Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were scrambling. They were posted outside a South Burlington house on the morning of March 11, waiting for a warrant to arrest a migrant man who they believed was holed up inside.
Within minutes, the agents had become overwhelmed by a growing crowd of anti-ICE activists. In a phone call to a South Burlington police lieutenant, an ICE supervisor in Boston said his Vermont agents were “frantic,” according to a recording that South Burlington police released as part of a trove of footage from what would become a chaotic standoff on Dorset Street.
To plead his case for local law enforcement backup, the supervisor, Mark Anzelmo, made a surprising admission: “We only have a handful of guys who work in Vermont.”
The events of March 11 offered a rare glimpse into how one of the most opaque and controversial federal agencies functions in Vermont as President Donald Trump seeks to deport millions of undocumented immigrants nationwide.
ICE closely guards information about its enforcement operations and personnel. It selectively touts recruitment figures and arrests to project an image of a powerful agency that is cleaning the streets of “criminal aliens.” Opponents of the mass deportation policy, in turn, have harnessed ICE as the symbol of the entire federal immigration apparatus.
The reality in Vermont is more complicated.
To better understand how ICE carries out President Donald Trump’s agenda in the state, Vermont Public reviewed 132 hours of police footage from March 11 alongside dozens of other criminal and civil case files in state and federal courts. We also analyzed data on ICE arrests and detentions in Vermont that the agency has released under disclosure laws to the Deportation Data Project.
The agency’s highly scrutinized Enforcement and Removal Operations team logged only a modest increase in arrests in Vermont after Trump took office last year. It has done so using more aggressive enforcement tactics that are ensnaring immigrants who do not have criminal records. With only a small crew of deportation officers, ICE has also leaned on other federal agencies — most notably U.S. Customs and Border Protection — to bolster overall immigration arrests in Vermont.
The early stage of the operation on March 11 appears to have been typical of ICE’s approach to investigation and enforcement, Vermont Public found. The records also help explain why ICE so quickly found itself outnumbered by activists who objected to agents’ tactics, putting local and state law enforcement in the fraught position of deciding whether to come to ICE’s aid.
Wrong place, wrong time
The day after Christmas, two deportation officers staked out the Texas Roadhouse restaurant in Williston.
They spotted a blue Honda CRV in a parking lot across the street, registered to a person who the agents claimed in court documents to be investigating. A man in the driver’s seat appeared to be Hispanic and “generally” matched the physical description of the migrant who ICE was searching for, the agents wrote, without elaborating.
As the driver began to back out of the parking space, one of the agents pulled his cruiser behind the car to block him in.
The driver, Rey David Velasco Rodriguez, was not a “target” that day. But ICE arrested him anyway.
ICE claims its agents have predominantly apprehended violent criminals. But many of those who have been arrested in Vermont — including Velasco Rodriguez and the three people arrested on Dorset Street on March 11 — appear to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
ICE agents in Vermont arrested 54 immigrants between Trump’s January 2025 inauguration and March 10, 2026, the most recent date for which data is available. Of those, nearly half had no criminal record or pending criminal charges, according to ICE’s data.
Vermont Public also found that some of those who ICE designated as convicted criminals or facing criminal charges were labeled as such because of decade-old misdemeanors or immigration-related offenses, not violent acts.
Velasco Rodriguez was labeled in the ICE data as having an unspecified pending criminal charge. Following his apprehension, he was charged with reentering the United States after previously being deported, a criminal immigration offense. In court, the government also referenced a state DUI case in Vermont, but the case had already been dropped.
Velasco Rodriguez had come to the U.S. to earn money for his wife and three children in Mexico who lived in “severe poverty,” his public defender told a federal judge. Unable to work while incarcerated, Velasco Rodriguez asked to be sentenced and deported as quickly as possible.
‘Assuming that’s him’
ICE labeled Velasco Rodriguez’s apprehension as a “collateral” arrest — a term for when agents detain migrants they aren’t targeting but instead encounter during a street sweep or raid.
Such arrests accounted for more than a quarter of all ICE apprehensions in Vermont between August 2025, when the agency began counting them, and March 10. That’s one of the higher rates in the country. Seven of the nine people arrested this way had no criminal record.
ICE did not directly respond to questions about its arrest data. Instead, the agency sent an unsigned statement that claimed “nearly 70%” of its arrests nationwide during the last fiscal year involved criminals. The agency also asserted, without providing evidence, that “many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’” in its own data are “actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
Some of ICE’s investigations began with no clear public safety purpose. Vermont Public identified one case in which an ICE agent positioned his unmarked cruiser outside a large Colchester apartment building where ICE had previously located undocumented seasonal workers. The agent ran checks on out-of-state license plates in the parking lot, which eventually led him to arrest and deport two Guatemalan women.
ICE agents have not said why they were stationed outside a Dorset Street home on the morning of March 11. While there, Agent Colton Riley looked up the license plate of a Toyota Camry in the driveway and learned that it was registered to Deyvi Daniel Corona Sanchez.
Corona Sanchez was on their radar because he had been arrested for DUI in Middlebury in January, Riley wrote in court papers. He also had a previous deportation on his record.
Riley’s pursuit of the Camry ended in a crash when the driver — who, it turned out, was not Corona Sanchez — fled.
Minutes later, a South Burlington police officer who came to investigate the crash asked Riley who he believed was driving the car, body camera video shows.
Riley couldn’t remember Corona Sanchez’s name, so another agent looked it up on his phone. “Assuming that’s him,” Riley interjected. “Doesn’t matter, at this point.”
ICE’s arrests that day sparked a fierce public backlash, but just one day earlier, records show, agents quietly carried out a similar collateral arrest without attracting public notice.
That Tuesday morning, agents arrested a construction worker in Burlington while he was carpooling to his job with a coworker. Agents pulled over the car and detained both men. An agent later explained to Jaime Eliceo Castro Guaman that they had been “looking for someone else,” his attorney told a judge.
Castro Guaman’s attorney said that the agents’ explanation appeared to be a “pretext for unlawful racial profiling.” Castro Guaman had a pending asylum application, a work permit and no criminal history, his attorney said.
He spent 10 days in prison before a federal judge ordered the government to release him. Castro Guaman, the judge wrote, was a “hardworking” and “very responsible individual.”
Interior patrols
The largest immigration raids in Vermont during Trump’s second term haven’t been carried out by ICE — but by Border Patrol agents.
These agents, who have the legal authority to carry out operations within 100 miles of international borders, have arrested groups of construction workers on their way to job sites in central Vermont. They have carried out street-level surveillance and arrests in ways that closely resemble ICE techniques, blurring the lines between federal agencies to a degree that migrant activists say they’ve not previously seen.
In one case, a Border Patrol agent tracked a Mexican man near his home in Winooski for months last summer, ultimately arresting him outside his apartment, according to court records.
Less data is available about Border Patrol arrests in Vermont, but the advocacy group Migrant Justice has tallied more than 100 immigrants who it says were detained by federal authorities in 2025. That figure is more than double the 38 arrests that ICE agents recorded last year, according to the government data reviewed by Vermont Public.
“I think it goes back to personnel capacity,” said Will Lambek of Migrant Justice. “There are a lot more Border Patrol agents in Vermont than there are ICE agents, and so that increased capacity allows them to engage in more raids and detentions.”
The agency did not make Swanton Sector’s chief patrol agent, Robert Garcia, available for this story and did not respond to written questions.
A small contingent of Border Patrol agents did arrive at Dorset Street on the morning of March 11, while ICE was waiting for a judge to approve a criminal warrant to enter the house. Two of the uniformed agents talked to the protesters, who were heckling them outside the residence.
“It’s almost like this is a big f---ing waste of time,” one protester said, according to a video of the interaction that Migrant Justice provided to Vermont Public.
“I agree,” one of the Border Patrol agents said. “I don’t want to be here, either.”
The agent told the protesters that immigration enforcement was different when she joined Border Patrol five years earlier.
“I’m not even supposed to be here — this is ICE,” the Border Patrol agent said, gesturing toward the house. “I’m supposed to be on the border. I’m supposed to be making sure no one comes into the United States illegally. You think I want to be here?”
The small group of Border Patrol agents didn’t remain at Dorset Street for long. They departed shortly after 10 a.m. The agency didn’t respond to a question about why.
Later that morning, though, another team of ICE agents arrived in unmarked cruisers carrying New Hampshire license plates, followed by Vermont State Police, whose crowd-control team pried the protesters from the front steps so ICE could get inside.
Federal judges later released the Honduran man and two Ecuadorian women whom agents had detained.
The arrests violated their Constitutional rights, one of the judges found. They face the possibility of deportation nonetheless.
Bryan Parmelee and Zoe McDonald contributed reporting.
