Nov 7
2025
The consequences of Trump’s immigration crackdown
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From left: Jennifer Connor, Brittany Triggs, Pam Kefi and Ba Zan Lin. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel.
Ba Zan Lin spent his first 18 years living under authoritarian regimes in his native Burma before coming to Buffalo in 2006 seeking political asylum. He says he and others in the region’s immigrant community recognize the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of detainment and deportation of non-citizens it characterizes as “illegal.”
The raids, the street grabs, family members disappearing into a byzantine network of federal detention centers — “the masked men waiting for them at night” — all these feel traumatizing and familiar to those who fled oppression elsewhere for the promise of a better life in the United States, he said.
“We experienced tyranny, we experienced dictatorship. We fled these things. And now we’re experiencing them again,” Lin, now a U.S. citizen, told the audience Wednesday evening at a panel discussion sponsored by Investigative Post.
“There are some red flags I’m seeing right now, that my fellow immigrants are seeing right now,” he said. “We need to address them before it’s too late.”
Lin was one of four speakers invited to discuss the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, who since January have been the subject of raids, arrests and detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies, sometimes in collaboration with local police forces. The event took place at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Buffalo’s Elmwood Village.
The other panelists were:
- Brittany Triggs, a staff attorney for the Erie County Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyers Project, where she works with immigrants fighting deportation in Buffalo’s federal immigration court.
- Pamela Bos Kefi, CEO of Journey’s End Refugee Services, which helps refugees from strife abroad resettle in Western New York.
- Jennifer Connor, executive director of Justice for Migrant Families, which provides support for detainees at the ICE detention facility in Batavia and their families.
The event drew about 300 people, the largest attendance ever for an event hosted by Investigative Post. It began with a presentation by Investigative Post reporter J. Dale Shoemaker, who has covered ICE activity and immigration issues since the beginning of the year.
That reporting has documented the high rate of solitary confinement at the ICE detention center in Batavia, the substandard medical care offered to those detained there and the numerous raids and arrests that have taken place around the region.
Investigative Post has also reported on ICE’s deception about what it’s doing, noting that while the Buffalo ICE office says it’s primarily arresting criminals, the majority of those detained have no criminal history.
A “chilling effect”
Triggs said her clients all are seeking legal status in the U.S. None have been detained or deported this year, she said.
But she attributed that to good luck, and she does not expect it will last.
“What we’re seeing is people who are following the steps they’re supposed to follow to get legal status and remain in the country legally being arrested on their way to work, at work, taking their children to school, at the grocery store,” she said.
Triggs said the tenor of federal immigration enforcement pivots not on what existing laws say, but by White House policy decisions regarding how the law is to be interpreted and executed. Policy can be “changed by decree,” she said, and judges and attorneys alike are hard put to keep up.
She said one of the “most shocking” policy changes since Trump took office is the presence of ICE and other federal agents in federal courthouses. She described agents — some uniformed, some plainclothes — roaming the corridors. Triggs said she’d witnessed officers outside court rooms calling to apprise colleagues when their target left a proceeding and entered the elevator to leave. When the elevator doors opened on the first floor, she said, the alerted agents were waiting to seize the target and whisk them away for questioning.
Some detained at the courthouse are eventually released. Others are arrested and sent to the ICE detention center or the Niagara County Jail, which contracts with ICE to hold women detainees. Some are sent to federal detention facilities in other states.
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Triggs said this has had a “chilling effect” on immigrants pursuing legal status. She said failure to appear for a scheduled check-in or court appearance are grounds for a deportation order. If you do show up, you might be arrested. She said she’s seen a spike in “in absentia” deportation orders as a result.
She said the Trump administration’s policy seems intended not only to stop the inflow of immigrants but “to prevent those already here from being successful” in navigating the legal path to permanent residency or citizenship.
“People are being disappeared”
Connor’s organization, Justice for Migrant Families, dates to the first Trump administration. It was formed nine years ago, when federal agents raided four Mexican restaurants in Buffalo and detained 25 workers. Many faced jail time, deportation or both. The owner of the restaurants was charged with tax evasion and conspiracy to harbor illegal aliens and sentenced to a year in jail.
Connor said in Western New York ICE’s targets have been “primarily workers … people providing community services, putting roofs over our head and food on our community’s tables.”
Wage-earners are the easiest to scoop up, she said, because they commute to and from work on predictable schedules and routes. In Western New York agents have raided construction sites, farms and an Asian grocery store.
Connors described federal agents surveilling and tracking their targets, then surrounding them with cars in public places and spiriting them away. It happens in mere minutes, she said.
“People are being disappeared,” Connor said, noting that detainees sometimes are quickly and without notice transferred between federal facilities. She called that part of “an intentional plan” to deprive them of access to the resources they need to fend off deportation — family, money, lawyers, hope.
Spouses are afraid to intervene, Connor said, for fear “they’ll get arrested, too, and their children won’t have a parent.”
The benefits of welcoming immigrants
One of Trump’s first executive orders shut down the federal refugee resettlement program that has bolstered Western New York’s stagnant population. Journey’s End and other nonprofits in the past have contracted with the federal government to provide services to the newcomers.
Adding insult to injury, the administration also refused to reimburse agencies like Journey’s End for services already provided under federal contract. The setbacks threatened to sink the organization. Kefi was forced to lay off workers and join other agencies in seeking emergency financial support elsewhere.
She said Journey’s End and similar agencies continue to “dodge the unknown and the threats” emanating from Washington, D.C.
Kefi said employees of agencies that serve undocumented immigrants have been told they will no longer be eligible for federal student loan forgiveness programs. The agencies themselves are at risk of losing their nonprofit status.
“We’re being told we’re criminals,” she said.
The benefits of welcoming immigrants are numerous and quantifiable, Kefi said. She said immigrants comprise 11 percent of the city’s residents and are responsible for the first uptick in the city’s population since the end of the Second World War.
Among other support services, Journey’s End helps connect newly arrived immigrants with employers. Kefi said many local companies are disappointed that the Trump administration has deprived them of workers.
More than that, she said, Buffalo’s immigrant community has enriched its culture with diverse cuisines, new businesses and festivals, and dozens of languages spoken on the streets and in the schools. The city will be poorer for the administration’s campaign against immigration, she said.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomAll of which pales in comparison to the fear gripping her agency’s clientele.
“Nearly everyone we serve is impacted,” Kefi said. “They’re worried, or afraid of what might happen, or they are at great risk.”
Many parents, worried they will be detained or deported, are seeking guidance from her agency on guardianship plans for their children. Participation in English language classes and workshops has declined, she said, because people are afraid to leave their houses.
“The vibe on the street is bad”
Lin, who worked for PUSH Buffalo when he first came here, noted that immigrants also have helped to revitalize dilapidated housing in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Those neighborhoods no longer feel so welcoming.
“The vibe on the street is bad. It’s beyond bad,” he said.
People who have brown skin and foreign accents must don “an extra layer of courage” just to go for a walk, he said. Many of his fellow Burmese were afraid to attend festivals and other community gatherings for fear ICE agents will snatch them away.
Their fear is justified. During June’s Burmese Water Festival on Grant Street, federal agents were parked just a block away in unmarked cars, surveilling the home of an Iranian man they’d targeted for removal.
Neighbors — many of them alerted by Connors’ organization — responded by keeping an eye on the federal agents and maintaining a presence on the street, so that there would be witnesses to any attempted arrest. They brought the man and his family food so they wouldn’t have to risk leaving their house. That intervention worked. After a week, the federal agents gave up and left.
Wednesday’s event at Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Avenue was attended by about 300.
Lin asked those in attendance at Wednesday’s panel discussion to be “vigilant” in defending their neighbors. Aspiring despots first come for “the least protected, the most vulnerable” in the community, he said. But they don’t stop there.
“ICE is afraid of you. Not me — you,” he told the mostly white audience.
Again referring to his youth in Burma, he noted that the measures taken by ICE agents to conceal their identities — unmarked vehicles, face masks, no badges or name-tags — indicates their authority is vulnerable to challenges by ordinary citizens.
“As long as they’re still wearing masks, they’re still afraid of us,” he said.
