A sea of people wearing white descended on the Suffolk County Legislature’s Aug. 5 meeting at the Riverhead County Center, pleading with the legislature to stand up for immigrants living here.
The quiet protest, organized by the Long Island Immigrant Justice Alliance, came amidst a wave of arrests and raids by Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal immigration agencies throughout the county and the country, including several on the East End — two separate raids in Greenport in the last two weeks resulted in the arrest of four people, and many people have reported that their neighbors and friends are afraid to go to work, even if they are working here legally.
Recent statistics from the Cato Institute and TracImmigration show the majority of people currently in ICE custody have no criminal convictions.
The white outfits were in honor of Argentinian mothers who formed a human rights group, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in response to people who disappeared there during a dictatorship in the 1970s.
“During the first half of the 20th Century, the Suffolk County Police had a very bad relationship with the immigrant community. A lot of people wanted to make that better,” Patrick Young, a professor of law at Hofstra University, told the Legislature. “If you want Suffolk County’s immigrant community — one in six people in Suffolk — to cooperate with police, you have to take yourself out of the process of rounding up people.”
“Ninety percent of the cases ICE brings up are administrative warrants, not judicial warrants,” he added. “That’s a warrant from a supervisor at ICE. That’s like a police officer getting a warrant from their sergeant.”
Shawn Bishop, a veteran, said he believes ICE actions “threaten our constitutional rights and the rule of law.”
“ICE acts like a paramilitary group — they detain people and they violate their due process with rendition to a torture prison in El Salvador,” he said. “This is behavior associated with third world dictatorships and the Soviet Union.”
“Immigrants should not have to fear going out to shop, go to school, get health care or go to work. They should not be afraid to call the police,” said Kevin Shea of Riverhead, a retired New York City firefighter who is currently running on the Democratic ticket for the Riverhead Town Board. “When immigrants cannot trust the police, crimes go unreported and public safety is at risk.”
“The masked men in our community are terrorizing our neighbors,” said Randy Wade of Greenport. “I talk to people who are working in schools, and children are so traumatized they are crying in the classrooms.”
Ms. Wade said she was in Greenport during an ICE raid behind the downtown laundromat on Sunday, Aug. 3, during which one man who was doing his wash with his twin sons was not taken but was given a summons.
“I was talking to the man they allowed to stay behind, and he was given a Tuesday court date on Varick Avenue in Manhattan,” she said. “He’s been here 20 years.”
“You each have allies in the federal government. You need to make the most of your relationships,” she urged the legislature, as Presiding Officer Kevin McCaffrey cut her comments off at the three minute mark without responding to them, as he did throughout the meeting.
Due to a lengthy presentation honoring volunteer firefighters, most who arrived to speak about immigration enforcement at the 4 p.m. meeting were unable to enter the Legislature’s meeting room until after 5 p.m. By just after 5 p.m., 45 people had registered to have their voices heard, though only an handful were allowed in the room at a time.
The legislature silently heard about an hour and a half of tearful testimony before breaking for formal public hearings, and by the time those public hearings ended after 7 p.m., few who’d come to speak remained.
But the words of the two dozen who were able to speak echoed throughout the room.
“Our neighbors are living in fear. What you decide to do has an impact on the people living next door to you, living two streets down from you,” said Colin Palmer, a former president of the Riverhead Central School District Board of Education. He then reminded the board of passages from Exodus in the Bible commanding that you “not mistreat foreigners in your land, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” he added, a verse from Matthew.
“These people are your brothers and sisters, your neighbors, your family and your potential friends,” he said. “Do not make the prayers at the beginning of your meeting political theater.”
Leydy Renteria-Merced, Executive Director of Centro Corazón de María in Hampton Bays, said her agency “welcomes immigrant families, and helps them to become independent, successful contributors to society.”
“People are living in fear, not because they’ve done anything wrong, but their very existence is treated like a crime,” she said. “The families I hear from on a daily basis — the mother too afraid to leave home to buy groceries or food for her family, a mother who had been working to better herself and become an entrepreneur. Families who have lived here for decades, worked hard and paid taxes, are being torn apart without any warning. Children are left behind, parents are vanishing and trauma follows.”
“Take a stand. Take a clear position against ICE detentions in Suffolk County,” she said. “We must draw a line between public safety and immigration enforcement.”
Osman Canales, whose parents left El Salvador to escape violence, has lived in Suffolk County for more than 25 years.
“My parents came to this beautiful country looking for safety,” he said. “Many families right now are not finding safety. They are in fear. There are children that are not able to go to school because they are fearful to leave their homes. This morning, you all left your home and you probably told your families ‘I’ll see you tonight.’ A lot of families left home today not knowing if they were going to return home to their children.”
“I myself have seen them terrorizing children outside their homes,” he said. “They did not want to show a warrant, they did not want to show who they are, their name or badge number…. Today we are here to beg you. You were elected to office to protect your community. You were elected to office to speak up for your residents. These are taxpayers, people who have lived here for many years. They tell us on the news they are going after criminals. This is a big lie. They call them criminals, but they invite them into their home to clean their houses and to cook for them at their favorite restaurants. They use their labor to care for their children and they call them criminals? How dare they. We all know they are not criminals. They are our neighbors. We are here to beg you — silence is not an option. A lot of these families have U.S. citizen children and they are going to remember when they are old enough to vote who was on their side. This is history in the making now and we are watching who is speaking up for what is right.”
“I am here because I cannot sleep. I cannot find a place to rest, in this demonizing our immigrant neighbors, negating their value, and subjecting them to a cruelty that is beheath who we are as human beings,” said Cindy Clifford of Riverhead. “While you, as our Suffolk County Legislators, can’t solve the national crisis, you can enact legislation here in order to reduce trauma and fear and insomnia.”
She asked for legislation requiring warrants to be presented, and that ICE agents be required to identify themselves and be prohibited from hiding their faces.
“There is a strong psychological component to this anonymity, much in the same way that “group behavior” also removes the sense of individual responsibility,” she said. “Faces are how we recognize one another, another way we read the meaning and the emotions behind words. That you can look into my eyes as I’m speaking and I can look into your eyes and see how you are reacting to this exchange, that’s part of how we communicate.”
Susan Cohen Pessah of Smithtown urged the county legislature to support a bill just introduced in the New York State Legislature, the MELT Act, which would ban the use of face coverings by immigration officers and require them to wear clear identification.
“You should not have to worry whether the person dragging your neighbor into a van is a federal agent or a kidnapper,” she said, adding that detention facilities being built “profit from every additional person put behind bars. They cut corners to increase their profits.”
“It’s not just inhumane, it’s unconstitutional,” she said.
Jon Pessah of Smithtown told the legislature that the majority of people currently detained by ICE have no criminal convictions — figures that have been reported by the Cato Institute and TracImmigration put the numbers of those with no criminal convictions at between 65 and 71 percent.
“Your voices carry weight. Your constituents deserve to know where you stand. We want the same transparency and accountability we demand from all law enforcement,” he said, urging the legislature to support the MELT Act. “Use your platform to push Governor Hochul to do the same.”
Lisa Votino of Wading River said that 18 years ago, activists had warned the county legislature that anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric would lead to trouble, and not long after, Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was stabbed to death by a group of seven high school students in Patchogue.
“We’ve documented ICE reports in almost all of your districts,” she told the Legislature. “I don’t believe, in your heart of hearts, you support this. People are afraid to go to the hospital, scared to seek essential services, afraid to go to immigration court and afraid to call the police. The Suffolk County Police Department has been spotted, on multiple occasions, with ICE… This is not justice. This is a failure of protection. I warn you again, this is going to end up in tragedy. There is absolutely no way it won’t. Speak up. You have a voice. I hope you use it. Your political party should have nothing to do with speaking up when you know what is wrong.”
Suffolk County Legislator Samuel Gonzalez of the Ninth Legislative District, representing Brentwood, Central Islip, Islip, Bay Shore, and a small part of Hauppauge, posted a statement Aug. 5 on social media about the recent ICE raids.
“We are witnessing one of the cruelest and most ruthless waves of persecution against immigrants in modern history, driven by the racist polices of Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” he wrote. “According to TRAC data, as of July 27, 2025, over 71 percent of individuals in ICE custody had no criminal convictions whatsoever. Of the remaining 29 percent, the vast majority had committed only minor offenses, like traffic violations.”
“This is not about public safety, this is racial profiling, plain and simple,” he said. “Because of my Hispanic features, I, too, could be targeted by ICE. There are documented cases of U.S. citizens wrongfully detained, including Puerto Ricans, simply because they ‘look Latino.’ That’s not just injustice — it’s racism, spelled in all capital letters, and I denounce it with every fiber of my being. It is a violation of basic human rights; and it has no place in a country that claims to stand for liberty and justice for all.”
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