Editor’s note: Liza Cochran is a Lincoln resident who pens the substack Brave Little Voices. In this piece — part news, part analysis — she delves deep into the Aug. 8, 2026, ICE raid of Mary Richards’s home in Cornwall, in which two roofers were detained by ICE without warrants or warning and taken out of state to face deportation. One has been released and is back in Vermont. Some names have been changed out of their fear of U.S. government retaliation. When Mary Richards and her teenage son moved to West Cornwall in 2023, she knew their roof would need to be repaired. The 19th-century Gothic style farmhouse had steep pitches and soaring dormers and was tiled with gray slate: elegant and durable, but difficult to maintain. For nearly two years Mary tried to find someone who knows slate to do the repairs. But roofers are in short supply in Vermont, and she kept striking out. This past May, when stains bloomed across the ceiling in the dining room and a crack appeared above her father’s portrait, Mary got desperate. The slate would have to go. She called a roofing company in Burlington and got on their summer schedule for tar shingles. On Friday, Aug. 7, a crew of nine showed up at her house, two women and seven men. The group seemed friendly and close-knit, laughing and bantering in Spanish. It was a sweltering day, but a towering silver maple next to the house cast shadows across part of the roof, giving respite from the sun. The following day, the tree, which Mary has dubbed “Grandmother Maple,” would offer the crew much more than shade. Her limbs would become a sanctuary for two of the roofers as they fled from ICE, her highest boughs their protection. ***** Mary had chosen Vermont for its stable climate. Leaving Alaska meant leaving her home of 30 years and uprooting her son, but she’d become acutely aware of the changing weather patterns in a region warming twice as fast as the global average. Anchorage’s snowstorms had turned volatile — heavy or absent entirely. Wildfires and droughts were more frequent now, one fueling the other. And across the state, Mary knew that the permafrost was thawing, destabilizing the very ground beneath their feet. When the region’s snow got “so heavy that peoples’ roofs started collapsing beneath the weight,” Mary decided it was time to go. For someone else, moving to Cornwall just weeks before Vermont’s catastrophic floods of July 2023 could have been taken as a bad omen. Not Mary. Vermont had healthy forests and fertile soil and a longer growing season. But the state’s biggest selling point was its small communities, known for taking care of themselves — which means taking care of one another. In Mary’s mind, storms were coming for everyone, and she saw Vermont as the place with the strongest social fabric to weather what’s brewing. But storms wouldn’t be the force that emerged to threaten Mary’s sense of safety here. That would be something quite unimaginable to her 2023 self — and to all the previous versions of ourselves who believed our nation’s democratic institutions to be as solid as the bedrock shoring up these Green Mountains. ****** The next morning, Saturday, the crew arrived at Mary’s house by 8 a.m. It was a humid day. From their perch, the roofers would have been able to see thunderheads starting to build in the west. This part of Vermont is a patchwork of farmland, scrub and forest sweeping between the spine of the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain. There were once 65 working farms in Cornwall. Now there are just a few, but much of the town remains as bucolic as in decades past. Acres of conserved or privately owned hayfields, pastures, and orchards surround small hamlets, like the crossroads where Mary lives. The houses around Mary’s are encircled by generous yards, but — and this is important — they are close enough that one can see what’s happening in the neighbor’s driveway, on the neighbor’s lawn, in the neighbor’s tree. Sometime around mid-morning Barbara Hofer, a recently retired Middlebury professor, walked by with a friend who lives in Cornwall. Barbara knew Mary from a local Indivisible chapter — part of a nationwide grassroots movement to defend democracy — and, as it happened, she knew the roofers, too. As she turned the bend and saw the crew at work, she said to her friend, “Oh look, I think that’s the same company that did my roof two years ago. They’re the nicest people!” The crew danced across the roof’s steep pitches with ease, efficiently deconstructing the labor of other workers — most likely migrants who came to Vermont after the discovery of the slate belt in the 1850s. By noon, most of the slate was gone. A neighbor from across the street, a middle-aged man named Jeff, had been watching from his window as it “came off in drifts and draff.” He was impressed, he later told me, and thought to himself, “I gotta find out who this roofing crew is!” Jeff could also see down the street to the neighborhood auto body shop. The garage’s lot borders Mary’s lawn, and he noticed a large SUV with tinted windows parked in the gravel. Around the same time, a neighbor named Anya was driving by with her 12-year-old son Luke. They had just finished brunch in town. They were about to turn toward home when they saw two men standing in Mary’s lawn, handcuffing someone and hauling him toward their SUV. The men were masked, in uniform, but it took Anya a few moments to register what was happening — to understand that the men were agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and that she and her son were witnessing an ICE raid. From his window vantage point, that’s when Jeff noticed the two women, who had just been carting away wheelbarrows full of discarded slate, “running full tilt” toward his backyard. He couldn’t compute what they could be running from. “I’m thinking ‘Is the house going to blow up? What is going on?’ And so I open the door to the deck. One’s already past the garage and the other is rounding the corner and I yell, ‘Hey what’s going on?’ I get three words in Spanish, and then she’s gone, disappeared.” The women had taken off through the hayfields beyond Jeff’s house, toward a thicket of striped maples and sumac on the far side. Jeff had just gotten back inside to collect himself when, in rapid succession, he saw out the window another roofer following the same path. The man shot through the backyard, heading for the woods. When Jeff looked back toward Mary’s house, he saw the masked agents. “They’ve got a guy on his knees, with his hands behind his back,” he recalled. That’s when he noticed Mary out in her driveway, yelling and animated. Jeff isn’t one to involve himself in politics. When I asked him if he’d seen any of the footage from ICE’s siege of Minneapolis, he shook his head. “I don’t watch the news, and I stay away from all of it. Because it is so negative and it just takes me down.” But when he saw Mary, Jeff clicked into action. Without hesitation, he headed out the door. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he remembers thinking, “but she might need my help.” ****** ICE’s quiet surge began this past spring. The government’s massive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, which left two Americans dead in the street, had prompted intense backlash across the country. It didn’t take long for controversial agency figureheads to be exchanged for nominally more palatable leaders. “We are going to take a different approach that can be more effective and less public facing,” Markwayne Mullin explained after he replaced Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary. “What I’m trying to do is remove us from the headlines every single day.” Mullin seemed to perceive what Noem, Trump and former Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino had not: that Americans couldn’t stomach the overt violence. But he also intuited that what was out of sight was also out of mind. ICE’s combustible city-wide raids gave way to quick, more opportunistic strikes — intercepting immigrants on the road, outside their homes, at work, even at the hospital and church. As Mary summed it up, “They just creep in like sharks. They want the public to think that everything is normal.” Indeed, Mullin’s strategy was about avoiding bad press, not about changing course. Since the spring, the numbers of arrests have soared, “with 43,000 in June, more than 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in Aug.,” the New York Times reported last week. In January, by comparison, at the height of the high-profile crackdowns in Minneapolis, Portland, Maine, and elsewhere, ICE arrested fewer than 40,000 people nationwide. And yet for so many of us, ICE has — by Mullin’s design — slipped off the radar. “The shadow surge is a much quieter, but no less violent or deadly, enforcement,” explained Jill Garvey, the director of States at the Core, a nonprofit organization helping people fight authoritarianism. Most horrifically, ICE killed two people in July raids: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who had lived and worked in Texas for more than 30 years; and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerreroa, a father of a young daughter in Maine. Over the course of the summer, ICE detained more than one person per minute. And as The Marshall Project told PBS News Hour, the vast majority of those detained had no criminal conviction. The source of this information, the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, notes that the dip in early 2026 could be interpreted as a regrouping after Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s killings. As the number of arrests have surged, so has the money flowing toward these operations. In June, Congress approved another seventy billion dollars for immigration-enforcement, 100% funded by U.S. taxpayers. ***** When Mary peered out her window at noon that Saturday and saw three black SUVs parked in front of her house, she knew immediately it was ICE. She slipped on her clogs and bolted out the door. First, she pounded on the SUV windows, but no one was inside. When she turned, she saw an ICE agent next to her house. Mary snapped a photo, then sprinted across the street, screaming for her neighbors to come help. She didn’t yet know that the agents had already detained one man and were in the process of detaining a second. Nor did she know that two roofers were high in the silver maple tree above her head. Or that three were fleeing across a nearby field. By the time Mary returned to her house with her nearest neighbors, a couple in their 70s, an agent had already questioned her 18-year-old son, who had heard a commotion and opened the front door. “Can I help you, why are you here?” he called out to an officer. “I’m just here to talk to workers,” the agent had said. Weeks after the raid, Mary would discover that her home security camera had taken video of this moment. Her son is standing on the porch in his socks. An ICE agent in a bulletproof vest is at the bottom of the steps, looking up at him. His left hand is on the gun in his hip holster. “Rage,” Mary would say later, describing her response to finding the footage. Her boy on the porch alone, Mary gone for help without knowing she’d left him with an armed agent. A practicing Buddhist, Mary told me: “I keep seeing myself as a sitting Buddha with my insides just burning.” ***** When Mary and her neighbors returned, the agents were headed for their vehicles. She could see that they had at least one roofer with them. “I need to see your warrants right now,” Mary shouted. She had pulled out her phone and hit record as she moved toward the SUVs, two of which were already backing up and turning around in the street, rolling in her direction. In the video, she says again and again: “I need to see your warrants.” Her voice is firm, clear. “You can’t just take people.” A bicyclist — a woman who looks to be in her 60s — stops, and is now yelling alongside Mary, fury erupting from her. “Get the fuck out of here,” she shouts in a gruff voice. “Son of a bitch.” She is wearing a red, white and blue cycling jersey. For a fleeting moment, the third agent exits his vehicle to say something to the women, but his voice is muffled under his mask. Mary asks again, “Do you have a warrant?” As the agent turns back toward his car, desperation fills her voice. “You gotta have warrants to take people. You can’t just take people. You can’t just take people. You can’t just take people.” “Get out of here, you son of a bitch,” the cyclist says. “You horrible man.” The agent gets back in his car and rolls away. Eight times more Mary yells after the last SUV as it leaves: “Do you have a warrant?” And then they are gone. When I watch the recording, what strikes me is how resolute Mary is in the 55 seconds she is confronting ICE. She says all the things that are our constitutional right to say, to hold feral federal agents to account, to protect those on her property who have come to fix her roof. Then, as soon as the last agent leaves, Mary’s voice deflates. She lets out a long, shaky “Ohhhhhhh,” a cry of defeat as she drops her arm and clicks off her phone. Before her is the roofers’ van, the sliding side door open, her roof open to the skies, the rest of the crew scattered. What now? ***** As ICE’s arrests across the country have skyrocketed this summer, the numbers in Vermont have stayed relatively steady. It was the beginning of Trump’s second term that marked the uptick here, Will Lambek, a staff member for Migrant Justice, explained to me: a tenfold increase in arrests over the past 21 months. It is difficult to track exact detention numbers, since the federal government does not supply reliable data. The state doesn’t monitor these detentions since a person can be arrested in Vermont and taken across a state border, never to be in state custody. The best data available is from Migrant Justice, which “is certainly an undercount,” Lambek acknowledged, but represents the number of people that have contacted the organization following detention. Most of the people being detained in the interior of the state — people who are living and working in Vermont, as opposed to being apprehended at the border — are construction workers. In 2025, there were 108 detainees across 41 different enforcement actions, Lambek said. This year, there have been 54 detentions so far, across 33 different enforcement actions. There have been peaks and valleys that seem to correspond with when Boston sends additional agents to bolster Vermont’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO), Lambek explained. “There will be a week where more agents will be in the state and able to arrest more people and then those agents seem to go onto another state and the numbers go down a bit.” Across those fluctuations, ICE’s tactics have stayed consistent: swift, tactical strikes carried out by just a few agents. With limited resources, the arrests have almost always been executed in the shadows, away from public scrutiny. One could say that ICE is now deploying nationwide the shadowy tactics it has been using in Vermont all along. ***** By th