‘No one will save you’: How a band of volunteers is helping identify people arrested by ICE

This story is part of Holding the Line in Queens, an ongoing series examining issues important to members of New York City’s immigrant communities.

J.Y. got a ping on her phone on a Wednesday morning in January. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been spotted again in Corona, Queens, and another neighbor had been arrested. 

Agents had crowded around a young Latino man, the woman texted, and though she ran towards them yelling, he had been taken away. She wanted to help figure out who the man was — and if his family knew he was detained.

J.Y., a longtime Queens resident in her thirties with Peruvian roots, clocked out of her day job, and the two women got to work. 

While some videos of ICE arrests get attention online, these neighborhood arrests often go unexamined beyond the moment they go viral. Offline, volunteers like J.Y. are doing the arduous work of caring for their impacted neighbors long after ICE has left the scene. 

Groups of volunteers who look out for, film and document ICE sightings around the city, also known as rapid response networks, have popped up and received more attention amid the Trump administration’s ramped up ICE enforcement locally and nationwide. 

But J.Y., who wants to be identified by her initials out of fear of retribution,  and her colleagues have been doing such neighborhood work for more than a decade through what they describe as a community-based organizing collective. First launched as a police watcher and anti-displacement group, they now find themselves using the same tactics to respond to an increase in arrests by federal immigration agents. 

“No one is going to save you,” J.Y. said of the group’s work. “No one’s gonna get faster here than your own neighbors. … you have to self-organize,” she added.

Their work has yielded results. J.Y. and her fellow volunteers, alongside business owners and other neighbors, have been able to confirm that more than 20 Latino men were arrested by ICE in their Queens neighborhood during November 2025. They have identified and otherwise connected with a total of 15 people arrested by ICE in their neighborhood. They have looked for relatives, colleagues or friends. They have helped connect the families of people who have been detained to legal resources and have promoted campaigns of families trying to raise money. Two detained men were successfully released from detention after their group connected them with immigration lawyers.

Under siege, yet united

As J.Y. and others walked through the neighborhood that evening in January, they reached out to those who would know best what had happened that day: the man’s neighbors. They walked from business to business — laundromats, delis, restaurants — showing a screenshot from the arrest video in the hope of identifying the young man in the picture. 

“Do you know this person?” J.Y. asked again and again.

Corona’s residents and business owners have become a growing network of concerned citizens, working in lockstep with J.Y. and her crew of dozens of volunteers to help those who have been swept up in ICE’s crackdown on New York City communities. 

This arrest, just like many others that the Queens groups had been monitoring, took place not far from the main commercial corridor, Roosevelt Avenue. The avenue —  where people from this predominantly Latino community do their everyday chores, eat out with family and grab the subway on their commute to work  — has become a controversial flashpoint over immigration and public safety,

Before an arrest ever happens, the volunteers have spent time building relationships with business owners, both informing them of ICE sightings, sharing resources, and providing mutual aid. And when it’s called for, they touch base with those same businesses and neighbors to see if they can help identify a person who has been detained. They also help verify whether ICE agents were in the neighborhood. 

J.Y. and others share pamphlets that contain local contacts, tips on what to do when encountering federal agents, and timely news on the latest ICE activity in the neighborhood. The network is not apolitical — in some of their flyers, the mutual aid group also urges community members to connect arrests by ICE to what they see as historical policing trends in a neighborhood targeted by Operation Restore Roosevelt and other NYPD operations.   

J.Y. arrived at a small convenience store selling everything from sweaters to cookies. They leaned over the counter to show a picture of the detained man being handcuffed. The woman at the counter didn’t recognize him.  

The owner, who is Chinese, told Documented she was grateful to have made the connection with J.Y. — and joked between ringing up clients about her new comrades needing to learn more Mandarin and Cantonese.

“We need more people to help,” said the shop owner, Joey. 

Many neighborhood workers — from shop owners to bicycle repairmen and laundromat attendants — echoed Joey. Six community members told Documented they found their neighborhood network helpful for resources and for disseminating information. While the fear of arrest had impacted both their lives and businesses, being a part of something bigger also gave them purpose, they said. 

“You feel good when you can do something, help them somehow,” a Corona laundromat worker who asked to be identified by the initials Y.S. said in Spanish.  “Even if you can help a little, you feel better.” 

The 44-year-old recalled how she’s been able to identify people taken by ICE and also give families access to help and legal support through her connection with J.Y. and her colleagues. 

As the sounds of washers whined behind her, she stopped to greet and send off various clients with bags of folded clothing. She laughed at the description of her workplace as a community center but she also noted that three of the people she’s helped identify were able to get out of detention. 

In the end, J.Y. and her neighbors were unable to identify the man detained that day — but they are intent on continuing this work.

Y.S., the laundromat worker, said that it’s important for the community to receive proper information on how to act in the wake of an ICE arrest.

“Every time you go out on the street,” she said, “you have to be ready.”