
The tip came Tuesday evening in a text from a priest: “ICE is at a candy factory.”
The priest had heard the rumor about federal immigration agents from an activist, who’d heard it from a lawyer, who’d heard it from a client.
When a WBUR reporter arrived at the candy plant, the only evidence of ICE activity was a huge pool of frozen water in the driveway.
“You know, chisme is a currency with us,” said Neenah Estrella-Luna, a civil rights advocate in East Boston. “Chisme” means “gossip” in Spanish.
And social media can spread these rumors quickly.
“We’re also trying to encourage people to stop sharing the chisme, because the only effect that that has is to spread fear,” Estrella-Luna said. She added that her organization, Mutual Aid Eastie, is doing everything it can to show that people in East Boston won’t be scared.
But countering the rumors is not easy.
Every day brings a rash of warnings: ICE at a bakery, ICE at a children’s hospital, ICE in the subways. On Tuesday, a personal audio recording made the rounds — a man warning a loved one that ICE agents would be patrolling train stations in East Boston and Revere.
“So be very careful,” the man said in the recording. There was no evidence it was true, but that didn’t stop the audio from going viral.
WBUR obtained the recording from a lawyer who was getting calls about the threat of enforcement.
All this noise is happening amid sensationalized coverage of real ICE actions. Agents last week brought along a Fox News crew when they arrested a Haitian national in Boston. The man was featured on Fox’s coverage for days.
Fox titled its “exclusive embed” as “First images of ICE mass deportation.” The reporting focused on the criminal backgrounds of those arrested, portraying the new administration as cracking down on so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions” that limit cooperation between local police and ICE.
But there’s nothing new about ICE targeting suspected criminals in Massachusetts, various officials tell WBUR. The agency and federal prosecutors routinely announce cases involving gang activity and drug trafficking.
Roberto Suro, a longtime immigration reporter and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, said focusing on criminals is part of an old playbook.
“ The idea is to create the impression of immigrants being this dangerous body within the population that has to be excised,” he said.
ICE has not responded to multiple requests from WBUR since President Trump took office, including for this story.
Suro said it’s no surprise the Trump administration handpicks sympathetic media to embed with agents.
“The strategy very much relies on this kind of news media coverage to make it look bigger than it is,” he said.
Massachusetts has quickly become a flashpoint for immigration enforcement, first with Fox hyping arrests in Boston. And now Republican Rep. James Comer, of Kentucky, has asked Mayor Michelle Wu to testify about the city’s policies on working with federal agents.
Under the city’s Trust Act, local law enforcement only cooperate with ICE detainers when someone is involved in a criminal matter. City and state law prevent handing people over simply for civil immigration violations.
Wu hasn’t said whether she’ll go to Washington for the hearing. She told reporters this week that ICE has long pursued immigrants, including under President Biden.
Enforcement actions so far “have mirrored the priorities and the same types of actions that took place under federal enforcement under the Biden administration,” Wu said.
The difference now, the mayor added, are the TV cameras.
Former Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson — who ran Trump’s 2024 campaign in Massachusetts — acknowledged that ICE was already active in the state before Trump took office.
“But unfortunately, not with the amount of resources they otherwise should have had,” Hodgson said, “or with the backing that they should have had to really be very aggressive about it.”
Hodgson ran an ICE detention center at the Bristol County jail when he was in office. Asked about ICE agents amassing in front of a Market Basket grocery store in Chelsea last week — a move that sent fear through the community — Hodgson said people’s fear is warranted.
“I don’t care whether you’re an illegal immigrant or you’re somebody in our community that’s committing crimes — you ought to be afraid that you’re going to get caught,” he said. “And if you do, there’s going to be consequences.”
But several local immigration lawyers tell WBUR that while fear is widespread, they’ve yet to see an actual uptick in enforcement.
“There has not been a large-scale ICE raid in Massachusetts,” said Heather Arroyo, an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
“However, as we have ICE agents throughout our communities in a very loud and visible way, it’s still creating chaos in the communities — and that’s what it’s designed to do,” Arroyo said.
But immigration attorneys are in a tough spot: on one hand they don’t want to cause unnecessary fear, on the other, they don’t want to pretend nothing has changed.
Recent news reports show that ICE has been picking up individuals, including some here legally, in controversial detainments.
If sowing fear is the design of the new administration, it’s working as planned in Lawrence. The overwhelming majority of the city is Latino — mainly Dominican and Puerto Rican — and support for Trump nearly tripled here over the last eight years.
In interviews immediately after the election, many people in Lawrence told WBUR they thought Trump’s threats of mass deportations were bluster. But now, as rumors are running rampant in Lawrence as well as in other immigrant communities, some are questioning that assumption.
Henry Reynoso, a barber originally from the Dominican Republic, said he’s trying not to add to the chaos.
“Just yesterday someone told me about a raid on one of Lawrence’s main streets,” he said in Spanish. “I didn’t repeat this because I don’t want to participate in adding to the terror.”

Just days into the new administration, Reynoso said his perspective on Trump has shifted. He had hoped Trump would improve the economy. But now, he said, what if people are too afraid to go to work and to shop at local businesses?
“Instead of improving,” Reynoso said, “the opposite could happen.”
Reynoso said he never imagined the level of “terror” taking hold among Latinos in Lawrence.
“We’re feeling this enormously,” he said. “And that’s not good for anything at all.”
With reporting from WBUR’s Jesús Marrero Suárez.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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