone call notifying her to report in-person at 8 a.m. on March 3 for an ICE appointment in Syosset, she was initially unconcerned.
She brought her daughter’s papers with her for protection. For three hours, as she sat, she watched other people come out of their appointments with ankle monitors and grew nervous. “I was very scared,” she says, but still was under the impression that “when your daughter wins an immigration case” the family would not be separated. “I never thought it would happen to me.”
But it did.
After being asked for identification during her appointment, she explained she was the legal guardian for her daughter under the SIJ classification. She says she was told her daughter had “won legal status, but you didn’t.…You can take your daughter and go, or leave her, that’s your decision. But you have to leave the country.” An ankle monitor with GPS tracking was placed on her. She says she was told she had 30 days to leave the country.
“I felt like a delinquent,” she says. She thought the decision would be reversed since she hadn’t been accused of any crime.
One Hamptons landscape company owner, who asked not to be named, heard about Peralta’s case and grew increasingly worried about her own workers, who, she says, became terrified as summer approached and rumors of ICE raids spread. Her eight-member crew is a “100% immigrant workforce,” she says, and all but one are undocumented. “The other route would be American-based, and it’s never worked. They either don’t do the job, or they flake out and leave the job because it’s hard labor.” Without her crew, she says, she would have to close her company.
Like many workers making the drive from more affordable areas mid-island, her staff has been coming in early (like 5 a.m.) because they’d heard ICE had set up checkpoints on Old Montauk Highway during the morning rush out East known as the trade parade. She heard unverified rumors that a public bus was pulled over in Watermill with “four people on the ground.” She says many are afraid to go anywhere other than work. “What a terrible way to live.”
She says she feels helpless. Her crew is like family to her—she’s provided English lessons, sponsored one visa, offered financial assistance over the slower winter months, and helped one staffer find a specialist in New York City during a medical crisis.
“They’re church-going people, like an extension of our family that we would protect,” she says.
Edna Winston, through the Amagansett Free Library, has been teaching English conversation classes online since November to Spanish-speaking locals and has noticed how scared some students are. “When I do an introduction to a class, some people are afraid to say their real name,” she says. “They don’t say where they came from. They want to learn English, but they’re in fear. The fear has been around for a while but wasn’t as palpable as it is now. People fear being sent to a prison or being separated from their families. So, we know they’re in the shadows. They go to work, they come home. They don’t have an outlet.”
While there are six or so regular students that always show up, and up to eight total most weeks, Winston says that some come once and don’t log in again. That’s why, while she’d considered changing the format to in-person classes, she ultimately decided it was best to keep it virtual. “With the turmoil on the news these days, it’s safer to keep in on Zoom,” she says. “Until things cool down. If they cool down.”
A longtime Springs resident, Nick Weber, has been a portrait artist for about 30 years. He’s always painted regular, working-class people, revealing their story through his art, but as he gained notoriety, has done commissions for or sold work to Liev Schreiber and Jennifer Coolidge. Leading up to the presidential election, Weber got worried about the heightened focus on immigration. Then, like so many others locally, heard rumors that members of the immigrant community were being grabbed up in raids.
“When the rhetoric started, I started to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, this is kinda the opposite of what my experience has been,’” Weber says. “These people who have taken risks, worked hard, been humble, been selfless, been brave, learned to go with the flow, all these things that to me are incredible aspirational qualities of a human.”
Many of his paintings are portraits of immigrants, some of whom, like Peralta, came from Ecuador. “One of the pillars that bonds our rare and special community of Springs is art, so it makes sense that an avenue to address what’s going on right now, the injustice and the inhumanity of it, is with the power of art—it’s part of the lifeblood and the history of our community.”
Over the past few months, Weber realized he had a sizable and unique collection that told the story of the immigrant community here. He hopes his work, now titled Melting Pot (Friends From Afar), in some small way calls attention to the deportation efforts portraying undocumented workers as criminals.
Peralta had always felt the love of her customers. “A lot of clients saw me as a friend. They would arrive with presents,” she says. “They’d ask how my daughter was.” One client who is in the museum world knew her daughter was a skilled artist. The client enrolled Peralta’s daughter in art classes, and, since she showed so much promise, told Peralta she was going to hire someone to teach her privately.
Ultimately, immigration officials didn’t change their minds. After 30 days, her affairs in order, Peralta and her daughter left the United States, her ankle bracelet removed at JFK airport.
Meanwhile, Trump has rolled back protections established under the Biden administration for the vulnerable immigrant children themselves. In a June 6 policy alert, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending a policy that automatically gave SIJs protection from deportation and work permits while they awaited residency.
“This is a return to past practices,” US Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a statement to Vanity Fair. According to USCIS, it will continue to review deferred-action petitions on a case-by-case basis from those with SIJ classification, but it will no longer be automatic; those who already have deferred action based on their SIJ status will generally retain it. In a separate statement, USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser said the agency “closed a loophole set up by the previous administration that was used by dangerous criminal aliens to gain automatic access to deferred action and employment authorization via the SIJ program.”
Melendez estimates there are approximately 1,000 or more SIJ cases in eastern Long Island left “in limbo,” and that, since April, the Trump administration has stopped processing residencies. For those with SIJ status, that’s causing a growing backlog. “I have people who were close to finishing the process,” Melendez says, and now, “nothing. No movement.”
Peralta’s boss, salon owner Xavier Merat, says of Peralta’s March 3 ICE appointment, “It was going into the mouth of the lion.” He says some of Peralta’s clients, once they heard of her situation, tried to pull strings behind the scenes, calling friends in high places to see if they could help. He says it was to no avail.
Merat says his clientele has high standards, and Peralta was a talented worker, a good person, and a taxpayer. “This country needs immigrants,” he says. As a small-business owner in a market that’s short of good help, he worries that small businesses will have to close a couple of days a week in the high season if the crackdown continues.
It’s also, according to Melendez, “barbaric.” She says the administration is “playing with people’s minds and hearts. They have no feelings. It’s really sad.”
“We immigrants arrived,” Peralta explains from Ecuador, where she’s working as a manicurist. “We treat our work like our second homes. Because we spend more time at work than our homes.” Her daughter’s status was removed once she left the United States. She could try to reapply to enter the United States again someday from Ecuador, but doesn’t think she or her daughter will ever be granted a visa.
“It was a strategy of Trump,” she says, “to get the immigrants out.”
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