Immigration and ICE in Rhode Island

Casty Souvannaxab holds a picture of her husband, Vanhhatdy “Lay,” who was deported to Laos in May. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The last time Casty Souvannaxab saw her husband as a free man in America was on a late March morning in the parking lot of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Warwick.

He was there for his annual ICE check-in, she recalls. “And he was like, ‘Something bad is going to happen.’ But I was optimistic: ‘You don’t even have a parking ticket. You’ve done everything right as someone who has been rehabilitated. Why would they detain you?’”

Vanhhatdy “Lay” Souvannaxab was a child of the second wave of Southeast Asians who resettled in Rhode Island after the Vietnam War. By 1987, some 12,000 Cambodians, Vietnamese and Laotians fleeing devastation and unrest entered the U.S. as permanent aliens, under a federal law intended to address the humanitarian crisis. Laos, Souvannaxab’s home country, had been the target of a covert bombing campaign that dropped two million tons of ordnance on a country roughly the size
of Oregon.

These new Americans brought their war traumas to the low-income, high-crime urban neighborhoods where they were placed. Some youth protected themselves by forming gangs. In 2011, Souvannaxab served time for a pipe bomb incident that wounded the mother of a gang member. He served seven years. His conviction for an “aggravated felony,” a designation in immigration law for offenses ranging from murder to petty theft with a one-year sentence, triggered a deportation order. But he stayed under ICE supervision, because Laos wasn’t accepting deportees at the time.

Lay straightened out his life. And his past seemed far removed from the couple’s present as workers, homeowners and the parents of two teenagers. Lay wanted a couple more years to build his moral character so he could change his status, but he ran out of time: He was deported to Laos on Memorial Day in 2025. Since then, Casty has coped with periods of silence when her husband was not permitted to communicate and frantic searches for a trustworthy Lao sponsor so he could leave the government detention center. Worry about the finances — to support two households and pay for airplane tickets to Laos to reunite the family — has stretched her secretary’s salary and her nerves.

“There are days when I want to give up. Your husband over there and your kids over here. What am I supposed to do?”

The worst is watching her son and daughter deny themselves sneakers or snacks to save money, she says. Her composure breaks and a single tear traces a silver path on her cheek.

“They’re kids. They shouldn’t have to worry about what you’re going through.”

For the last century, immigration has been a political pinata, swinging on the string of public opinion. Most U.S. citizens support legal immigration and acknowledge the importance of immigrants, says Colleen Putzel, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute. “People tend to rebuff immigration when there’s a sense that it’s out of control.”

In 2024, immigration reached a record high, with more than 50.2 million immigrants comprising 14.8 percent of the U.S. population, according to the institute. More than three-quarters are here legally under a permanent or temporary status. Rhode Island had an estimated 81,000 noncitizens, 50,000 of whom were undocumented, according to a recent report by the Economic Progress Institute, the Latino Policy Institute and the Immigration Research Initiative. President Donald Trump campaigned to secure borders and remove undocumented
immigrants and “the worst of the worst.”  He delivered “an all-of-government approach to immigration — vast changes across the board across the entire spectrum of immigration and across the entire spectrum of the government,” Putzel says.

American history is littered with so many legislative reactions to perceived threats to the workforce, national security or American culture that over time, the immigration system has become a complex “Frankenstein-ian monster” of laws, regulations, policies and statuses, says Sarah Cade, a former immigration prosecutor and judge. “Depending on who you are, what country you’re from, how you enter, and who processes your case first, you could have wildly disparate outcomes.”

Casty’s husband’s deportation upsets the couple’s son and daughter. “They’re kids,” she says. “They shouldn’t have to worry about what you’re going through.” Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The Trump administration has ramped up enforcement while dismantling the systems to process and settle immigrants under an unprecedented 500-plus executive actions. It has cut funding to resettlement agencies, executed a record number of denaturalizations and deportations — without due process, critics say — deported immigrants to countries to which they have no connection, suspended visa processing from seventy-five countries, enacted a travel ban from thirty-nine countries, and challenged the constitutionality of birthright citizenship.

From January 2025 to March 10, 2026, ICE made nearly 700 arrests in Rhode Island, according to data assembled by the Deportation Data Project. ICE reports its agents arrested 13,517 people and removed 13,599 in New England from January 2025 to May 2026. High-profile actions, such as Operation Metro Surge, an enforcement blitz in Minneapolis that resulted in ICE agents killing two American citizens, have sent a current of fear and anger coursing through the state, splitting families and communities, and straining agencies that assist immigrants.

“These attacks are not new but it’s definitely worse,” says Catarina Lorenzo of Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance. “They aren’t really hiding their violence and they are not following the law — picking up people without a warrant or people whose cases haven’t been decided yet.”

An ICE spokesman said that its officers operate within the law, and that nearly 70 percent of those arrested were “criminal illegal aliens. Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘noncriminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

Many in the state have risen to defend immigrants, challenging federal authority in courtrooms, conference rooms, council chambers and churches.

“We recognize that immigrants are full people — our neighbors, business owners and essential workers,” says Economic Progress Institute Analyst Hector Perez-Aponte. “We need to be careful about how we frame them, not based just on their citizenship status, but as Rhode Islanders.”

A ragged line of human need trails outside the Refugee Dream Center, scrolling through their phones, chatting softly, inching down the hallway for a box of groceries. Wednesday is food distribution day, and Jan Botha (a pseudonym) is there to resupply. In February, he, his wife and three children left South Africa at the U.S. government’s encouragement. In October, Trump froze all refugee admissions except for white Afrikaners as a persecuted minority. The Bothas were among the nearly 4,500 South Africans who have since immigrated to the U.S.

Botha didn’t get the welcome he expected.

Last July, the Republican Congress cut nearly $1 trillion in funding for food stamps and medical care for legal immigrants. About 90,000 lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The EPI estimates that 2,300 Rhode Islanders were affected, an impact of about $5.5 million. The restrictions placed on access to Medicare, Medicaid, government subsidies to purchase ACA plans and tax credits means another 1.4 million are expected to lose health coverage by 2034. 

“That is a big shock for me,” Botha says. “It’s like feeling a heart attack but you don’t want to look at the signs. So, I must get used to the feeling.”

It has likewise shocked the nonprofit resettlement agency founded by Omar Bah and his wife, Teddi Jallow. The center, which serves about 2,700 Rhode Islanders annually, lost $500,000 in federal grants. SNAP cuts pushed the demand beyond the center’s capacity, forcing it to purchase food at about $250 a week for a family of five to supplement private and Rhode Island Community Food Bank donations, while shouldering the entire burden of food support for South African refugees.

“Fear of ICE raids has caused many clients, including those who may still be technically eligible, to disengage from public assistance programs entirely. As a result, they are turning to us as their primary source,” Jallow says. “We are doing everything we can to bridge these gaps, but the cumulative impact is placing the organization under considerable financial pressure.”

Cecelia Dama Lizotte considered closing her Providence restaurant, Suya Joint, when her brother, Paul Dama, below, was arrested and detained by ICE agents while on his way to church. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The effects of Trump’s everything, everywhere, all-at-once approach are rippling through the economy. A recent report co-authored by the EPI estimates that the loss of low-wage immigrant labor will increase costs on everything from dining out to construction, and lead to labor shortages and employment losses for U.S. workers whose jobs depend on immigrant workers. Undocumented immigrants alone contribute as much as $95 million in state and local tax revenue, according to the EPI.

David Molina-Hernandez, formerly of Central Falls-based immigrant advocacy organization Fuerza Laboral, says that the volume of calls from immigrant workers complaining of exploitation has increased, as the sales of businesses that cater to immigrants have gone down.   

“Businesses have reduced their labor force, and employers who know the situation will take advantage of their workers and threaten them with ICE — these threats are not legal, but they put fear in their workers,” he says.

Farouk Rajab, president/CEO of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, has been fielding calls from members worried about workers being deported.

“It has a huge impact on our industry because we are an industry of immigrants,” he says. “It’s one of the easier industries for immigrants to integrate in our country, and we’ve always welcomed them.”

Chef Cecelia Dama Lizotte considered temporarily closing her acclaimed West African restaurant Suya Joint to fight her brother’s detention. Seven years ago, Paul Dama fled a terrorist insurgency in Nigeria to manage Lizotte’s restaurants in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and Providence. Dama was authorized to work and his asylum petition was pending when ICE arrested him on the way to church last June. He was held until late September 2025, when a judge granted him asylum.

Lizotte calls it “one of the most painful experiences of my life.

“Our staff in Boston and Providence showed up every day not knowing what the outcome would be. There were tears behind the scenes, long nights and financial pressures that most people never see. When a key team member, who is also your family, is in legal limbo, it affects everything,” she says. “I am grateful to say that Paul has now been granted asylum. But I want to be honest, the legal process was costly. The emotional toll was heavy.”

Nonetheless, the ending of Dama’s immigration journey is happier than most, because, for one thing — it had an ending.

Maria Kyiv (a pseudonym) sits in limbo, after the program that temporarily admitted Ukrainians escaping the Russian invasion stopped processing the work permit and visa extension requests for the 240,000 Ukrainians already here. Kyiv, her mother and nine-year-old son have lived in Rhode Island, near her sister’s family, under temporary visas since 2022. Recently, she rejected her sister’s suggestion to sponsor Kyiv’s application for permanent legal status through the family reunification program.

“They are now reviewing applications filed in 2007. Can you imagine?” she says. “The last four years I’ve built my new life here. And then one day you have to cross them off and go somewhere else to start again from zero. I wouldn’t go back to Ukraine because it is not a safe place.”

Immigration lawyers say that the Executive Office for Immigration Review has eliminated judicial discretion and defendants’ legal strategies. Immigrant filings could now be rejected for any paperwork error, and clerks are prohibited from explaining why or how it could be corrected, Cade says. Critics charge that 100 judges out of a staff of 750, whose average caseload is 12,000, were fired for below par deportation decisions.

Cade left in May 2025 out of “a concern that due process was becoming impacted.” In the past, a new administration might have instituted a policy change she may “have personally disagreed with, but I never felt like I was being asked to violate the law. I remember specifically my supervisor said, ‘I’m not going to tell you how to decide your cases, but you know what they want you to do.’”

Paul Dama. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

An EOIR spokesperson said the office continually evaluates immigration judges. “All judges have a legal, ethical and professional obligation to be impartial and neutral in adjudicating cases. If a judge violates that obligation by demonstrating a systematic bias in favor of or against either party, EOIR is obligated to take action to preserve the integrity of its system.”

Deborah Gonzalez, director of Roger Williams University’s Immigration Law Clinic, says that “immigrants are now viewed as criminals and treated worse. A rapist gets a lawyer for free, and a bail hearing. A rapist isn’t going to be held in detention until he is proven guilty. None of that happens for immigrants.”

Rhode Island’s federal court has been clogged with habeas corpus petitions, which forces a judicial review of those detained and held by ICE. But Southeast Asian advocacy groups say they no longer have much success getting deportation orders removed or guiding their clients to citizenship.

“The challenge has been redefining what wins look like and making sure to celebrate those because of this overall sense of hopelessness,” says Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, who recently stepped down as executive director of PrYSM, a Southeast Asian social justice and advocacy organization.

Theary Voeul, who has been working with refugee families for twenty-five years, says many who came over as babies never realized that they were not full citizens.

“The majority of our cases are for decades-old crimes. These folks have been clean and compliant with ICE, and now immigration is coming back to them and they are being detained on check-in.”

These obstacles have not stoppered the flow of immigrants seeking advice, says Milagro Sique, CEO of the Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island. The state’s largest immigration services nonprofit lost $2.5 million in funding and 25 percent of its staff.

“We try to guide them as best we can, by providing some hope.”

Providence-based immigration lawyer Hans Bremer is similarly inundated with inquiries, but “our income is down dramatically.” His firm is still winning asylum cases that were already in process, but he has fewer new cases because “from the immigrant’s point of view, why pay an attorney thousands of dollars for a case where they may be back to their home country in a few months?”

This possibility weighs on Jose Garcia (a pseudonym). He bolted from his village in Ecuador steps ahead of the murderous intention of the local police, who he says extorted and beat him, left him for dead in a garbage dump and shot up his house. Garcia gathered his wife and three-year-old son and headed for the U.S. border, where the family was admitted in April 2024 as asylees with a credible fear of harm. In January, he was detained by ICE agents on his way to a construction job. Since his release in February, AMOR was helping the family get a lawyer to plead their case.

“My papers were in order. I’ve always done the right thing.,” he says. “We simply strive to earn an honest living so we can put a plate of food on the table. That is, literally, the only ‘crime’ we commit on a daily basis.”

He watches his son quietly eat a slice of pizza.

“If something were to happen to me, I don’t know what would become of him, because I am their sole provider.”

“ICE is in the area!”

The Deportation Defense Network hotline gets a call about masked men in the neighborhood, and a verifier on the scene confirms they are ICE agents waiting to detain someone on that street. The alert goes out and a dozen volunteers mobilize. Ken Pariseau begins knocking on doors, as a crowd chants:

“You have the right to remain silent!”

Within minutes, the commotion persuades the ICE agents to leave, and the crowd gives a cheer.

It is a gloomy Sunday afternoon, and the steely light barely penetrates the Bell Street Chapel — but it matches the mood in the room. About seventy people came to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Providence to learn about the DDN, a state-based initiative of AMOR. The role-playing exercise caps a presentation on the network’s mission, tactics and their constitutional right to legally oppose their government.

In early 2025, AMOR and Party for Socialism and Liberation increased the capacity of the DDN and its twenty-four-hour hotline. Borrowing from local organizing activities and other states’ experiences, the DDN uses the right to free speech and to assemble to warn a potential target, document the incident and discourage ICE from executing an arrest: Show up in numbers, make enough noise and ICE will melt away.

The PSL’s Beka Yang estimates that more than 5,000 volunteers have signed up to receive ICE alerts on their phones or take intervention training, to man the hotline and patrol the courthouses.

“Our approach has been to build a strong, local mass movement and it’s really gotten a life of its own,” Yang says. “Our success is measured by how much we’re able to continue growing a movement of everyday people who are inspiring each other to exercise our collective bravery.”

In the last year and a half, Rhode Islanders have mounted a modern-day burning of the HMS Gaspee, the 1772 rebellion that helped unite the Colonists against the crown before the Revolutionary War. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, the ACLU, religious institutions and immigrant groups have filed several lawsuits to block federal actions that harm immigrants. This session, the General Assembly considered a legislative package that would add legal protections for immigrants and redefine a statutory year as 364 days for petty misdemeanors, such as shoplifting, to prevent immigrants convicted of those offenses from being deported.

“This closes a loophole between state and federal law,” says Representative Leonela Felix (D-Dist. 61, Pawtucket), sponsor of the 364-day bill. “I come from an immigrant family, and I’ve had family members who’ve gone through the immigration process successfully and others who have not, so to me, this issue is personal.”

Sales have fallen 40 percent at La Casona, a Central Falls restaurant owned by the Tabares family. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

The city of Providence posted 200 signs marking public and private city-owned spaces off limits to immigration officers. In November, the City Council updated an existing ordinance to establish protected spaces, limit the collection and disclosure of sensitive personal data and clarify the limits of city law enforcement’s interactions with immigration officers. Last June, it mailed jumbo “Know-Your-Rights” postcards citywide.

“We want to make it clear: Providence is not going to make their job any easier,” Mayor Brett Smiley says. These countermeasures are meant to minimize disruptions of immigration enforcement to the flow of city life — if, for example, “a federal agent tries to grab someone coming here to pay their taxes. It’s critical that everybody in Providence feels comfortable calling 911 if they’re a victim of a crime or a witness. We believe deeply that the community is safer when Providence embraces these policies.”

The Immigration Coalition of Rhode Island has forty-four member organizations that meet monthly to share information, strategize and advocate for bills, says coordinator Juan Pablo Ocampo. Its members organize free legal consultations and preparedness clinics to help families organize their paperwork, and develop a temporary guardianship plan if an immigrant is unexpectedly detained. They support “Know-Your-Rights” seminars statewide.

The Rhode Island chapter of the AFL-CIO has held several such trainings to prepare its members for a swift response.

“There is that power of information, which is how we move past fear into action, and get ready for mass mobilization,” says AFL-CIO Political Director Autumn Guillotte. “If we see an increase in federal action here, the labor movement is prepared to be there.”

The Rhode Island Council of Churches was one of twenty-six litigants in a 2025 federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s recission of a policy that protected schools, churches and hospitals from immigration enforcement actions. It runs “Know-Your-Rights” trainings and accompaniment trainings to teach congregants how to support immigrants by doing their grocery shopping or escorting their children to school. RICC Executive Minister Jeremy Langill says that the events in Minnesota spurred their members to act.

“There’s this sense in our faith communities that we can’t just sit around. It’s a matter of grace and of the mystery of faith. Christ has died, Christ has risen and Christ will come again. That’s what we say every Sunday. That’s got to mean something,” Langill says.

Pariseau joined the DDN in September because he “wanted to defend democracy.” He had been manning shifts around the Providence courthouses, to encourage passersby to take the DDN hotline number and to look for idling SUVs with tinted windows — telltale signs of ICE presence. One morning, he was standing on the corner blowing his whistle when a vehicle stopped and an occupant filmed him, raising concerns of making himself a target for federal retribution.

“The fact that I even have to worry about that really makes me angry,” he says. “I wasn’t breaking any laws and yet I felt like there may be some repercussions — and that’s very un-American and wrong.”

Cristian, his mother, Doña Gloria, and father, Pedro Antonio (at center right) moved to the city from Medellín, Colombia, in 2001. Photography by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley

“Señor! Cómo estás?”

Central Falls Mayor Maria Rivera steps into the dim of Tony’s Shoe Service, crammed with shoes awaiting repair or sale, photos of celebrity visitors and Central Falls history.

“Ayi!” Abraham “Tony” Hernandez opens his arms to her. In 1999, the Hernandez family left the Dominican Republic to settle here. A saddle-maker in the DR, his father became a zapatero — a cobbler — in the U.S. Abraham worked alongside his father to provide for the family and ensure his nine siblings were educated. Today, he counts a doctor, a lawyer and a teacher among the family’s successes.

When he took over the shop on Broad Street, life here was “difficult,” he says. But now Hernandez declares Central Falls “the best place in Rhode Island: fresh food, safe, respect and interesting people.”

After decades of decline, Broad Street is noisy with the construction of a forty-six-unit affordable apartment building next to City Hall, and the revival of the historic DeNevers building as El Centro, the city’s first community center in fourteen years. Central Falls opened a new high school, and plans are underway to build a new dual-language pre-K–8 school. Once pockmarked with vacant storefronts, Broad Street is now anchored by stalwarts like Tony’s and newer businesses, like Mimi and Pop’s Ice Cream Shop.

Rivera says that the state’s smallest city with the highest poverty rates has been able to leverage an annual $21 million budget into progress, in part, by forming partnerships with nonprofits and state agencies. But Central Falls really runs on immigrant grit.

“If it were not for the immigrants, Central Falls would not be what it is right now. They built this community, and everywhere you look,” she says, “almost every business on this street is run and owned by immigrants.”

In 1910, the foreign-born and their American children comprised 70 percent of Rhode Island’s population — more than double the national average. They were French Canadians and Europeans mostly from Ireland, England and Italy who poured in beginning in 1876 to power the Industrial Revolution.
The need for their labor did not ease their reception, says University of Rhode Island Professor Emeritus Scott Molloy. The established unions, which viewed immigrants as unskilled competitors, did not want them. The larger society greeted these newcomers with fear, disdain and extreme rhetoric. Today’s social media memes of “Haitians eat dogs” are yesterday’s editorials declaring that the Irish spread disease. Immigrants eventually formed their own unions. A toehold became a foothold. Upward mobility and political influence followed.

Nearly 17 percent of Rhode Island’s labor force, and 20 percent of its entrepreneurs, are immigrants, according to the EPI. The growth in the immigrant population helped Rhode Island retain its second congressional seat in 2017. In the last five years, international migration has kept the state’s count above 1 million residents. A January U.S. Census Bureau analysis shows that about 31,000 people moved here since 2020, boosting the population by 1.6 percent. But Trump’s immigration actions are causing a sharp decline, as evidenced by Census numbers, and Rajab, of the Rhode Island Hospitality Association, worries about what will happen when the state falls off the next generational cliff.

“In 2030, deaths will surpass births in the U.S. and by 2050, deaths will surpass births and current immigration,” he says. “If we lose population, the economy will shrink. We are heading in the wrong direction.”

Central Falls is the current equivalent of Rhode Island’s 1910 high-water mark, with 44 percent of its population foreign born, two-thirds of whom identify as Latino. It was once a settlement area for the skilled weavers from Barranquilla, Colombia, who were recruited by the mill owners in the 1960s, says oral historian Marta V. Martínez. The Dominicans followed to work in the jewelry factories, and word-of-mouth brought many more Latinos.

“They told others, ‘It’s this beautiful place. Very quiet.’ They eventually brought the families, and that’s how the community grew,” she says.

The Tabares family immigrated to Central Falls in 2001 from Medellín, Colombia, in search of small-town living, says Cristian Tabares. They worked factory jobs until 2006, when the owner of a six-seat eatery, tired of commuting between his Boston and Broad Street locations, offered the family a good deal.

Tabares’ mother, Doña Gloria, had been a chef in Colombia, but her three sons knew nothing about the restaurant business. The baker followed his old boss to Boston, but taught Cristian how to make traditional breads like pandebono. Each morning, Tabares drove to Boston at 1 a.m. and was back in Central Falls by 4 a.m. to reproduce his lesson. Customers rated his first efforts as “not good,” he recalls. “I almost wanted to cry, but we don’t quit.”

They named their little restaurant “La Casona” — the big house — and then made it so. In 2012, the three brothers opened their current location, with an airy two-story dining room, outside dining patio and bakery. During the first three months of Trump’s second term, high-profile immigration enforcement turned Broad Street into a ghost town; some people have trickled back, but “it’s still not easy,” Tabares says. Sales are down 40 percent. But he doesn’t want to dwell on that. The World Cup was coming up; there were watch parties to plan.

“We want to keep moving.”

Immigration remains a polarizing issue along partisan lines, but a variety of 2026 surveys from the University of Chicago, the Pew Research Center and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, among others, indicate that American attitudes have flipped in the last eighteen months. Large swaths of Americans disapprove of Trump’s aggressive tactics; support for ICE has dropped significantly. Majorities support a legal pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and birthright citizenship.     

That’s a good sign for those writing the beginning of their American immigration story. Botha’s spring was stressful, waiting for a Social Security number so he could find work and support his family. But he says “we are up to the challenge; I can move a mountain if I want to. I’m very happy to be here. I love the culture and the people. It’s a cliche, but we have this American dream.”

And perhaps this change of heart gives comfort to families trying to rewrite the ending of theirs.

Casty and Lay Souvannaxab have a plan: Establish his life in Laos and focus on educating the kids in America. If nothing changes, they’ll sell the house and Casty will join Lay there; the kids will be adults and can decide where they want to be. But Casty hasn’t given up on a legal path back.

“He didn’t get due process, so his lawyer never had a chance to fight for him,” she says. “I’m really hoping to get him back home.”