Over the past nine months, Megan Chapman has seen the federal government run deportation flights out of the Portsmouth International Airport.
Chapman heard about several counties considering deals with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with four county sheriff’s offices, seven local police departments and New Hampshire State Police signing onto agreements deputizing them to assist ICE and enforce federal immigration laws.
She watched as the federal prison in Berlin began to house immigration detainees earlier this year. Not long ago, just one location in New Hampshire held detainees for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: the Strafford County Jail, which has done so for decades.
Then, she decided to take action.
Chapman, a human rights lawyer from the North Country town of Albany, is one of many people participating in so-called “sanctuary communities,” a grassroots effort that seeks to create a network of people across New Hampshire to monitor and document ICE activities and advocate against what they call “police-state tactics” by the Trump administration.
“We’ve come together to reaffirm and uphold the best values upon which our nation is built and to root out and cure the worst human instincts that the rhetoric of this moment is trying to unleash,” she told a small crowd at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Concord on Tuesday. “Practically, we must also push back the effort to lay the infrastructure for the authoritarian state and terror regime on our own soil, here in New Hampshire.”
The network of eight groups across the state — some new, others that have existed for several years — seeks to offer trainings on bystanders’ right to witness and record what’s happening in their community, Chapman said.
State Republicans say they’re keeping a close watch on activists and are prepared to punish anyone who crosses the line.
“Threats to law enforcement or efforts to obstruct them will not be tolerated in New Hampshire,” Gov. Kelly Ayotte said in a press release. “If you disrupt law enforcement activity, you will be prosecuted.”
State Rep. Joe Sweeney, the deputy majority leader of the Republican caucus that controls the House of Representatives, warned undocumented immigrants in his statement: “If you are here illegally, you are not welcome in New Hampshire,” he said. “You cannot hide. We will find you and deport you.”
Ayotte signed a law earlier this year banning cities and towns from adopting so-called “sanctuary” and “welcoming” policies designed to keep local police from assisting federal immigration enforcement. In passing that law, Republicans have said sanctuary policies present a threat to the public by allowing, in Ayotte’s words, “dangerous criminals” into communities.
Most people detained by ICE and border patrol have no criminal convictions.
Of the nearly 60,000 people detained in the U.S., less than a third have been convicted of a crime, according to the most recently available federal data. Roughly 15,000 detainees have pending criminal charges, and more than 27,700 people were designated as “other immigration violators.”
As Republicans keep a close watch, activists said they have no intention of breaking the law. They do intend to do everything in their legal rights to protect others from what they view as unlawful actions by ICE.
Bob Baker, an immigrant and a lawyer who lives in Columbia, said federal agents arresting and detaining people off the streets — sometimes while masked and in unmarked vehicles — denies those people of due process in the courts.
Towns and cities in New Hampshire can no longer instruct their local police not to cooperate with ICE, and while lawsuits are an option, Chapman said that path of resistance could jeopardize state or federal funding. Individual community members can still put pressure on institutions, she said.
“By forming a citizens’ movement, No. 1, we make it not about towns and cities and authorities,” Chapman said. “It’s about human beings and citizens saying, ‘We don’t accept this.”
The sanctuary communities plan to host trainings and come up with ways to share information across the network. In the meantime, though, they’re still figuring it out.
“We’re going step by step. We’re not highly sophisticated. We’re just relatively ordinary citizens,” said Larry Brown, an organizer from Lancaster. “This is what citizen movements are about. They grow, and they turn here and there. We don’t know where this is going. We don’t know… if we’re going to be successful, whatever that might mean. This is truly the David and Goliath moment in our history.”
