Hartford, Thursday Aug. 27, 4:30 a.m.
It wasn’t a normal morning. Helen Garcia knew that when she got up in the dark.
First, a cold shower to wash off the restless night. Then she put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover a tattoo that could identify her. After more than a year of activist work, Garcia had learned how to dress and what to carry when she might face off with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in her role as a member of a rapid response team that tracks ICE activity in Connecticut.
That might happen today, she thought.
It took an hour for Garcia to drive from Hartford to Danbury. She’d never been to the city before she joined Danbury Unites for Immigrants, a group that works to protect and support the immigrant community in one of the nation’s most diverse cities. Garcia had helped out in Danbury in the past, but since Monday, she’d spent every waking hour there, as ICE was conducting one of the largest immigration enforcement operations in the state’s history.
She arrived in Danbury around 6 a.m. Danbury is a nice town, she thought: Every time she’s here, she sees kids riding bikes. The families walking down the sidewalks look happy, and the kids getting out of school are laughing and talking. She wondered: Do they know what’s going on?
“Do they know why so many of these SUVs have such dark windows?” she asked. “They’re just existing casually among these atrocities that are targeted at them.”
On election night in 2024, Garcia had stayed up late to watch the polls. It was the first time she’d been old enough to cast her vote. When the results solidified, she started to cry. She’d read about Project 2025, and she knew what was likely to come next.
“I was thinking about my community. I was thinking about women,” she said. “You cry for a little bit, and then you do what you’ve gotta do. You do what you can.”
On Thursday, she called in sick to work — it didn’t make sense to be anywhere but Danbury.
“I’m supposed to be at work, and I’m so far below the poverty line I couldn’t touch it if I jumped 10 feet, but how am I supposed to work right now?” she said.
ICE agents had taken dozens of people from places like supermarkets and parks in Danbury over the course of the week, according to advocates who keep track. Agents appeared at school bus stops on the first day of school, according to advocates and elected officials. A video shared with The Connecticut Mirror showed ICE vehicles outside of a daycare.
Scenes Garcia recalled over the past few days in Danbury — happy residents walking down tree-lined streets, ICE agents in unmarked cars careening through school zones at high speed, chasing people and putting them in handcuffs — were a surreal combination.
For a year, members of Danbury Unites for Immigrants had prepared for the kind of scenario that was now playing out. In less than a week, the number of arrests they counted in Connecticut had reached nearly 100, including incidents in Stamford and Bridgeport. The group had conducted trainings, prepared kits of supplies to confront agents who deploy pepper spray and tear gas, distributed cards with emergency contact information and tried to help members of the community prepare legal paperwork in case parents get separated from citizen children. All of that preparation was now coming to a head.
Officials and advocates in Danbury said they witnessed ICE sweeps targeting people based on racial profiling. Compared to the beginning of this year, a larger percentage of people arrested by ICE in recent weeks have no criminal or pending criminal charges. In July, just 11%, or seven of the 64 people arrested on the ground by ICE had a criminal charge.
This mirrors the national trend, where increasingly more people across the nation arrested by ICE have no criminal charges.
Since January of last year, ICE arrested more than 1,200 people in Connecticut during on-the-ground operations alone. Only 190 people arrested in the state have been charged with a crime.
Danbury, Kennedy Park, 6 a.m.
Garcia met up with her buddy for the day, “J,” at a parking garage. As members of the Danbury Unites for Immigrants rapid response team, they began driving around the areas of the city where day laborers typically wait to be picked up for work and where ICE agents might, therefore, be conducting raids.
One of those locations, Kennedy Park, is where, in 2006, a group of day laborers were lured into a van by a local police officer posing as a construction worker. The men were then turned over to federal authorities.
On Wednesday, Mayor Roberto Alves held a press conference at the park with Gov. Ned Lamont, U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes and Sen. Chris Murphy, an attempt to call for unity in the face of the ongoing ICE operations. But members of the crowd raised their voices in frustration, sometimes making it difficult for speakers to continue. Lamont ultimately left the podium mid-answer.
Danbury, 8 a.m.: ICE in the mirror
As Garcia made loops through the city scanning for ICE vehicles, Danbury resident Edel Hernandez Cervantes was just waking up at home so he could get ready for school and began his commute to CT State Community College in Danbury, where he’s studying to become a physical therapist. He was born in the U.S. but spent part of his life in Mexico, and he’s part of a close-knit family.
Around 8 a.m., a call came in from his father. It immediately struck him as strange. They’d just said goodbye at home.
“I was like, OK, something is happening, right?” he said. “It’s something in Mexico, or something right here.”
Hernandez’s dad told him that his uncle had been leaving for work at his construction job with four other people when they saw what looked like an ICE vehicle in the car’s rearview mirror. They decided to change course, turning back toward home, according to an account the family heard later. But the vehicle followed them.
Those details came to Hernandez second-hand, but as videos taken by neighbors were posted on social media, he would see with his own eyes what happened next: His uncle had been pulled most of the way out of a car and lay face-down on an asphalt driveway. His feet were still inside the car, his chest on the ground. He was surrounded by three ICE agents — in some moments, as many as five — some of them masked. One agent kicked him. As he lay face down, an agent shocked him with a Taser. Then again.
Hernandez was struck by how his uncle was treated compared to the other men in the video.
“The other people looked so calm in the video. He’s the only one on the floor,” Hernandez said. As the video popped up on social media and the Spanish-language Facebook group Danbury Al Dia, Hernandez grew uneasy.
“It’s kind of shocking. I didn’t know how to react. Everybody is posting the video, and I know that person.” This was his uncle, the expert baker, the man who always had the radio on when he worked and who loved to sing. Now, he was an anonymous man being brutalized. As more videos were posted, he saw him from the vantage point of a person quietly recording from a second story window. You couldn’t see his uncle’s face in this video — he was just a blurred mound on the asphalt partially covered by ICE agents, the Taser’s white light flickering in the negative space between their bodies.
At 6:45 a.m., the call came in to Danbury 911 from an ICE officer.
“We’re ICE, we had to tase a guy that was resisting us, and he’s kind of convulsing a little bit,” the agent says. A voice in the background adds that “he complains of hypertension,” according to audio later provided by the mayor’s office.
The agent goes on: “He’s kind of like shaking and he’s talking, but he’s kind of like a little bit out of it. His breathing is a little labored. I thought he was having a panic attack a little bit, but we’re trying to get him to breathe through this.”
An ambulance arrived on the scene, and the man was loaded in the back on a gurney. This, too, was captured by witnesses.
Hernandez and his family knew raids w