In Staten Island’s ‘Little Mexico,’ ICE Presence Rattles a Community

Lorna Wilson and 40 other food pantry volunteers were in the middle of their shift inside Faith United Methodist Church on a sunny November day when a half dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrived. 

“I remember telling everyone to come inside the church,” said Wilson, the Port Richmond church’s treasurer. “Ten minutes later, I hear ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom’ on the door. ‘ICE, ICE!’” 

For more than 50 years, Faith UMC has hosted a biweekly food pantry for Port Richmond residents. Hundreds of people once wrapped around the corner of Heberton Avenue — to collect food, clothes, and other supplies — but since the raid, Wilson says volunteers “sit there for hours” without visitors, seeing a few people “come in drips and drabbles.”

Many of those who have frequented the Faith Food Pantry over the years come from Port Richmond’s large Latino immigrant community. But recent and steep increases in citywide arrests by ICE have altered day-to-day life in the neighborhood.

Since the beginning of the second Trump Administration, ICE street arrests in New York City are up over 200 percent, including the North Shore of Staten Island. While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not record borough-level arrest data in New York City, reports of ICE arrests in stores, parking lots, street corners, and in front of peoples’ homes on Staten Island have picked up since October in one particular neighborhood: Port Richmond.

Port Richmond is at the heart of the sometimes-overlooked diversity of Staten Island’s North Shore. Known as Staten Island’s “Little Mexico,” nearly half of the neighborhood’s population is Latino — with rates of Mexican ancestry that are quadruple the city’s average. Port Richmond, like the rest of the North Shore, regularly votes Democratic in municipal, state, and federal elections — while the rest of the borough leans Republican. 

“We have been seeing a lot of people talk about ICE agents having a clash with Staten Island residents, especially in Port Richmond,” Abou Sy Diakhate, co-chair of Staten Island Immigrants Council, said. 

The raids have changed the lives of immigrants in the area, from how they work to how they acquire food and clothing, advocates say. And some residents even believed witnessing the ICE presence has softened the hearts of some critics of immigration.

ICE raids and fear surrounding them have had an impact on many facets of life in Port Richmond. They prompted two recent student protests at local high schools, and ICE watch events have been scheduled.  The enforcement has particularly affected day laborers — many of whom are undocumented — according to Gonzalo Mercado, director of transnational programs at the National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON).

Joshua, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of his safety, is a 35-year old day laborer who lives in Port Richmond. An immigrant without legal status from Mexico, he’s created a contracting business over the last 19 years doing small-to-medium-sized construction jobs across the North Shore, but he said the last year of immigration enforcement has made day laborers feel exposed and vulnerable. 

At one point, Joshua and his crew of 10 to 15 day laborers could regularly get contracts that would be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Since the beginning of 2025, that has changed. 

“Two years ago, I was doing great. I was doing big contracts,” said Joshua. “Now, I have nothing.”

News of increased arrests, detainments, and deportations have scared some of his usual clients and nearly all potential clients from working with him or his team, Joshua explained. “They think if they give the money, we’re going to disappear,” he said, referring to fears that contractors will be arrested and deported mid-contract

Even those who are working with day laborers feel squeezed financially. Tariffs on construction supplies have curtailed contracting jobs that many day laborers rely on. Joshua has savings, but his reserves could run out soon if job opportunities don’t return. “If it keeps like this, probably in six or eight months, I have to go back [to Mexico] because it doesn’t make sense to stay here,” he said.

Businesses like Joshua’s give day laborers without legal status a way to get dependable jobs without having to wait around outside for work, exposed and vulnerable. But, the lack of new contracts for businesses like Joshua’s has meant that his employees, along with many others in their same situation, have wound up looking for work — largely unsuccessfully — back on street corners.

“We live day by day, and we work[ed] everyday,” Joshua said. “But now with this situation we don’t have work.”

Day Laborers lefts out in the cold

Advocates fear this loss of work has led to a noticeable spike in homelessness among day laborers, Mercado said. New York City does not specifically track homelessness by immigration status, or at the neighborhood level, but the number of single adults in Staten Island seeking shelters during the last six months of 2025 was 21 percent higher than the same period in 2024. 

Ana, a 66-year-old domestic worker and community organizer who assists NDLON’s Adopt-a-Corner program, said the current homelessness she’s seen is unprecedented. She also requested that Documented use a pseudonym to protect her safety.

“We’ve always had day laborers that go homeless [in the winter], but never in these numbers,” she said through a Spanish translator. “When I go to the corner, [it’s] not only one or two, but there was like about 30 to 35 men.”  

Being out on the street corners —whether searching for work or due to homelessness — has become increasingly dangerous for day laborers in Port Richmond, Mary Hernandez, a volunteer with NDLON’s Adopt-a-Corner program said.

“What began happening was that people were being opportunistically picked up in the areas where ICE had a warrant for someone,” Hernandez explained. “They’d be sitting outside that address, but then if anybody brown walked past, they’d get out of the car and demand where you’re from.”

Mercado added: “I’ve worked in Port Richmond on immigrant rights issues since 2004. I have never seen ICE on the street like that.”

A community responds

Concerned neighbors and local community organizations are stepping in. The Adopt-a-Corner program, founded on the premise of community members standing, literally, with immigrants as friends and allies, has branched out, now donating winter jackets, backpacks, and other useful items to the newly homeless in Port Richmond.

The Rev. Hank Tuell, of St. John’s Episocal Church in Rosebank, near the Verrazzano Bridge on the opposite side of the North Shore, has been one of the faith leaders helping to coordinate community response to the arrests in Port Richmond. Volunteers have been doing “everything from making cookies, to doing hospitality at food pantry lines, to doing ICE watch,” Reverend Tuell said.

Through ICE watches, community members are informing neighbors of increased law enforcement presence and describing vehicles through private chats and on social media. On the SI MigraWatch Network page on Instagram, for example, people can anonymously send in pictures and videos of suspected ICE vehicles and locations where arrests have happened. The page administrators then try to verify the locations of the arrests or the vehicles before uploading them to the page. 

Tuell has also sought out monetary donations for the response work – and  this is where he says he is seeing a change of heart in some of his parishioners and those in the community. 

“I have church members that are much more on the conservative front of politics that are making monetary donations,” he explained. “They realized this isn’t what they thought was going to happen.” 

Since the beginning of the Second Trump Administration, ICE arrests of people without criminal convictions have increased seven-fold. Tuell thinks that Staten Islanders seeing arrests of people they know without any criminal records is really shifting opinions.

“Hopefully after all of this is done, there’s going to be a much broader recognition about the immigrant community,” Ana said. “The majority of them are not bad people. [They] are good people who are just trying to get their families supported.”