Immigrants in this blue-collar town say they are living in constant fear of ICE raids that have rounded up 1,500 undocumented people throughout Massachusetts.
Among those arrested was Marcelo Gomes da Silva, an 11th grader at Milford High School, whose story has drawn widespread attention for throwing into stark relief immigration enforcement tensions around the country.
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Gomes da Silva’s family, who brought him to the United States from Brazil when he was 7, are just some of the thousands of immigrants from Latin America whose arrival has reshaped Milford in the past two decades. {snip}
The fear is pervasive throughout the community, says Reggie Lima, a Brazilian American who on a recent day wore a Trump hat in Milford’s Padaria Brasil Bakery.
“Every day, it’s on the back of everybody’s mind. Nobody leaves home today without checking around, checking the windows, to see if ICE is outside,” Lima says.
Gomes Da Silva, 18, was arrested by ICE agents on May 31 when he was stopped on his way to volleyball practice. Federal officials said they targeted his father, Joao Paulo Gomes-Pereira, who they say is undocumented and has a history of reckless driving.
The next day, Gomes da Silva’s girlfriend and the other seniors at Milford High School graduated under a cloud of angst. Not only was Gomes da Silva − the drummer in the school band performing that day − absent, but so were two of the graduating students and the families of many others.
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Gomes da Silva was released June 5 after posting a $2,000 bond set by an immigration judge that afternoon. His arrest drew backlash and condemnation from members of Congress.
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Though the mainline Protestant churches − Episcopal, Methodist, Congregationalist and Unitarian − reflect the British roots of the town’s original settlers, a nearby Catholic church demonstrates its more recent immigrant history: Once catering to the Irish and Italians who dominated the population in the 20th Century, it now offers services in Spanish and Portuguese as well as English.
“When I grew up in Milford, Milford was pretty indistinguishable from other suburbs in this part of Massachusetts,” said Otlin, who graduated in 1996 from the high school where he’s now principal.
Back then, he said, it was “almost exclusively White.”
“Today Milford is very, very different than it was. Most of our students identify as something other than white, native-born, English-speaking Americans. Here at the high school, 45% of our families need a translator to communicate with the school.”
According to the U.S. Census, 30% of Milford’s 30,000 residents are foreign-born. The census undercounts immigrants, who may be afraid to respond to the survey, according to experts and the Census Bureau itself. {snip}
Still, census data shows a massive surge in immigration: Since 2000, the Hispanic population and the foreign-born population have tripled in Milford.
Massachusetts might evoke liberal coastal elites, like the ones at Harvard that Trump is attacking with every weapon he can find. But Milford is 30 miles and a world away from the Ivy League campus. Just one-third of adults in Milford have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 80% in Cambridge. And while it’s easier to find a New York Yankees fan than a Republican in Harvard Yard, 42% of Milford voters went for Trump last year.
“Massachusetts has the 6th highest foreign-born proportion in the country at 18%,” wrote Mark Melnik, a researcher at the UMass Donahue Institute, part of the University of Massachusetts, in an email to USA TODAY. “Milford at 30% is higher than Boston (27%)!”
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And on Main Street, many of the stores feature signage in Spanish and Portuguese and sell products from Latin America such as soccer jerseys and plantain leaves.
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Two days after Trump’s inauguration, a rumor circulated in the Milford High School community that ICE would be arresting undocumented immigrants at school the next day. Students say most of the school population was absent that day, including native-born citizens who feared their parents could be arrested while dropping them off or picking them up.
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“Everywhere is kind of crazy: Chelsea, Framingham,” said Lima, the Brazilian American Trump supporter, referring to two other Massachusetts towns with large Latino immigrant populations. “You see (ICE) every day. I saw them this morning.
“Now people are afraid of driving vans with letters on the top, because they are targeting vans and commercial vehicles,” said Lima, a construction worker. Because so many of the manual laborers are immigrants, ICE will “see a van with the letters on the top, like roofers,” and target it for immigration enforcement, he said.
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ICE defends Gomes da Silva’s arrest, noting that he wasn’t the target of the operation but that anyone in the country illegally is subject to deportation. According to ICE, just over half of the immigrants recently arrested in Massachusetts have criminal convictions in the United States or abroad.
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In 2011, Milford resident Maureen Maloney suffered a horrific tragedy when her 23-year-old son was killed by a drunken driver who was in the country illegally. The driver also had a criminal record for assaulting a police officer in 2008.
Maloney became an advocate for removing undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. She went on to campaign for Trump in 2016 and to serve for four years on the Republican state committee.
In Maloney’s view, while what happened to Marcelo is unfortunate “collateral damage,” the ICE raids are beneficial because of the criminals they have caught.
“If these raids save only one life or prevent only one more child from being sexually assaulted, it was worth it,” Maloney said. “No matter how bad it was for Marcelo, and I’m sure it was traumatic for him, he’d probably rather that than having lost a sibling or been sexually abused as a young child.”
Even some Brazilian Americans agree.
“It’s needed because we’ve been having a lot of criminals all over the place,” Lima said.
“They (racially) profile. They look at you, you look Spanish, you speak with an accent, yeah: ‘Where’s your papers?’” Lima said. “But it’s complicated. By doing that, they’ve caught like murderers, people who committed crimes in Brazil.”
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