‘We love them’: Small N.Y. town embraces a family freed from immigration detention

When the three children come back to Sackets Harbor Central School, they’ll find signs and decorations celebrating their return — and the end of an ordeal that started in late March.

“We’ve had third graders bringing in cards and leaving it on their classmate’s desk,” principal Jamie Cook told NPR. “And the third grade class has created a large welcome back sign that they have hung in their classroom.”

With classes from pre-K through grade 12, the school is a hub of life in Sackets Harbor, a small town sitting along New York’s Lake Ontario shoreline. So when three students and their mother were arrested and detained by immigration agents on March 27, the tight-knit community suddenly had a gaping hole.

Hundreds of people — kids, parents, teachers and neighbors — have called for federal authorities to bring the students and their mother back. And now, their call has been heeded.

“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after eleven days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Sackets Harbor Central School District Superintendent Jennifer L. Gaffney said in an email to NPR. School and local officials say the family is on its way back to Sackets Harbor.

A student called her teacher from the detention center

For days, after federal agents descended on a nearby farm with a dairy and petting zoo and made several arrests, no one in the community knew where the family was. Finally, one of the teenagers got access to a phone.

“The first person she called was her favorite teacher,” Cook said.

They were being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Karnes County, Texas. The children and their mother weren’t charged with a crime; they were swept up during an operation to arrest a South African man accused of using his cell phone to share child pornography.

The criminal search warrant centered on Old McDonald’s Farm, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement to NPR. The children’s mother works at the family-owned farm and lives nearby. During the operation there, Homeland Security says, officers “arrested seven illegal aliens, including a mother and her three children.”

Officials have given varying explanations for taking the family into custody and moving them to another state.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection told member station North Country Public Radio early last week that while the woman and her children weren’t part of the investigation, they were arrested and “awaiting removal proceedings.” But border czar Tom Homan — who is from the area and has a vacation home in Sackets Harbor — later told a local TV news station that the family was seen as potential witnesses and/or victims and held at a “family residential center.”

Meanwhile, local officials led calls to bring the family back home. In a Facebook posting that gained wide attention, Cook said her students were arrested after trying to do the right thing.

“They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process,” Cook wrote.

The community came together to support the family

Sackets Harbor “feels like a neighborhood from, like, 50 years ago or 100 years ago where everybody still knows everybody,” Cook says. Because of that deep familiarity, she adds, “when this family was taken, it didn’t feel like the ‘other.’ It felt very much like our children” who were whisked away.

A rally over the weekend drew nearly 1,000 people, according to North Country Public Radio — a massive turnout for a town that the U.S. Census Bureau says has a population of 1,351 people. The town is part of New York’s 24th congressional district — rated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index as the most reliably Republican district in the state.

The protesters’ goal was simple, Cook says: to support their neighbors and urge federal authorities to correct what many residents see as a mistake.

“We love them,” Cook said of the family. “I think that this week has been painful, and the community has been inspiring. And we just really want our kids back.”

The night before the rally, tensions rose, the principal said, as residents worried that hateful comments they were seeing online might indicate the threat of a large counter-protest or even violence. As the event began, the number of counter-protesters was fairly small, Cook said — although one man persisted in trying to shout over the speakers’ voices.

Cook said the family’s supporters, including several elderly women, began forming a sort of barricade around the man with their signs.

“And then the gentleman yelled out, ‘I’m surrounded by fascists!’ And the entire rally burst out in laughter,” Cook said.

“I get goose bumps” thinking about it, she added. “There’s nothing like laughing in the face of hatred.”