The following is from the Boston Globe, September 6, 2025
/As a new surge looms, ICE’s deportation machinery has fallen into place in New England
By Sean Cotter, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio and Yoohyun Jung Globe Staff,Updated September 6, 2025, 6:00 a.m.
In late August, Marta Portillo Vasquez kept a routine appointment at a federal immigration office in Revere to update her visa application to live in the United States legally after coming here from El Salvador 20 years ago.
Instead, she was abruptly arrested by immigration officers and within a day was whisked off to a detention facility outside Burlington, Vt., before her family could get a judge in the Boston area to intervene.
It took days for her family to confirm where she was being held, all the while pleading with officials to keep her within reach. But they fear that any day now, she could be transferred anywhere across the country.
“It’s been really worrying. Anxiety. Sleepless nights,” said her eldest son, Saul, 32. “Now it’s at a crucial point again where she’s going to be moved again, and we don’t know where. . . . We won’t have a clue at all.”
Her swift removal, and her family’s efforts so far to stop it, underscore an emerging truth about the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown: in New England, which had few facilities for enforcement and even less political interest in building one, the federal dragnet has in just a few short months solidified into a prolific and aggressive machine that is arresting and processing more detainees like Portillo Vasquez more quickly.
Amid a new surge in arrests enforcement, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expanded its presence and reach around the region through cooperative local law enforcement agencies, additional detention facilities and support services, and swift relocation of detainees away from their families and sympathetic courts.
The average number of arrests by federal immigration authorities has jumped in 2025 to 655 a month, compared to 192 in 2024. All eight major detention facilities under contract to ICE are now at capacity, with the daily population at the lone ICE holding facility in Massachusetts jumping from 374 the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration to 515 on Wednesday.
ICE is also adding new facilities to house detainees, with 771 beds at five locations coming online. By the end of the year, ICE will have more than 1,600 detention beds in New England, according to an internal road map obtained by The Washington Post and shared with the Globe.
Those new facilities are in Wiscasset, Maine, as well as in four New Hampshire communities: Berlin, Brentwood, Boscawen, and Manchester. The Berlin facility, which adds 500 new beds, is already open and, as of the most recent data available, holding an average of more than 110 people a day.
And in recent months, ICE has recruited more local law enforcement agencies and officers to assist its agents. Immigration enforcement is largely a civil matter, separate from the criminal matters police departments typically handle, but local departments can partner with federal authorities to investigate and arrest people here unlawfully — and they increasingly have done so, specifically in New Hampshire.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said agents are “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens — including murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles, and terrorists — across the country.
As part of that effort, ICE has increasingly used both charter planes and commercial flights to either deport outright or relocate detainees to more distant parts of the country that have more conservative judges, who, advocates say, would be less willing to hear detainees’ pleas to stop their deportations.
In August, ICE had the highest number of transfer and deportation flights in a single month since a watchdog group called the ICE Flight Monitor began tracking them in 2020, according to its founder, Tom Cartwright, a retired JP Morgan executive.
Traffic out of Portsmouth International Airport at Pease in New Hampshire in particular has picked up. There were 23 such departing flights so far this year, most of which were in July and August, according to the ICE Flight Monitor program, which is based at Human Rights First.
Hanscom Field in Bedford had 66 flights operated by ICE this year, with the highest number in June at 17 departures.
The airport in Burlington, Vt., is close to the facility where Portillo Vasquez is being held. Detainees there and at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in Vermont are often transferred within two to five days, according to Brett Stokes, an assistant professor of law and the director of the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
In general, Stokes said, transfers of detainees — with no notification to their lawyers or family members — are happening more frequently, more quickly, and to states farther from their homes in recent months, Stokes said.
“It creates secrecy. I lose my clients, or family members lose their loved ones,” Stokes said. “The use of local jails and the use of transfer is a way to basically functionally disappear people, and remove them from access to counsel, and remove them from access to resources, family.”
Advertisement
The long-promised surge in detentions and deportations from Trump began to really show in Massachusetts in May.
That month nearly 1,500 immigrants in the Boston region alone were arrested in what authorities dubbed “Operation Patriot.” Though the administration said it was targeting people accused of serious crimes, nearly half of those swept up had no criminal records. The administration called them collateral arrests.
And it seems to be just the beginning of a prolonged effort, as the administration has set quotas of 3,000 arrests a day. That has proved a difficult number to hit, despite the federal government roping in thousands of employees from other agencies to assist.
But ICE now has more resources. The federal budget approved at the start of July tripled funding for the agency, to create 10,000 new positions nationwide, a 50 percent increase in the number of agents on the ground carrying out arrests. By the end of July, ICE said it had offered jobs to 1,000 applicants.
ICE did not respond to a request for updates on hiring, and has not said how many additional agents would be allocated to its Boston office, which covers all of New England.
The agency has recruited aggressively, holding job fairs, posting billboards along highways inviting applicants to “Defend the Homeland,” and offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000. One digital billboard at a mall in Framingham showed a recruitment ad briefly, according to local news reports, before a backlash led to its removal.
“AMERICA NEEDS YOU,” blares the ICE hiring website, all capital letters sitting under an image of a star-spangled Uncle Sam pointing out from the screen. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators,” it reads. “We need YOU to get them out.”
One important way ICE has further penetrated New England, where communities in many blue states have refused to cooperate, is by concentrating on New Hampshire, the most Republican-leaning of the six. There, ICE has signed partnerships with a dozen departments, including the State Police, to assist its agents in immigration matters. Through these agreements, certain police officers are trained to make arrests in concert with ICE.
The police department in Wells, Maine, also has an agreement to partner with ICE, though local news reports say it’s been put on hold. Officials in Maine did not respond to requests for comment. The Massachusetts Department of Correction has maintained an agreement with ICE since 2020 to share some information about people incarcerated in state prisons, and some sheriffs’ offices in Massachusetts communicate with ICE informally about the release of people from its jails.
But no state in New England has seen such widespread support of ICE’s operations as New Hampshire.
“I’m glad to have State Police and county and local law enforcement working with our federal partners to enforce our immigration laws, and I thank them for their continued efforts to protect and serve New Hampshire,” Governor Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, said as the State Police announced its agreement with ICE in April.
Correctional facilities in New Hampshire have participated, too. The facility in Berlin now holds more than 100 detainees, with room for a total of 500.
The largest facility in New England under contract with ICE is the Plymouth County Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, which has largely served as a transfer center in recent months. At least 489 people have been taken to airports from Plymouth since February, with none recorded in January, before Trump took office. Nearly all of those transfers went through the Hanscom Air Force Base in Lincoln, which ICE stopped using in July.
ICE has built up its transfer operations in other ways as well: In May, the agency enlisted an outside vendor to provide armed transportation services for detainees in New England at a cost of more than $3 million.
In their request for funding, ICE officials wrote that officers in the Boston area were handling transportation duties on their own, which limited how much time they could devote to other responsibilities. The agency “has determined that armed transportations services are essential to ensure ICE officers are able to focus on their core mission of making arrests.”
The Burlington airport is owned by the Vermont city, which earlier this year looked into ways to restrict ICE’s use of flights for enforcement.
According to a memo by a consultant to the city, immigration authorities charter planes to move detainees, but also bring them into Burlington on commercial flights.
The consultant found that Burlington, in spite of its political opposition to ICE’s actions, is “extremely limited in its authority to control ICE’s access to most areas of the Airport terminal or its aeronautical operations, and criminal penalties may apply for interference with ICE operations.”
Boston-based immigration attorney Kerry Doyle, a former immigration judge and general counsel for ICE during the Biden administration, said the agency has undergone a “massive sea change” in its approach to enforcement and infrastructure, despite opposition from many New England communities.
“It breaks my heart to see what’s happening to the community and the nation,” she said. “It’s this unilateral type of enforcement without cooperation, without some understanding of what the community wants and needs.”
But retired ICE agent Bruce Foucart, who ran the criminal investigations branch of the agency’s Boston office a decade ago, said the new infrastructure represents the inevitable evolution. Under former president George W. Bush, the agency’s priority was national security and arrests through workplace raids. Under President Barack Obama, the priority was child exploitation and the agency also focused on owners of businesses who employed people here illegally.
Now, he said, it’s the removal of people here without documentation.
“Priorities change,” Foucart said. “Obviously for this administration, the priority is to arrest and remove people in the United States here illegally.”
But the family of Portillo Vasquez fear she has been caught up in the machinery of the ICE operation without any consideration of her situation. For months, she had been processing her application for a visa reserved for victims of human trafficking who assist law enforcement with their investigations. She went to a US Citizenship and Immigration Services Revere office to to have her fingerprints and a photo taken, but was arrested. Her legal case is in the process of being transferred to Vermont, but immigration officials have told her she could be moved any moment.
Her youngest son, Manuel, is unable to focus at work, and at the end of the day comes home to the now-empty apartment in East Boston where he lives with his mother.
“In my head, I’m always like, what is she going through, what are the things like over there? How are they treating her?” the 23-year-old said.
Portillo Vasquez, 58, does not have a criminal record, but does have a deportation order from 2006 that was issued after she did not appear at an immigration hearing, according to her attorney. Her eldest son, Saul, has watched in desperation as his mother has been rapidly pulled into an expanding detention and deportation system that could mean the worst case scenario for his family.
“I see some cases of people saying that they’ve been held at one detention facility, then they’re already deported, back to some other country, some other place,” Saul said. “We don’t want that to happen.”
Steven Porter, Laura Crimaldi, and Matt Stout of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter. Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at giulia.mcdnr@globe.com. Follow her @giuliamcdnr. Yoohyun Jung can be reached at y.jung@globe.com.
