One morning in early March, I met John Cano, a thirty-year-old immigration organizer, outside his office at the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC) in Falls Church, Virginia. It was a few minutes before 8:00 a.m., cloudless, and just above freezing.
Cano held out his hand in greeting. “As you may already know,” he said, “ICE might raid today. We had to make some changes.”
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims that agents arrested more than 7,400 people across the country in the first nine days of the second Trump Administration. Later that month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem donned tactical gear and posted photos of herself accompanying ICE on raids in New York City. “7 a.m. in NYC. Getting the dirt bags off the street,” she wrote in a post on X on January 28. In February, federal agents arrested more than 22,000 people and deported 18,000, some of them shackled in military aircraft.
Despite all the initial imagery of ICE raids and military planes, the Trump Administration appears to already be behind on its stated objective of deporting millions of people. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar in charge of mass deportations, wants to increase the arrest numbers. Communities and immigrants’ rights organizations across the country are bracing for the spike.
A few days after Trump’s Inauguration, I reached out to LAJC to see if I could accompany one of their organizers and observe how they, and the immigrant communities where they work, were responding to Trump’s rhetoric and executive orders.
On the day we planned to meet, Cano offered to take me to a food distribution site and a day laborer gathering point in two different Northern Virginia communities. ICE agents had gathered at the food distribution site days before and had reportedly been seen that very morning on the move a block away from the sidewalk where day laborers waited for work.
Cano told me that his team received a tip about the ICE movements and sent an observer to verify. Another organizer, Kathy Nuñes, checked in with community members to ask if they would prefer to suspend the monthly food aid that morning. They said they preferred to continue as planned, though organizers advised against people waiting in line before the food truck arrived, one of the changes LAJC made that morning.
Cano gathered his materials: yellow caution tape, a speaker, a microphone, boxes of information cards, and stacks of manilla folders with handouts offering advice, contact information, and examples of administrative and judicial warrants.
LAJC distributes emergency information on yellow and red cards, with English on one side and Spanish on the other. The yellow card contains a hotline number—(855) AYU-DAR1—that is staffed by bilingual volunteers who are available from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. to offer real-time assistance during or after encounters with ICE. The card advises people to not open the door if ICE agents knock, to avoid contact with ICE agents in the street, to call the hotline to report what’s happening, and to maintain silence and refrain from signing any documents during encounters with ICE.
The first line on the red card states: “You have Constitutional rights.”
“We’re recommending people tape this sheet to the inside of their door,” Cano said, showing me a flyer. “It’s one thing to get a card, a handout, or hear an organizer describe your rights, but the moment ICE bangs on your door, panic can take over. So, we suggest people hang this sheet up, then they have the hotline number and a reminder of their rights before their eyes.”
John Gibler
The Legal Aid Justice Center distributes emergency information cards, which provide know-your-rights facts, contact details, and guidance on what to do if ICE agents knock on your door.
Cano loaded the materials in his car and we set out. He told me LAJC would have two other organizers and a staff attorney present for support, as well as a host of volunteers. He described the area as a diverse, working-class community with a large immigrant population from across Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
We arrived at a public parking lot near an elementary school. Nuñes and two other volunteers were there waiting, hands in pockets, wool caps pulled down low. They sectioned off an area with caution tape, set up the speaker, and fought the cold with a bit of cumbia.
Cano and Nuñes took and made calls while the first volunteers and one of the LAJC’s legal directors, Catherine Cone, began to arrive.
María, a woman in her early sixties wearing grey sweatpants, an Andean wool sweater, a dark pink windbreaker, and a wool cap approached to greet Cano and ask about the ICE sightings earlier that morning.
María is herself an immigrant. She, like other immigrants both naturalized citizens and undocumented, asked that I only use her first name for fear of reprisals. Born in Bolivia, María came to the United States thirty-three years ago, working as a babysitter. Now retired, with two children in the U.S. military, she receives $500 a month in Social Security and pays $800 a month for rent. The food aid that LAJC provides is a major relief for everyone who comes, she said. She has been volunteering here for years, and was visibly worried that ICE would raid the food distribution line.
“They’re traumatizing us,” she said. “I don’t have any undocumented family members, but I do have friends. This is a disgrace. May God forgive this country. I voted for him and I regret it.”
I was surprised to hear she had voted for Trump, and I asked her what she had expected. “I thought there would be a change, that there would be more jobs, that he would impose a bit of order with all the crime. But now I regret it. I never imagined that this would be happening,” she said, referencing Trump’s mass deportations.
By 9:00 a.m., a number of parents, mostly women, had walked their children to school and had begun to gather at the parking lot with their empty grocery bags. The food bank was running late. Some people waited around the corner or down the block, out of sight.
A woman came up to me and asked if the food distribution had been canceled. I said that people were still waiting for the delivery truck to arrive. The woman then asked me and Nuñes for assistance reading something in English. She said she was from Guatemala and had been in the United States for eight years. She had just dropped off her two children at school. The sheet of paper she showed us was a notice to appear in immigration court. Her failure to appear, the letter said, would result in a deportation order. This was the first letter she’d received since entering the country. Her hearing was scheduled for the next day.
Soon Cano turned off the music, handed out the materials, and spoke to the crowd of some thirty people. He went through the information on the yellow and red cards, and described what to do in the event that ICE agents knocked on the door: Do not open, do not answer questions, and if agents say they have a judicial warrant, ask them to slip it under the door.
Cano explained that while judicial warrants signed by a judge grant agents the right to enter homes, administrative warrants issued by the Department of Homeland Security do not. He urged the crowd to verify that any warrant given to them listed their correct names and complete addresses, and that they should not open the door in the event of any discrepancy. And he advised that everyone in the household have their IDs and immigration documents easily accessible in case ICE agents arrived for one member of a household. “If agents enter the house for one person,” he told the crowd, “they’ll take as many people as they can. This administration wants to scare us and say that we don’t have any rights, but the Constitution says that people have rights—not citizens, people.”
LAJC staff then acted out various different scenarios. Nuñes and a friend pretended to be in their house while Cano assumed the role of an ICE agent banging on their door, pressuring them to open up, saying he had a court order.
One woman asked, “If ICE knocks on the door and we don’t open up, what happens? Can they force entry?”
“It’s possible,” Nuñes replied. “I say this to be honest, not to scare you. But they’ll only do that if they have a judicial warrant.”
After taking a few more questions, they put the music back on. People continued to arrive, forming a line on one edge of the parking lot. One twenty-six-year-old woman from Guatemala who works in housekeeping told me that she came to the country to seek asylum three years ago, escaping domestic violence and hoping to provide a better future for her two children. When I asked her how she’s felt since Trump’s Inauguration, she said, “I’m scared to go outside, scared to go to work. I’m scared to take my kids to school.”
Around 10:00 a.m., the food truck arrived. The driver unloaded wooden pallets with huge cardboard boxes of red apples, and fifty-pound bags of onions, potatoes, and cabbage. Some seventy adults, with ten or so kids dashing between their legs, moved in groups of three and held out their bags for volunteers to fill. Within about thirty minutes, the food was distributed and the crowd entirely dispersed, leaving behind only three bags of cabbage to be divided amongst the volunteers.
After everyone had left, Cano and I went to talk over baleadas at a local spot with Salvadoran and Honduran fare. Cano’s parents immigrated to the United States from El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the worst years of the Salvadoran Civil War. Their experience as immigrants fleeing violence that was supported and funded by the U.S. government formed the base of Cano’s calling to work with immigrant communities. “If my parents hadn’t shared their story with me, I might not be here,” he said.
Courtesy John Cano
John Cano speaks with Legal Aid Justice Center staff at a community assembly that the organization held in November 2024.
Cano said that LAJC started planning for a possible Trump victory before the elections. Once the results were in, they got to work. The volunteer-staffed hotline, printed materials, and grassroots campaign work all stem from that planning.
After lunch we went to the shopping center where ICE agents had been spotted that morning. Earlier, he had shown me a video clip circulating online that showed ICE vehicles in a parking lot and ICE agents in the street, some wearing tactical gear. Within a few hours, the clip had more than 8,000 views.
We visited a store with a mostly immigrant clientele near where the ICE agents were seen. It was opened by a Salvadoran man who immigrated to the United States in 1982. His son, a thirty-three-year-old I’ll call Adam, now runs the business.
“I opened the door this morning and the first customer who came in told me that there was a military vehicle and a van parked right over there. They pulled in and everybody scattered,” he said.
Cano offered Adam stacks of the yellow and red cards and the handouts to distribute to his customers, walking him through the information and recommendations.
“This is good,” Adam said, receiving the materials. “We’re a community that gets scared before it gets informed. It sucks to hear, but it’s true. We’re a community that’s very poorly informed.”
He said that for two weeks after Trump’s Inauguration people were afraid to go to work or take their children to school. People coming into the store dropped to a trickle. “You could tell people weren’t going out. Now, they’re still scared, but they joke around and say they’ll be here until Trump throws them out,” he said. “It’s gonna get ugly.”
Customers came and went, overhearing our conversation. Cano handed out a few more yellow and red cards, describing their contents.
Cano and I then walked to a stretch of sidewalk where day laborers gather to wait for work. Two men were there and another three approached soon after we arrived. Cano again distributed the cards and handouts, walked the men through the information, and responded to their questions.
The men, four from Guatemala and one from Honduras, said they had been there since 7:00 a.m. and that in that time, only one person had been hired for a day job. They’re hoping that with the arrival of spring, the demand for day laborers will increase.
“I just ask God for one more year,” said the man from Honduras. “I’ve been here for five years now. With one more year of work I’ll go home. This is no place to grow old.”
Reporting for this article was supported by the Global Exchange Voices of Resistance project.