Leora Matison was parking her car on Monday in Danbury when she noticed a man in front of her wearing an armored vest. The man, she said, was approaching the car parked behind her.  

Matison, a member of Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, began recording the incident with her phone. The video shows Matison repeatedly asking the man, whose shirt read “U.S. Marshal,” if he had a warrant, and to show her his badge number. The man does not respond, except to tell her to step back. 

Matison said she witnessed the agent remove a woman from the car and transfer her into their car. In the back of the woman’s car, she said, were children’s toys.  

She was one of what Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants co-founder Juan Fonseca Tapia said were 12 to 15 people who had been detained by ICE agents in Danbury within the last few days. According to Fonseca Tapia, several members of the organization’s Rapid Response Team, who have been trained to help members of the immigrant community when such activity occurs, took videos of the detainments.

The videos are marked as taking place on 5th Street, Moss Avenue and White Street in Danbury, an area near the Danbury Superior Courthouse.   

Connecticut has seen stepped up immigration enforcement in cities and towns over the past week, from the detention of a woman in New Haven who was taking her kids to school, to four men who were detained while working at a car wash in Southington, to a Meriden high schooler who was detained, along with his father, shortly before he was set to graduate. 

Across the country, protests to such actions have exploded into arrests, prompting a showdown in California between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard. Tuesday also saw the arrest of New York’s Comptroller Brad Lander, a mayoral candidate, as he walked with an immigrant who had attended an immigration court hearing earlier that day. 

Tapia said that the group believed there were between 25 and 35 ICE agents in Danbury on Monday. He said the organization became aware of ICE activity around 5 a.m., when they started to send members of their rapid response teams out to canvas the streets. 

“It has been a very hard day, and painful day for me and for many of us,” Tapia told a crowd of people gathered in a parking lot across from the Danbury Superior Courthouse on Tuesday evening. 

At the Tuesday press conference, Karen Hunter, a leader for Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, told a crowd of people that she’d encountered two young women walking down White Street, handed them cards listing their rights in the case of an encounter with ICE and told them to be careful. 

According to Greater Danbury Unites for Immigrants, the two were later apprehended and detained by ICE. 

“These girls could have been my daughter or my granddaughter. We need to do better protecting our community from horrible kidnapping,” Hunter said. 

Fonseca Tapia told CT Mirror that they knew the identity of one person who had been taken by ICE, a man who he said was exiting the courthouse. 

He and others spoke about fear among members of the community and mentioned that a nearby bakery that people often frequented was nearly empty on Monday. 

Yesenia Bernabi, whose family has owned La Mexicana Bakery on White Street for 25 years, said she’d never witnessed a similar situation.

“We have never seen our customers, our clients, people that we know, scared, scared, petrified to even come to our parking lot, come to get bread, come to get food,” she said. 

Bernabi said she had to ask ICE agents to leave the bakery parking lot on Monday. She said that although they left when she asked, they later returned. 

Julian Shafer, a history teacher at Danbury High School, said he’d watched his students struggle when a family member was forced to leave the country.  

“As a teacher of undocumented children, I’ve seen students of mine suffer emotionally, financially and academically because family members of theirs have been deported,” he said. “I personally have had students who had to drop out because they had to work to support their family when a parent was deported. They were heartbroken. They wanted nothing more than to stay in school and learn with their peers.” 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 35% of Danbury’s approximately 88,700 residents were born outside the U.S. Thirty-eight percent of students in Danbury Public School are learning English, a number that has increased over the past few years. 

Danbury has a history of working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2009, the City Council voted to enact an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to become part of the 287 (g) program, which allows local law enforcement to take on some of the duties of immigration enforcement officers. 

And in 2006, a group of 11 men from Ecuador, who became known as the Danbury 11, were picked up by an undercover Danbury police officer and turned over to federal immigration agents. 

Rep. Farley Santos, D-Danbury, said that this week’s detainments brought back memories of that bitter history. 

“That was a terrible situation back then, and it impacted many immigrants. It hurt businesses here and the economy locally, and more importantly than that is how people feel,” Santos said. “Absolutely, that brings up old scars, I would say.”  

Santos himself was living as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. until age 20. He said he was outraged by recent events but tried to calm his nerves.

“This creates a lot of fear, but our job as public officials is to get information out to folks to know there are resources available to them and tamp down that fear that is being promulgated in the community now.” 

Rep. Pat Callahan, R-New Fairfield, said that he was not concerned about the ICE activity occurring in Danbury, having worked in law enforcement for almost 30 years. 

“The fake narrative is that these are poor people they’re going after. No, it’s the bad actors. It’s the people who are on the radar for having committed crime,” Callahan said. 

He also criticized the Trust Act for degrading public safety by preventing local police from open communication with ICE.

“To be clear, legal immigration great,” he said. “Illegal immigration and you’re here committing additional crimes, you should be removed.” 

Fonseca Tapia also criticized the Trust Act, which he said didn’t go far enough to protect immigrants. He noted that the bill did not include a provision that would have prevented certain state agencies from sharing information with ICE, such as a person’s address.

Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves told CT Mirror that any collaboration between ICE and the city of Danbury was long past. He said neither he nor the chief of police were made aware of the federal agents’ presence in Danbury on Monday. 

Alves, who grew up as an undocumented immigrant and received his citizenship in 2017, said he agreed that people who have committed serious crimes should be the main targets of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that they should receive due process.   

“As somebody who’s formerly undocumented, I’ll tell you that nobody that grew up like me or currently is [undocumented] wants serious criminals living among them,” he said. 

Alves noted that local governments aren’t able to stop ICE from being on their roads. All they can do, he said, is try to comfort local residents, offer them resources and demonstrate the city’s position on immigration. 

“Folks who are here, hardworking, who are the backbones of our economy, our neighbors, your kids’ friends at schools, family members — we really should do what we can to protect folks and give people a path to be here legally,” he said. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to a request for comment.