What happens when federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents know, or think they know, where to find people they have in their sites?
North Adams is facing this question tonight. The City Council will consider a vote on an Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Formula Grant that includes conditions imposed by the U.S. Department of Justice that would require North Adams police to cooperate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In a debate that has spanned three meetings and will move into a fourth, members of the council and the community are raising larger questions about the connections between ICE and local law enforcement and the city’s responsiblity to protect all members of their community.
“What’s the ripple effect on communities,” asked Hema Sarang-Sieminski, executive director of Jane Doe Inc.,” if (decision-makers or police departments are) walking that line between compliance with the law, the letter of the law, and the actual impact in practice on a community that that may be very well ripped apart or made further vulnerable?”
Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts state coalition against domestic violence, one of 16 state coalitions who won a lawsuit in September to remove similar DoJ conditions from grants through the Office on Violence Against Women. This union has now blossomed, Sarang-Sieminski said, into 25 or more groups who have joined in a collective effort.
In the Northern Berkshires, some 40 to 50 people have spoken before the council against signing the grant with those provisions included. More than 300 have signed a petition. They argue that accepting the grant could give ICE leverage to influence local police, extract information and cause harm to local families.
‘What’s the ripple effect on communities, if (decision-makers or police departments are) walking that line between compliance with the law, the letter of the law, and the actual impact in practice on a community that that may be very well ripped apart or made further vulnerable?’ — Hema Sarang-Sieminski, executive director of Jane Doe Inc.
Councilor Lillian Zavatsky has called on the City Council to create an ordinance for strong, clearly stated protections for local immigrant communities.
This debate comes at a time when partnerships between ICE and state and local law enforcement are surging.
“As of October 1, 2026, more than 1,850 local and state law enforcement agencies participate in the Task Force Model across 30 states and two U.S. territories, covering at least 136 million people, and the program continues to grow,” according to a report by FWD.us, a policy organization for criminal justice and immigration.
“More than 29,000 state and local law enforcement officers across the country are now estimated to be deputized by ICE. … The ‘shadow surge’ in immigration arrests in June and July 2026 was buoyed by state and local law enforcement, who in some states accounted for over half of immigration arrests.”
In Massachusetts too, law enforcement is serving as extension of ICE, according to a 2026 investigation and report by Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CfJJ).
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has signed the Protect Act into law in August, attempting to limit ICE’s involvement with state and local police. But ‘immigration enforcement’ continues. Among them, ICE reports taking 82 people in three days in Boston in October. In September, ICE detained least 24 immigrants across New Bedford, Dartmouth and Fall River.
“Many of those arrested have lived here for many years and have families here,” Healey said in response. “They were on their way to work at a fishing plant, supermarket … We’ve heard of one father who was arrested and has several children at home, including a one month old baby. We heard about an 8-year-old boy who was waiting for his father to pick him up from school.”
In considering the Byrne grant specifically, North Adams City Councilors and locals have considered two levels of risk. In meetings on October 13 and October 27, the council has focused largely on the legal liabilities the city could face in the courts if they were to accept the grant and refuse to cooperate with its conditions.
Sarang-Sieminski understands the concern for funding, she said. Victim services resources are scarce already, and she felt a responsibility to programs and communities they serve. They also hold a core value that all survivors need access to safety and healing. She and JDI’s community partners were concerned that they cound draw backlash and scrutiny from the DoJ to themselves and the communities they protect.
In response, she said, she has leaned into the power of numbers, the power of people standing firm side by side.
“We had initially 16 coalitions that have since blossomed to the 25 plus who joined in this collective effort,” she said, “to say this is against (our) fundamental values … and we’re going to stand together and make sure the spirit of is upheld. We felt that we were stronger together.”
Members of the community in the in the Northern Berkshire community have spoken of an immediate risk that their friends and family and neighbors are facing in everyday life, in public places, in the streets as they head to work and school, in classrooms and workplaces, in their homes. When ICE agents have detained people — or seriously injured or killed them — without cause, without evidence, without charges, without knowing their names. People ICE has taken have vanished into detention centers or disappeared. Families have been divided.
Sarang-Sieminski agrees that this is a real concern. As an immigration attorney and executive director for JDI, she sees a current climate of continuous and intensifying attacks, and an emboldening of people who cause harm.
She traces broad effects beyond in immigrant communities — for people who hold any identity or point of view the federal administration opposes, for women, children who have survived abuse, people of color, LGBTQ folk and more.
When abusers see the federal administration backing them, she said, they often increase their violence. They think, ’if I do something that’s causing harm, the likelihood that I’m going be held accountable is pretty low, given that some of the people in highest positions of power have also caused harm and aren’t being held accountable.’
She hears these fears from people living with and resisting that violence, she said. They have showed up in some themes around hotline calls and in reports from programs that support survivors
Survivors are saying that their abusers tell them “‘Well, guess what? No one’s going to believe you even more now.’”
‘When ICE does try to exercise their ability to request information, who do they go to?’ — North Adams City Councilor Lillian Zavatsky
“When ICE does try to exercise their ability to request information, who do they go to?” North Adams City Councilor Lillian Zavatsky asked North Adams Police Chief Mark Bailey at the October 13 City Council meeting.
“The only time I’ve ever encountered it, a call would come in to our dispatch center,” he said. “We take the call and we see exactly what they want. Most of the time it’s ‘do you have such and such a person in custody,’ and since that’s public information for our blotter note, we can let them know, yes we have such and such a person in custody.”
Under the Protect Act, providing this information is now illegal: “An officer or employee may not knowingly give a federal immigration authority nonpublic personal information, advance notice of a person’s release, a person’s custody status, or advance notice of a court appearance” and “the desk may not confirm or deny that a person is held.”
Chief Bailey asserted that in sending information to ICE, his records officer was responding to ‘a public records request’ — and that the department will continue to do this in the future.
“Yeah, we have 10 days to respond if we wanted to go that route. But then we’d have to treat everybody the same,” he said. “… We can’t treat one person different from another. We can get caught in legislation for that as well.”
In fact, according to the public records law, a police department is not legally required to proved that information, even if it is ‘public’ in any form: ‘nothing in the written response shall limit an agency’s or municipality’s ability to redact or withhold information in accordance with state or federal law.’
The North Adams police department does not uphold civil detainers, Chief Bailey said: “We don’t hold you extra or wait for ICE to show up and turn you over to ICE or anything like that. We don’t go out with ICE looking for people. Police departments across Massachusetts don’t go out looking for people to pull them in for civil detainerships. We don’t work like that.”
A number of in-depth reports say that Massachusetts police communication and cooparation with ICE is widespread.
According to the Citizens for Juvenile Justice 2026 report, local police, sheriffs, and courthouse staff regularly collaborate, and share information, with federal immigration authorities.
According to the Citizens for Juvenile Justice 2026 report, local police, sheriffs, and courthouse staff regularly collaborate, and share information, with federal immigration authorities. CfJJ submitted more than 90 public records requests to police, sheriff and district attorney’s offices in Massachusetts.
“A public records request (PRR) to 57 police departments across the state found that 28 departments had policies allowing, or in a few cases requiring, collaboration with ICE,” the report says.
“Most sheriff departments have incredibly close collaboration with ICE, sharing daily logs of who comes into their custody, and regularly sharing information about when and where individuals are going to court and whether they might be released on bail.”
In Western Massachusetts, for more than two years, the Hampden County Sheffiff’s Office under Sheriff Nick Cocchi “has routinely sent ICE agents the name, date of birth, place of birth, race, home address, and other sensitive personal information of people held by the sheriff,” according to the Shoestrong.
ICE was given this information even for those who had not been convicted of a crime, the Shoestring reports. While the Protect Act has had an effect, the Sheriff’s office has said it will continue its partnership with Homeland Security Investigations, and ICE can still learn of arrests in other ways, including fingerprinting, even for misdemeanors.
Since the Protect Act has gone into effect, 12 of the state’s 14 Sheriffs have sent a letter to Maura Healey asking her to lighten restrictions on their communications with ICE.
According to the Massachusetts ACLU and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, The Protect Act bars new or future 287g agreements between local law enforcement and immigration — that language appears to allow existing ones, and ICE has reported 287g activity in Mass. as recently as September. (The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office has not yet responded to a request for more information.)
Sarang-Sieminski defended the Protect Act’s strong protections on prohibition of overreach or overcollaboration between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement.
‘The importance of having a firewall between those agencies has been cited as an essential component of community policing standards.’
“The importance of having a firewall between those agencies has been cited as an essential component of community policing standards,” she said.
“I think we need municipalities, we need our state partners to be brave in this moment to look to what Massachusetts law is. Our Attorney General is a strong fighter for those in vulnerable situations, for vulnerable communities. And her office is fighting back at every turn of these kinds of incursions into Massachusetts values and Massachusetts laws and policies.”
And beyond specific legal restrictions, she shared a concern about informal communication between law enforcement and immigration enforcement, and the larger influences they could have, within a police department, between the police and the comunity, and within the community.
‘There is that direct threat from an agency,” she said, “and then there is the ripple effect of a chilling effect of cultural impact. These kinds of escalations of harm to communities … impact lives of survivors.’
“There is that direct threat from an agency,” she said, “and then there is the ripple effect of a chilling effect of cultural impact. These kinds of escalations of harm to communities … impact lives of survivors.
“I come from an immigration attorney practice background. So I know every time there have been escalations of immigration enforcement, you see a chilling effect in survivors’ ability to reach out.”
Survivors of abuse are now afraid that if they seek help or speak out, or try to leave a dangerous situation, they can be taken by ICE.
In Mass Live coverage that Sarang-Sieminski supports, Irene Rotondo writes: “Survivors of domestic violence in Massachusetts’ immigrant communities have increasingly faced a stark choice: stay with the man who is hurting them, or seek a restraining order at a courthouse where immigration officers could be waiting.
“For many, the abuse may feel like the safer bet. Across the state, hotline workers, shelter staff and policy advocates tell the same story: over the past year, immigrant survivors have quietly disappeared.
“They’re skipping restraining order hearings, dropping out of counseling and choosing not to call police — not because the abuse has stopped, but because they’re more afraid of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than of the people hurting them.”
‘They’re skipping restraining order hearings, dropping out of counseling and choosing not to call police — not because the abuse has stopped, but because they’re more afraid of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) than of the people hurting them.’ — Irene Rotondo, Mass Live
The use of systems by abusers is a longstanding, Sarang-Sieminski said. Her field understands that as a long, tried and true tactic of harm.
“The heart of intimate partner violence or sexual violence is power and control,” she said. The equation in an abuser’s mind is: “‘what can I exercise power over? Who is vulnerable to that system? And how do I make things work in a way that’s going to rob the individual who I’m trying to hurt of even more agency and power, and make sure I get what I want in the end?”
She sees a growing confluence of immigration enforcement with anti-immigrant, anti-DEI, anti-trans and other kinds of enforcement against many points of view and identities the federal administration chooses to target.
“And you can imagine what the landscape would be like for a survivor who might be holding one of those marginalized identities,” she said.
At the federal level, she also recognizes a level of lawlessness that has become endemic to the DoJ. As an agency, they are willing to blatantly disregard orders of federal court charges, she said. Blocked in one avenue, the agency will deliberately and persistently seek another.
“One year ends and another begins … and the tactics of the administration to shift. … That tension between direct resources, overreach the potential for abusive power by these agencies that have in many ways gone rogue is a really important concern.
‘What happens when you have evidence over over and over again that an agency has really pushed far beyond any kind of statutory, moral and legal authority?’
“… What happens when you have evidence over over and over again that an agency has really pushed far beyond any kind of statutory, moral and legal authority?
“… There are aspects of this particular landscape right now that do beg the question: this agency has so far surpassed its original intent, in power, resources, use of tactics, and it’s causing significant harm to a number of people.”
She calls for accountability, for a broad group of people who support this funding. And she stands behind her convictions and the ethics of her field.
“We’re going to shout that loud and clear,” she said, “this movement in Massachusetts and a number of other states is very clear, that domestic violence and sexual assault services must be accessible to all survivors, regardless of who you are.”
