For more than a year, activists in Danbury have mobilized to support the local immigrant community as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has ramped up in one of the country’s most diverse cities.

Members of immigrant rights groups and their families have helped people compile custodial paperwork to prepare for the possibility that parents could be separated from their children. They’ve handed out red cards to members of the immigrant community, to help people understand their rights if they are approached by ICE agents. And they’ve filmed ICE vehicles they see on town streets.

But this week, activists say they are facing the nightmare scenario they hoped would never come: massive raids that have resulted in parents detained in front of their children at school bus stops and dozens of people arrested in Danbury in just a few days.

Representatives of Danbury Unites for Immigrants, which works to protect, support and empower immigrant families, said on Wednesday that at least 25 people were detained in the city that day. That number, if accurate, outpaces any single day of immigration arrests in the entire state of Connecticut since the Trump administration promised to crack down on illegal immigration.

According to CT Students for a Dream, which compiles counts of detainments based on arrests witnessed by activists, 16 more people were taken on Monday and 12 on Tuesday in Danbury, with additional arrests made in Stamford and Hamden on those days.

ICE officials did not return a request for comment on this week’s operation.

According to ICE data dating back to October 2022, which is processed and published by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, Connecticut saw the most arrests recorded in a single day last August during Operation Broken Trust, a four-day string of arrests in Connecticut that ICE announced resulted in more than 60 arrests, including some in Danbury.

But Monday’s arrest count compiled by activists would top that.

And with no sense of when ICE activity will abate, activists are preparing for the days ahead. Some of those in attendance at a press conference held by state officials Wednesday afternoon in Danbury said they haven’t slept in days, and some were visibly shaken, shedding tears as they listened to the speakers.

Many expressed frustration related to what they say is a lackluster response from elected officials, sentiments that spilled over during the press conference on Wednesday, as activists shouted over speakers, including Gov. Ned Lamont who ultimately left the podium mid-response.

U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, and Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves, who pressed a message of coalition building, also faced anger from the crowd, which demanded more action to protect immigrants from ICE and enforce the Connecticut Trust Act.

Some people also demanded an investigation into whether the Danbury Police Department has been cooperating with ICE in violation of the law, which outlines the circumstances under which local and state officials can work and communicate with the federal government’s detainment efforts.

The press conference was held in a place of layered and painful history for the Danbury community: Kennedy Park.

Speakers stood in front of a mural of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which is near the site where 11 day laborers waiting to be picked up for work in 2006 were instead tricked by a police officer posing as a contractor and handed over to federal immigration authorities.

The arrests resulted in a lawsuit that was settled in 2011. But by that time some men had been deported, and another had disappeared before receiving the settlement money, according to reporting from the Connecticut Post.

Alves told the crowd that some of the arrests by ICE this week also occurred in Kennedy Park. “We are now seeing racial profiling, random people being picked up off the streets right here at this park, bringing back memories of a time in this city that we want to forget about,” he said.

Alves thanked the activists for their work, saying “you’re the reason we know what’s going on,” but also voiced his concerns that activists, who have been pepper sprayed and hit by ICE vehicles in recent days, according to accounts from members of Danbury Unites for Immigrants, could also be in danger.

“What I need you to do too is understand that these are dangerous actors who have killed people, and I want your safety just as much as I don’t want people deported,” he said. “Videotape them, yell, do what you need to do, but keep a safe distance…because I don’t want to see something happen to you either.”

Volunteers, like Bill and Karen Hunter, members of the Danbury Unites for Immigrants rapid response team, are trained to stay 6 feet back from ICE agents and to comply with their orders as they attempt to record the arrest. Their main goal as they go into the streets is to get the name of the detainee, and try to notify their family.

But these safety precautions don’t seem to be as effective anymore.

“They’re escalating,” Karen Hunter said. “Last summer, no one was pepper sprayed.”

Bill Hunter said activists have been approached and pushed while filming, and a recorded encounter from yesterday posted by Danbury Unites for Immigrants shows an ICE agent approaching an advocate.

Last year, Operation Broken Trust resulted in 65 arrests in Connecticut, according to ICE. The operation ran from Aug. 12 to Aug. 15.

Some of these arrests were conducted outside Connecticut courthouses, and some people arrested faced criminal charges. A press release from ICE alleged that 29 individuals arrested by the organization had been convicted or charged in the U.S. with “serious crimes.”

But this year, the arrests look different, activists said.

“Over the last year, there have been mostly targeted arrests,” Tabitha Sookdeo, executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream, told the Connecticut Mirror on Tuesday. “Yesterday was out of trend with anything observed.”

The arrests Monday were seemingly more random, Sookdeo said, with ICE apprehending people at pickup sites for day laborers like Kennedy Park.

Hayes was also shouted over by activists on Wednesday, and she seemed ready for the criticism. “I just want to start by saying we’re all on the same side. None of us want what we are seeing,” she said.

“Is that why you thanked ICE last year?” one person shouted, referring to a House resolution that Hayes voted for that also condemned antisemitism. As her speech went on, Hayes urged people to work with officials to keep community members safe.

She said that she’d been elected to sit at the table where decisions are made. “I promise you that I will work as hard as I can to keep your families safe, but once you gave me a seat at the table, it means you don’t want me yelling in the window,” she said. “It means you want me at those tables, doing the job that you sent me to do. So at a moment where the criticism of me is coming from both the left and the right, I know I’m meeting in the middle where the people are.”