As ICE continues to detain residents of the East End in actions that have caused concern for the safety of all who witness and are targeted by the raids, Latino advocacy group OLA of Eastern Long Island is proposing new legislation to enable local police departments to respond to these concerns.
OLA Executive Director Minerva Perez has begun to present the resolution, drafted by retired State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr., to town and village governments all over the East End, and it will be up for discussion at the Shelter Island and Southold Town Boards’ Tuesday morning work sessions. Mr. Thiele serves on OLA’s Board of Directors.
Pictured Above: OLA Executive Director Minerva Perez gave an overview of the proposed resolution to a crowd of about 80 residents gathered at the Unitarian Universalists of Southold meeting house on Feb. 2.
“They are looking for people that look a certain way and have a certain accent or certain language they are speaking,” Ms. Perez told a crowd gathered at the North Fork Action Center in Southold on Feb. 2. “They say they have a memo that they no longer need a judicial warrant to break down someone’s door. That’s a memo, and then there’s the United States Constitution. Never forget that we still have that, and we still need it.”
The resolution acknowledges that local police cannot interfere with federal law enforcement actions, but it does give local police officers authority “to run the license plates of any group of persons or vehicles where an articulable threat to public safety exists,” both manually and with automatic license plate readers.
These situations include the operation of these vehicles “in a manner that endangers the general public,” in a manner that “is likely to be a threat to public safety, and in a manner that “causes injury and or loss of life.”
The resolution also expressly states that local police departments “shall not use this technology solely based on race, religion or the exercise of First Amendment rights, such as lawful assembly or political activity.”
“This allows for accountability, if something goes terribly wrong, and there’s a vehicle accident that results in injury or death,” said Ms. Perez in a Feb. 9 interview with The Beacon. “Let’s make sure that our local law enforcement is going to know who’s in town.”
OLA has just made the resolution public, and asked the community to sign on to support it, in this Google form.
The draft resolution includes a guide to how the municipality should handle reports of federal immigration enforcement activity within its boundaries and how it should communicate that information to the public, and establishes a Community Task Force on Immigration Enforcement with which the town shall consult “concerning all relevant matters regarding immigration enforcement.”
Ms. Perez said this particular role could be assigned to a task force within a town or village that is already working on public safety issues, and could be tailored to meet the needs of each individual municipality.
The draft resolution also allows municipalities to “designate officers specifically trained to investigate reported incidents of individuals impersonating law enforcement officers, including but not limited to ICE and FBI agents, within the town/village,” and to develop protocols to respond to and investigate these reports. It also lays out the municipality’s role in enforcing laws related to impersonating law enforcement personnel.
While Ms. Perez said she hasn’t heard many accounts of impersonation of a law enforcement officer here, she said this provision will help local police who are called to an ICE-related incident to determine who they are dealing with.
“The agents would need to share their ID with the [local police] officer,” said Ms. Perez. “They shouldn’t just be assuming when a guy with a mask shows up that they’re there for a legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
Ms. Perez first brought the resolution to Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski and Councilwoman Anne Smith in a meeting last Wednesday afternoon, as the Greenport community was still reeling from the detention of three residents there in a chaotic raid that involved high speed chases down a dead-end road in the early morning hours, as children were getting on the bus for school.
Reports circulated through the community that morning that ICE was at the Greenport School, though Superintendent Beth Doyle said the agents did not enter school grounds.
That day, one-quarter of the students in the Greenport School did not attend classes, according to Ms. Doyle.
A resident of Ludlum Place who asked not to be identified told The Beacon last Wednesday that, at around 7 a.m., “at least five cars came flying down our street at about 50 miles per hour. There were children leaving their houses to walk to the bus stop on the corner — they don’t plow our street and it was covered with ice and slush. I was leaving my driveway and I almost got hit — I had to slam on my brakes. They were jumping out of their cars and chasing people.”
Ms. Smith, the Southold Councilwoman, said she’s also approaching this from the perspective of making sure people in Southold feel safe living here.
“I’m happy we’re having a regional conversation. We’re going to spend a good amount of time on it,” said Ms. Smith after meeting with Ms. Perez. “I’m glad we partnered with OLA — I feel it’s been well-vetted. Our next step is to get it out to the community. We’re going to dig into it and see where it goes.”
Mr. Krupski said he believes the resolution will be a topic of conversation at the East End Supervisors and Mayors Association meeting this Wednesday.
“We’re sworn to uphold the law,” he said of town police. “We need to look at the mechanism for how it would work. There’s a lot to be considered.”
Several dozen residents had come to the Southold Town Board’s last meeting, on Jan. 27, with a petition that had more than 800 signatures demanding the town take a strong stand on ICE actions in the community, in the wake of the killing of two observers by ICE officers in Minneapolis earlier that month. There are now more than 1,200 signatures on the petition.
The town has since posted a statement on its website regarding its support for the North Fork’s immigrant communities, and also posted its letter to the Department of Homeland Security in December of 2025 attempting to obtain more information about ICE actions on the North Fork, after two raids in Greenport last summer and another massive raid in Hampton Bays and Westhampton on Nov. 5, 2025.
The Southold Town Board is slated to discuss the resolution at its work session tomorrow, Tuesday, Feb. 10. That meeting starts at 9 a.m., but the resolution scheduled for slightly later on the agenda. The board’s 9 a.m. work session and 6 p.m. regular meeting will be held at the Peconic Lane Community Center due to a plumbing emergency at Town Hall.
Ms. Perez said she will also be addressing the Shelter Island Town Board via Zoom about the resolution at its 9 a.m. work session on Tuesday, and she is in the process of distributing it to towns and villages throughout the East End.
Ms. Perez had given an overview of the resolution, and of the work of OLA’s Rapid Response Network, which documents ICE raids, to a crowd of about 80 residents who packed a meeting of the North Fork Action Center at the Unitarian Universalists of Southold meeting house on Feb. 2.
“We are serving the entire East End — all the towns and villages. It is 10 police departments, 10 court systems, 22 school districts,” she said of OLA. “We serve this region with an effort to create a safer, healthier and more equitable East End for everyone.”
“When these actions have come to town… these raids don’t bring calm, there’s no targeted measure, no orchestrating of it,” she added. “When ICE comes to town, there is a better chance there’s going to be fear. There’s going to be chaos. There’s going to be injury, and potentially there’s going to be death. We look at that as everyone’s responsibility, not just ours as a local non-profit organization, not just yours as caring community members, but as every entity of our towns and villages — Those of us who are running schools, cancer centers, day care centers, elder centers — all of these spaces where, in the flash of a moment, there could be absolute chaos. It’s the responsibility of all of us to understand how we uphold public safety.”
“Public safety is something we can all ask for and be a part of and support,” she said, adding that everything OLA does, including its Rapid Response Network, is “focused on safety and making sure we are not doing anything that is going to exacerbate the situation. But even if someone is deescalating a situation or walking away from a situation doesn’t mean they’re safe.”
Ms. Perez applauded the statement from the Southold Town Board, which she said was “very strong, and a really important move,” despite community grumbling at the Jan. 27 meeting that it didn’t go far enough. She urged the crowd to support the town in doing what is within its power, and not ask them to take actions that could result in legal challenges instead of keeping people safe.
“Nobody believes we have the right, in a local context, to stop federal agents from doing what they believe they should be doing,” she said. “There is no power that local police have to stop these actions. However, there is power that we have in the local context to uphold our public safety.”
As she has throughout the past year, Ms. Perez urged every person and agency on the East End to have their own plan for how to deal with potential chaos due to the whipsaw of the constantly changing situation in the federal government.
“I want to make sure everyone has an emergency plan that is fully set and understood by everyone that works in that institution — in that school, day care center cancer center, when that chaos comes to town it puts everyone’s lives at risk,” she said, adding that, while school superintendents often call her looking for guidance, “while I appreciate that responsibility, it should not be all on me.”
Ms. Perez, who formerly served as the director of The Retreat, an East Hampton-based domestic violence support agency and shelter, said she has been working with local law enforcement for decades.
“This resolution is not looking to put them against the wall and say ‘do it like this,'” she said. “From what I hear from law enforcement leadership, it’s going to be giving law enforcement and the towns and villages the wings they need to take steps in a direction they can lawfully take — steps within the power of towns and villages to act in the interest of our public safety.”
“Our community needs law enforcement, and as things get more difficult, the rate of exploitation gets even higher,” she said, adding that the chaos created by ICE’s presence makes it easier for crimes often committed against immigrants — wage theft, sexual assault and illegal evictions — to escalate unchecked. This is particularly the case when immigrants no longer trust local police.
“This is a safe place to be, on the East End of Long Island, and that has everything to do with our law enforcement,” she said. “My god, it was all going in a different direction. It’s completely disrespectful that another entity steps in, with a very different mission and says oh no, we’re going to keep you safe. We’ve got this. Now we have a situation where we have ICE showing up at the fire departments. For people calling 911, it feels different, when someone has a fire in their house or when grandpa or mom has a heart attack, when you know just a couple weeks ago ICE was staging themselves in a fire department parking lot. Those things can’t happen, for public safety.”
Ms. Perez said in other times, she might have taken months to vet the resolution with different government agencies, but given the urgency of the present situation, she’s looking for the community’s help pressuring their local governments to get something on the books quickly. She added that the resolution is designed to hold up to legal challenge, and doesn’t include such controversial measures as requiring ICE agents to take off their masks.
“The Attorney General of New York State hasn’t been able to do that. It’s not easy to do,” she said. “We’re not going to add that into a resolution because it sounds good and then find out we get nowhere with it.”
“In the past I would have taken a few months to shop this around, but the reality is I don’t have the time,” she added, as she addressed the crowd directly. “I’m going to call upon you all to show up to towns and villages so we can push to get this passed. It might not happen right away, but I’m looking at people who I think will stick to it and get it passed.”
Ms. Perez added that in addition to this work regarding ICE, OLA continues to work with families whose loved ones have been detained, and its network of volunteers also help with driving people to appointments — including court appearances, doctor’s appointments and immigration check-ins. OLA also has many other initiatives — promoting mental health for all students in local schools, providing scholarships and holding events celebrating Latin American culture.
But the urgency of this issue, she says, is on another level.
Ms. Perez said OLA still doesn’t know where some people who were taken in a November 2025 raid in Hampton Bays are today. She added that conversations about whether someone is in the country legally or not are more complicated than many people who have never come into contact with the immigration system understand — many people are at different places along a pathway to citizenship or are living in “mixed status families” with other family members who are U.S. Citizens, she said, and OLA’s immigration lawyers, will tell those families directly and individually whether they believe they have a strong case in immigration courts.
“The only reason why I’m here is because of love,” she added. “Whatever our conversations are around the dinner table about immigration reform, about what could have been done, and what should be done in the future, what is happening right now is not a political conversation for us. It is a public safety conversation.”
Here’s the resolution, and here is OLA’s Google survey asking the community to support the resolution.
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