On Friday morning, the activist group El Centro Hispano and officials from around North Carolina denounced a spate of ICE raids across the Triangle that have led to the detention of up to twenty-five local undocumented immigrants over the past several weeks.

At a press conference, U.S. Representative David Price spoke about his work to protect undocumented families in North Carolina. Price said that he spoke with ICE officials last week and called on them

to

be honest and transparent about what initiated the raids. However, he said, they offered little new information about their policies and practices.

Price said he believes ICE should only detain dangerous criminals.

“The very notion of a roundup implies a certain indiscriminate approach, and [there were] a lot of people who [ICE] will admit were picked up simply incidentally,” he said. “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s not an acceptable basis for federal detention policy.”

Representatives of El Centro Hispano relayed the story of one of the men who was arrested. (His wife was present at the press conference but asked not to be named.) The man was arrested early in the morning after ICE agents spotted him as he was turning on his wife’s car. Frightened, he rushed back inside. Wearing vests that read “Police,” the ICE agents knocked on the man’s door and insisted that they were only looking for a fugitive and that they would not ask for immigration papers. The family allowed them into the house, and after searching through each room, the agents asked for documentation from the family and proceeded to detain the husband.

Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle, who previously condemned the raids in a press release last week, warned that raids conducted by federal agents often break trust between the undocumented community and local law enforcement. That wariness often makes undocumented immigrants hesitant to contact police when they’re faced with acts of violence or other emergencies.

“What’s happening at the national level, as it trickles down to the local level, it impedes any trust that we have with our local law enforcement, so we work every day as much as we can with El Centro and our friends to make sure that all of our community members understand that at the local level, everyone has our support,” Lavelle said. “And we want everyone to feel safe and welcome.”

Lavelle and other local officials are also hosting initiatives that include “Know Your Rights” events that help educate the undocumented community about the resources they can use to protect themselves against deportation.

As the INDY reported last week, other organizations including Siembra NC have also been reaching out to the Triangle’s undocumented community. That includes helping coordinate neighborhood group messaging networks so that neighbors can warn each other about possible ICE sightings. Siembra NC has also created a list of “interrupters,” volunteers with papers who can approach and identify ICE agents if they’re spotted in the community.

El Centro Hispano has created a GoFundMe campaign to gather donations to help pay the legal fees for at least ten people who have been detained. All of the people who have been detained in the recent raids across in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, and Carrboro are now being held at a detention facility in Georgia where they are awaiting trial.