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ICE Raid in the Best Small Town in the US
The post from the Berkshire Eagle (May 6, 2025) reported on an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in a town less than two miles from where I live. Several people posted videos of the ICE agents, with automatic weapons in hand, a battering ram, and dressed in battle outfits reminiscent of Star Wars stormtroopers. Reportedly (Berkshire Eagle, May 6, 2025), two men were arrested in an apartment complex, where during the 2010 census, I had knocked on doors to enumerate residents for the census. They brought out a man dressed in a hooded sweatshirt in handcuffs. He has been described as a friendly person and worked in a restaurant only a few feet from where he had lived for between one and four years. One video of the arrival of the ICE agents showed a drone hovering above, a feature of the arrest that made this incident bone-chilling. If the Trump administration wanted to create fear, they indeed had achieved their goal. Albany radio station WAMC posted this report (May 6, 2025), which corroborates much of the information contained in the Eagle article. Both New England Public Media and the Berkshire Edge reported similar accounts of the arrests.
A search of ICE news releases found no mention of the Great Barrington arrests. No additional information was found on the second man reportedly arrested in Great Barrington.
I arrived at the scene about two hours after the arrests were made. I walked through the hallway that leads to the apartment complex, an area that also houses several businesses. The climate in the building was as if nothing had happened. I walked across the main street of Great Barrington and into a popular coffee shop. I spoke with the person taking orders, and she said that no one had mentioned the ICE arrests during the morning. There are other local journalists who frequent this coffee shop, but they were not there at the time I arrived.
I walked back in the corridor through which the apartment complex could be accessed and spoke to a clerk in one of the adjoining businesses who knew who one of the men was, where he worked, and the country from which he came. She said that he was originally from Mexico. The shop worker had not been in the business at the time of the arrests and had not witnessed it.
I called the Massachusetts district attorney’s office in Pittsfield and asked if they knew of the planned action by ICE and also what they thought about the incident. The attorney who returned my call expressed distress, which I also felt, and said that the district attorney’s office had no knowledge about the arrests and had a policy, a state policy, of not being involved in the actions that ICE carried out in Berkshire County. While it is state policy not to become involved in these actions by the federal government, Governor Maura Healey stated, in an end-of-year interview, that Massachusetts was not a sanctuary state and at the same time would not assist the federal government in their actions against immigrants. She said, “We are not a sanctuary state” (CBS News, December 22, 2024) in that interview. The town in which today’s immigration raid took place, Great Barrington, however, is a sanctuary town.
On May 7, 2025, I interviewed a neighbor of one of the people who was arrested. The neighbor said that the person‘s name is Arturo and she knows that he is in his early 20s. She called him a “sweet kid.” According to this source, she noticed at least two people walking on her floor of the apartment building over a period of a few weeks and mentioned to one of these individuals that the door to the fire escape needed to be kept closed. She described the tenants in the apartment building as friendly toward one another and accepting. She said that she had helped Arturo with some court papers, but did not know what those papers involved. That person spelled the name of the man apprehended as “Artoro.”
I visited the restaurant where Arturo worked as a chef, and the owner or manager was not available to speak with me. A worker in a nearby restaurant declined to comment, although she said she knew Arturo quite well. I mentioned that I could speak to her anonymously, but she declined again.
I spoke next to Ben Elliott, who is the creative director of the Triplex Cinema just across a small parking lot from Barrington House where Arturo lived. Mr. Elliott saw much of the events that took place during Arturo’s arrest. Mr. Elliott is also a selectboard member in Great Barrington. He knew about the court incident that involved Arturo and described the issue as one involving a minor motor vehicle incident. He spoke about Arturo being a “nice guy, a good worker, and the father of a young daughter.” He categorized the incident as “really disturbing” and added that Arturo was a “nonviolent contributing member of society.” He said that yesterday’s events were “terrifying” and that they were “designed to be terrifying.” He added that besides the camouflaged members of ICE and US Marshals (I cannot confirm the presence of US Marshals), there were vans and darkened SUVs, and a BearCat. An unmasked lead agent accompanied four masked agents who carried assault weapons. One agent carried a huge battering ram across his shoulders, and a worker at the apartment building had to intervene so that a door would not be battered.
Immigrants, according to Mr. Elliott, are a “vital part of the Berkshires,” and “ICE is trying to destroy that.” I asked him about the drone that accompanied ICE, and he said that it was “shocking to see.”
I sent an email to an immigrant rights group, BASIC (Berkshire Alliance to Support the Immigrant Community), to find out whether or not Arturo had any relatives with him in Massachusetts. The group offers a wide array of services to immigrants, and at this writing, I have not received a response.
Some of the onlookers at the arrest demanded that a warrant be shown, but no one displayed one.
I called both the federal court in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Immigration Court in Boston. The federal court employee I spoke with said that the court did not take part in immigration issues or issue warrants for the arrest of immigrants. The employee at the Immigration Court said that he could not comment about warrants and that I would have to travel to Boston where documents could be seen. What he meant by “documents” was not made clear.
In April 2012, Smithsonian Magazine named Great Barrington the best small town in America. There’s a small-town charm to the place, and it is a destination for many people, especially from the greater New York Metropolitan area. Second home ownership thrives here along with tourist and cultural destinations such as Tanglewood, many theater companies, museums, including the famous Rockwell Museum, Jacob’s Pillow dance venue, and many cultural and tourist attractions.
Much of the labor that drives the tourist economy, such as restaurants, shops, and hotels and motels, are staffed by people like Arturo who come here for a better life, work hard, and sometimes send money they’ve earned back to their home countries. This is not a new story in the US, as much of the agriculture that produces food for an untold number of people around the world is based on lots of migrant labor.
To see ICE officers in military gear carrying automatic assault rifles, battering rams, etc., with a drone flying overhead is not exactly what many who live and visit the area picture. That due process of law may have been broken by not producing a warrant for the arrest of an immigrant is concerning. That many immigrants across the US are faced with deportation to countries they do not know and are hostile to human rights is also alarming. That this arrest in a generally open-minded part of the US sends a chilling message for those who believe in human dignity and hold that the law functions for all.
Arturo and millions of other immigrants are trying to support themselves and their families, often coming from nations that have regressive social and political policies. Many immigrants work jobs no one else wants, no matter the propaganda about taking away work from citizens of the US. These workers also are not likely to complain about working conditions or pay, as their presence in the workforce is tenuous at best given the government’s campaign against immigrants.
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