Armed with phone cameras, websites, and on-the-fly legal training, a growing network of groups stands between immigrants and ICE. The needs of the terrified communities they’re protecting are skyrocketing. So is interest from volunteers eager to resist the Trump administration. Both seem certain to grow as billions of federal dollars flow into ICE’s coffers, courtesy of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill:
Nikki Marín Baena co-founded Siembra NC in 2017 to protect Latino worker’s rights in North Carolina, but the mission was quickly recalibrated as the first Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies began to take hold. After the 2024 election, interest in this work was turbocharged.
“The weekend after the inauguration, we had scheduled two ICE Watch trainings, one in Raleigh, one in Durham,” says Marín Baena, 40, of the sessions teaching community members strategies for confronting immigration agents in their neighborhoods. “We could not fit people in the places we’d booked. We had lines wrapping around the block, like a thousand people.”
Whereas the shock and horror of the family-separation policy during Trump’s first term eventually put the administration on the defensive, this time around, the intimidation seems to be the point, as agents have begun to scour places like Home Depot and 7-Eleven. The second iteration “is kind of a TV show about how cruel you can be to a group of people,” says Marín Baena. “In this moment, they’re going after immigrants regardless of their [immigration] status or what protections they had. The panic is significantly higher. You get the sense this could happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone.”
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