Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced this week that it arrested 82 people in a three-day operation across Massachusetts’s South Coast, framing the sweep as a strike against “dangerous criminals” and a rebuke to the state’s new law limiting cooperation with federal agents. But the agency did not say how many of those arrested had been convicted of a crime, and local officials, the governor and immigrant advocates have described the operation as a broad dragnet that swept up workers and longtime residents with no serious records.
The operation began September 21 and centered on New Bedford, Fall River and nearby communities, ICE Boston said in a release made public October 20. The agency said the people it detained were non-citizens living in the country without legal authorization, and that many had criminal histories or pending charges involving assault, child sexual abuse material, extortion, strangulation, drunk driving and larceny, as reported by The National News Desk, the Sinclair-owned wire service.
Most of the operations were conducted in New Bedford, about 58 miles (93 km) south of Boston.
Acting ICE Boston Field Office Director Joseph Sher used the announcement to attack Massachusetts officials.
“Time and time again, sanctuary politicians in Massachusetts have made the dumbfounding choice to prioritize dangerous criminal illegal aliens rather than their law-abiding American citizens,” Sher said in a statement, singling out the state’s Protect Act as “embarrassingly performative legislation.”
The core of the dispute is a figure ICE left out. The agency did not say how many of the 82 people had criminal convictions, how many faced only pending charges, and how many had no criminal record at all. That omission matters because the officials closest to the arrests describe something far broader than a roundup of dangerous criminals.
New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, whose city was the center of the operation, called it “an arbitrary sweep of people” and said, “This is not the way that federal law enforcement should work.” He said there was no indication the people detained had criminal records beyond motor-vehicle infractions, that some appeared to be in the country legally, and that city officials who reached out to ICE for information received no response. In nearby Fall River, Mayor Paul Coogan said two students were among those taken into custody, and that the city was working to verify their ages.
Advocates and attorneys on the South Coast, who began tracking the arrests as they happened in late September, described people pulled from their routines on the way to work.
Those detained included mechanics, fish-processing workers, landscapers and roofers, many of them stopped as they traveled to job sites, according to reporting by WBUR. One New Bedford attorney, Ondine Galvez Sniffin, put it bluntly: “They’re fishing.” A relative of one man arrested while on a work break — a man with a pending asylum application and permission to work, whose car window was broken during the arrest — told WBUR, “We are human beings.”
The scale drew comparisons to an earlier era of workplace raids. One advocate called it the largest round of immigration arrests in New Bedford since the 2007 Michael Bianco factory raid, which netted 361 people at a single site, and noted that this time the arrests were scattered across the city rather than confined to one workplace. Attorneys said detainees had court orders requiring ICE to keep them in Massachusetts, and that habeas corpus petitions were being filed to secure bond hearings, with dozens of people assisted through a local Habeas Project.
Sher’s attack landed on the Protect Act, a Massachusetts law Governor Maura Healey signed in August 2026 that limits civil immigration arrests at schools, courthouses and medical facilities. The law does not bar federal officers from making arrests on public streets — which is where much of the South Coast operation took place — and the street arrests proceeded despite it. Healey demanded answers from ICE as the operation unfolded, calling on the agency to disclose who had been detained and why; her administration has said it relies in part on nonprofits and journalists to identify people taken into custody.
Others in the state’s political and civic leadership condemned the arrests as the operation spread.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association said its leaders were “outraged” by arrests affecting families and students and urged ICE to “leave these communities in peace.” Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, characterized the arrests as politically motivated and said he was working to help constituents “exercise their habeas corpus rights and to get due process.” The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, has defended the enforcement as lawful and part of a broader deportation effort, and ICE has declined to identify specific targets, citing operational security.
The competing accounts leave the central question unresolved by ICE’s own announcement. The agency has put a number on the people it arrested — 82 — and a list of the categories of crimes some of them are accused of. What it has not provided is the breakdown that would show whether this was the operation against dangerous criminals that its director described, or the indiscriminate sweep that the mayor of the city at its center says he watched unfold.
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https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/gallery/82-illegal-immigrants-arrested-during-3-day-operation-in-massachusetts-ice-criminal-histories-assault-child-sexual-abuse-material-extortion-strangulation-drunk-driving-larceny-new-bedford-fall-river-true-crime?photo=1
Source: The National News Desk
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