It wasn’t a normal morning. Helen Garcia knew that when she got up in the dark.
First, a cold shower to wash off the restless night. Then she put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover a tattoo that could identify her. After more than a year of activist work, Garcia had learned how to dress and what to carry when she might face off with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in her role as a member of a rapid response team that tracks ICE activity in Connecticut.
That might happen today, she thought.
It took an hour for Garcia to drive from Hartford to Danbury. She’d never been to the city before she joined Danbury Unites for Immigrants, a group that works to protect and support the immigrant community in one of the nation’s most diverse cities. Garcia had helped out in Danbury in the past, but since Monday, she’d spent every waking hour there, as ICE was conducting one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in the state’s history.
She arrived in Danbury around 6 a.m. Danbury is a nice town, she thought: Every time she’s here, she sees kids riding bikes. The families walking down the sidewalks look happy, and the kids getting out of school are laughing and talking. She wondered: Do they know what’s going on?
“Do they know why so many of these SUVs have such dark windows?” she asked. “They’re just existing casually among these atrocities that are targeted at them.”
On election night in 2024, Garcia had stayed up late to watch the polls. It was the first time she’d been old enough to cast her vote. When the results solidified, she started to cry. She’d read about Project 2025, and she knew what was likely to come next.
“I was thinking about my community. I was thinking about women,” she said. “You cry for a little bit, and then you do what you’ve gotta do. You do what you can.”
On Thursday, she called in sick to work — it didn’t make sense to be anywhere but Danbury.
“I’m supposed to be at work, and I’m so far below the poverty line I couldn’t touch it if I jumped 10 feet, but how am I supposed to work right now?” she said.
ICE agents had taken dozens of people from places like supermarkets and parks in Danbury over the course of the week, according to advocates who keep track. Agents appeared at school bus stops on the first day of school, according to advocates and elected officials. A video shared with The Connecticut Mirror showed ICE vehicles outside of a daycare.
Scenes Garcia recalled over the past few days in Danbury — happy residents walking down tree-lined streets, ICE agents in unmarked cars careening through school zones at high speed, chasing people and putting them in handcuffs — were a surreal combination.
For a year, members of Danbury Unites for Immigrants had prepared for the kind of scenario that was now playing out. In less than a week, the number of arrests they counted in Connecticut had reached nearly 100, including incidents in Stamford and Bridgeport. The group had conducted trainings, prepared kits of supplies to confront agents who deploy pepper spray and tear gas, distributed cards with emergency contact information and tried to help members of the community prepare legal paperwork in case parents get separated from citizen children. All of that preparation was now coming to a head.
Officials and advocates in Danbury said they witnessed ICE sweeps targeting people based on racial profiling. Compared to the beginning of this year, a larger percentage of people arrested by ICE in recent weeks have no criminal or pending criminal charges. In July, just 11%, or seven of the 64 people arrested on the ground by ICE had a criminal charge.
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