A 41-year-old Fair Havener named Oscar Ocampo was taking his seven-month-old son to daycare when he was suddenly surrounded by five federal immigration agents.

Ocampo clutched his baby to his chest, in disbelief that these armed men had come for him.

That scene played out at around 8:50 a.m. Monday on Exchange Street near James Street in New Haven.

Ocampo doesn’t have a criminal record or any pending charges, according to state court records. He said he has been working through the process of securing a work permit. He said he has an immigration-court date scheduled for June in his bid to stay in this country.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, too, appeared to be surprised as they attempted to apprehend Ocampo on Monday morning.

They appeared to think he was alone in his truck — and didn’t realize he had a young child with him.

“Stop,” Ocampo recalled one of the federal agents saying to his colleagues. “Baby!”

Soon thereafter, more people emerged on the residential block.

These were neighbors and local immigrant-rights activists — holding their phones aloft, recording ICE’s attempted arrest of a fellow Fair Havener.

The activists and neighbors urged the agents to leave Ocampo alone. They asked Ocampo for contact information for a family member who could come and help.

“This is our neighbor,” one activist said to the ICE agents. “They belong here. This is Connecticut. Get out.”

Roughly 20 minutes later, ICE left. Without Ocampo. Ocampo and the activists and neighbors on the street watched the agents drive away.

Even as Ocampo’s future is uncertain, he remained filled with gratitude days later as he reflected on people he had never met before, from the New Haven Immigrants Coalition (NHIC), showing up to his defense at such an unsettling moment.

“They’re beautiful people,” he said.

The account of events included in this story is based on an Independent interview with Ocampo (conducted with Spanish-language interpretation by La Voz Hispana’s Norma Rodriguez-Reyes). The Independent has also reviewed video footage from the incident and spoken with NHIC activists who happened across ICE’s attempted arrest of Ocampo and then turned out in force to try to protect their neighbor.

“Hate has no home here,” a New Haven Immigrants Coalition spokesperson said in a written statement while providing a link to the group’s Instagram page as well as its rapid-response-line phone number, 854-666-4472 (854-NO-MIGRA).

“On Monday, April 27 five ICE agents tried to detain a neighbor carrying his baby to daycare in Fair Haven,” the group’s spokesperson wrote. “This neighbor, with a backpack of milk and daycare supplies at the ready, held his baby close and calmly. School buses passed. People taking their kids to school, heading to work, and walking the dog stopped what they were doing to respond in an instant. New Haven Immigrants Coalition showed up. We recorded. We stood united and ICE went home. Our neighbor and his baby are safe thanks to our resistance. We will keep up that resistance as long as our community is under attack. Hate isn’t welcome here, but solidarity is thriving.”

Ocampo told the Independent that he came to the U.S. from his home country of Ecuador in 2022. He works a construction job, lives in Fair Haven, and has a wife and four children, two of whom are in Ecuador, two in New Haven. He was dropping off his youngest child, his 7-month-old son, at daycare Monday when ICE attempted to detain him.

Ocampo stressed how surprised he was that ICE had come for him. He said he noticed a dark-colored vehicle near his truck as he made his way from home to daycare drop off. Only when he got out of his truck on Exchange Street did he find himself surrounded by ICE agents.

Ocampo said that one of the agents spoke in Spanish. Ocampo said ICE agents showed him a picture of himself when he entered the country three years ago, and said that his “entrance” to this country had been “revoked.”

ICE did not respond to requests for comment by the publication time of this article about why they sought to arrest Ocampo on Monday.

Ocampo said he felt safe in the moment after ICE left and the New Haven Immigrants Coalition activists remained behind to help. However, he now finds himself concerned each day that ICE will return and that he’ll be whisked off to a detention facility.

He told the Independent that he has tried to live his life honestly. His car is registered. He has a driver’s license. He came to New Haven in search of work, and chose this city because of how many people he knew from Ecuador who had migrated here as well.

Asked on Friday about how he his doing several days after this attempted arrest, Ocampo wrote to the Independent via text message about his fear of being apprehended by ICE on the street: “El miedo es salir a la calle que nos atrapen Ice.” He said he would like to move to a different apartment, but doesn’t have enough money right now to afford a new place.

Norma Rodriguez-Reyes contributed to this report.