On a recent Monday morning in the offices of Siembra NC, a non-profit focused on immigrant worker rights based in Greensboro, North Carolina, the calls are starting to come in.
Hotline coordinator Aimee Sarai Velasquez picks up the phone. On the other side of the line a woman hesitates, and then says she's calling from a doctor's appointment. She's seen law enforcement in the area, she says, with officers wearing tactical gear.
She's not sure if they are federal immigration agents or just local police.
"Where are you calling from?" Velazquez asks. There is a long pause.
"Greensboro. They came in a large black SUV."
The caller has reason to be concerned: President Trump has promised an unprecedented mass deportation campaign. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said monthly arrests of immigrants have skyrocketed, though deportations are have not. Senior immigration officials are under pressure to boost those numbers, and the president is demanding cities and states do more to cooperate with enforcement.
The messaging from the White House on who is being targeted is mixed. On the one hand the administration continues to say it is going after immigrants without legal status who have face criminal charges. But officials have also ordered all immigrants without legal status to self-deport, or face the consequences.
All this has led to panic, rumors, and lots of misinformation. In the first week of the Trump administration, Siembra NC's hotline got about 600 calls. They were mostly false alarms: someone who knew someone who had seen something. Many of them were regarding social media posts about raids. The number of calls has since dropped off significantly but they still come in daily. The goal of the hotline is to fact check and stop those rumors before they pick up steam.
Velasquez starts asking the caller questions: Where was this? Did you see the men yourself, or did someone tell you about it? Did their vests say police, or something else?
She checks on the location of the call: it's coming from a county where the police do not cooperate with federal immigration agents. But just in case, her team decides to send a volunteer to check if these are indeed immigration agents.
In this case it's a false alarm; it almost always is. But if there were immigration agents, Siembra NC would send out a notice on social media and by text to a list of over 20,000 subscribers letting them know: ICE agents are in this area.
Efforts like these are taking place in cities and states across the U.S., and they've been met with plenty of criticism. Border Czar Tom Homan has said they interfere with federal law enforcement. "They'll frame it as knowing your rights. In my view, you're helping a criminal escape apprehension," Homan said on January 26th, on the show Dr. Phil Primetime.
"Siembra NC is openly impeding ICE immigration enforcement and helping illegal aliens," posted Rep. Mark Harris (R-NC) on X on Feb. 19. "The bottom line is clear: NGOs are impeding immigration enforcement and obstructing federal law."
Siembra co-director Nikki Marin Baena says the organization is simply trying to allow immigrants to live normal lives. She sees panic and fear as a government tactic, with the end goal of "making people miserable to the point where they just choose to leave [self-deport] on their own."
She points to the recent wave of panic over immigration agents being allowed into schools, churches and hospitals. "They didn't even have to detain anyone. All they had to do was say that ICE could do that, and people started to get worried. We get so many messages about schools. The panic is the point. The cruelty is the point."
But much of the fear in the community is based on very real incidents. In January, police in Raleigh, North Carolina allege a man posing as an ICE agent threatened to deport a woman if she didn't have sex with him, according to local media reports.
In another case, people allegedly posing as federal immigration agents robbed a Hispanic family in Greensboro.
And there have been real ICE operations in the state: about two weeks ago, Velasquez said she took a call about an ICE operation taking place in a suburban neighborhood of Durham. On the recording of that call, a distressed woman narrates the arrest of her neighbors. "They're covering their faces," she says, sounding agitated. "They're walking this guy out of the house in cuffs and chains. F****** chains."
Throughout the call, another dispatcher steps in and advises the caller not to interfere. "You can just loudly remind the families who are probably inside their house scared, ask for a judicial warrant. That will remind the family that they don't have to open the door."
ICE said 11 migrants were arrested that day. ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about the Durham arrests, but gave The News and Observer the following statement: ""U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers conducted a targeted enforcement operation in Durham, NC, yesterday, resulting in the arrest of 11 individuals identified as illegal aliens. The 11 individuals are currently being held at a federal detention facility pending deportation hearings."
11 out of about 300,000 immigrants without legal status living in North Carolina is a tiny number. But the arrests have left a mark.
NPR reached out to the woman who called the hotline that day. Emily Ingebretsen is an American citizen, who works in refugee advocacy. She says she's been rattled since the operation happened in her neighborhood. "I don't recognize this version of the United States," she tells NPR. "It sets such a dangerous precedent for us to normalize people being taken from their homes without due process like that. It's not normal and it's not American."
Immigrants NPR spoke to said they too had heard about the incident, and felt shaken.
When the weekend rolls around, Velasquez leads Siembra staff in canvassing a mostly immigrant trailer park in Greensboro, reminding people to use the hotline. One neighbor pokes her head out her trailer door and says she watches the text alerts whenever she's out and about, but she's still scared. She's in the US without legal status, so she asked that NPR use her first initial only: M. "When you knocked on my door, my son told me: Mama stay inside. But I need fresh air. All I do is stay locked in." M. says she's been thinking a lot lately of going back home to El Salvador.
Velasquez winces.
Later on, she tells NPR a little more about herself, how when she was a child her parents were in the country without legal papers. In the Obama years, when there was a historic number of deportations, she was told the same thing: stay inside.
She says she won't let it happen again.
"We want for our community to continue living life. We're not going to not take the kids to school. We're gonna continue going to work. It's a form of resistance to that fear."
This time around she says, there will be no hiding.
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