Volunteer rapid-response group documents ICE arrests in Waltham
A volunteer group in Waltham is receiving national attention for their work responding to in-progress ICE arrests within the community.
The group, known as Fuerza, was founded by Jonathan Paz, a former Waltham city councilor, and is dedicated to providing support for families who have been affected by ICE. It currently has over 100 members.
The organization was recently the focus of an article published by Mother Jones, a large investigative news outlet based in San Francisco. According to Paz, who spoke to Mother Jones for the article, the popular news sites Reuters and Al Jazeera have also expressed interest in writing about Fuerza.
Additionally, a video taken by members of Fuerza, which showed ICE agents dragging a person from their car on Moody Street, recently went viral, appearing on multiple news sites, including CBS, NBC, The Daily Beast, Newsweek and The Independent.
Councilor-at-Large Colleen Bradley-MacArthur, a Fuerza volunteer, was also interviewed by Mother Jones for the article. She said that the increased coverage has already had a tangible impact on the organization.
“More people want to be involved and are asking how they can help with the efforts that we’re doing,” she said. “It’s pretty amazing.”
The increase in volunteers is allowing Fuerza to refine how they provide care to people who have had family members or friends arrested by ICE.
“That aspect of Fuerza has just grown exponentially,” said Bradley-MacArthur. “We’re starting to become kind of a well-oiled machine.”
According to Paz, the response from the community has been one of overwhelming support.
“We’ve seen an increase in people reaching out who want to get involved,” he said, “who want to stand in solidarity with their immigrant neighbors.”
Paz said he did not expect the video of the ICE raid to go viral, but added that he thinks that it illustrates both the brutality of the ICE raids and the hope that inspires other people to take action.
President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which allocates nearly $200 billion to ICE and immigration and border enforcement — recently became law. According to Bradley-MacArthur, this will cause the already-bad situation in Waltham to deteriorate further.
“The effort in the campaign that we saw from ICE, especially in the month of May, was just relentless and punishing,” she said. “And now if they have more money, that means they have more people, more resources to dedicate to this campaign to scare and threaten and bring violence to our immigrant communities.”
Paz agreed, adding that it will cause extensive damage not only to Waltham, but to the rest of the country as well.
“It would not only destroy our social safety net as a country, but it would also ramp up racial profiling across our country, and across Waltham,” he said. “You are going to see a lot more kidnappings [by ICE] in broad daylight. It is going to be a campaign of terror, unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
Paz also said that he thought Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey should be doing more to support communities affected by ICE within the state.
“[Fuerza] is stepping up and providing support in a time when it should really be our state government,” he said. “But we cannot do all of the work to defend our families right now, we need our governor to step up and actually defend our immigrant families.”
LUCE, a statewide immigrant rights group, posted a list of demands in May directed at Healey. The demands include declaring ICE a rogue agency and restoring COVID-19 era remote participation in courthouses.
The Waltham Times reached out to Governor Healey’s office asking for an interview or a comment, but did not receive a response. The Times also sent a request for comment to ICE, but again has not received a response.
In the face of that, Fuerza is continuing to support the Waltham community by continuing to report and respond to ICE arrests, and also by introducing an emergency support fund for families who have been affected by ICE.
“We need to be able to put our money where our mouth is,” said Paz. “We need to support our families right now who have lost income earners. We want to support our neighbors who may be skipping meals, because they had to pay for someone’s bail.”
Fuerza is also hosting events to help raise money for affected families and to help educate the wider community. One such event is a Solidarity Fundraiser to be held on July 13th from 3-6 p.m. Interested parties can email the organizers.
“We want to educate folks that what we’re doing in Fuerza, anyone can do,” said Bradley-MacArthur. “Be the eyes and ears, and if you see something, record it, because you are within your rights to do that.”
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Thank you for highlighting this local community organization and their hard work protecting our neighbors! Would be great to know more information on the emergency fund and the Solidarity fundraiser.
Here is a link to the Solidarity Fundraiser flyer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BBScS7KwsSUjuRLM6m27lJIuEcuuPycB/view?usp=drive_link.
If you cannot attend, donate to Fuerza’s emergency support fund here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IzoL3pQwXFn-M4dmbixFKV8HqsHoHqf9/view?usp=sharing
Fuerza has created this brief video about the fund: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5adX-qKUX0.
Such important work. Going to donate!
My wife came into this country from El Salvador the same year I graduated from Waltham H.S., 1957.
Believe it or not, she has more angst with undocumented aliens than I do, so it seems.
Maybe it is because she, and her four sisters, followed all the required restrictions at that time, and all became naturalized citizens.
Resentment, perhaps; but justifiable according to my wife.
Granted – times have changed beliefs and values; but it seems to me that more respect has to be given to those aliens who followed our laws and less respect to those willing to by-pass our immigration laws for immediate opportunity.
When the Waltham Times began I was told that they would try to be true journalists- meaning that they would try to cover both sides of story. Is that not true? When I was taught journalism I was told that pieces that clearly advocated a particular viewpoint should be labeled as editorials.
There are hundreds of American’s that get separated from their families every day, as they go to jail. because they broke the Law. I hear nothing about supporting Those families. If you break the law and are not documented you should be out!!
U.S. citizens whose relatives are imprisoned or deported are eligible for welfare, not that this is a happy situation for them. Your taxes pay for this when it’s the family of a deported person too. How do you feel about that — cruelty or compassion? And citizens may legally work.
How about the people who were brought to the US as children, through no decision of their own, we have paid for their education, they are fully Americanized, and we throw that investment away by detaining them, or forcing them to leave the country to keep their family together?
How about that we have a demographic crisis in this country with an aging population, and the unemployment rate was at a historic low last year in spite of all the rhetoric about immigrants’ taking jobs away from citizens?
How about that ICE used to be in the business of taking dangerous criminals off the streets but it is now snatching up people who merely overstayed a visa; people who had speeding tickets and paid them off; people who have been here legally but, oops, we changed our mind, send you back to gang-infested Haiti, dictator-ruled El Salvador and Venezuela, Communist Cuba?
How about detention in South Sudan, a failed state or the torture dungeon in El Salvador or the concentration camp in Florida — cruel and unusual punishment. Eighth Amendment, in the bill of Rights: https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-viii/clauses/103
How about stopping payment for the preservation of 50 years of samples from the Nurses’ Study at Harvard Medical School, which has already led to major advances in diagnosis and treatment of disease, and according to Dr. Walter Willett there, only the beginning but it is the end if the freezers are turned off. Why? Because some students at Harvard conducted a legal political protest. “It’s real nice priceless medical data you’ve got there, too bad if something happened to it.”
The current administration’s directives are brutally stupid and cruel.