Late in the afternoon is a good time to take in the section of the near North End that is the heart of New Bedford’s Central American community. On the Avenue, folks are doing errands at the many shops and eateries that advertise themselves as catering to Guatemalan tastes. A block away, at Riverside Park, every evening the soccer field is home to four or five groups of young Latinos playing half-field around the nets. Meanwhile young families, their Indigenous features like a map of their ancient civilizations, gather around the tots’ playgrounds, just mom, or mom and dad watching together, while their pre-schoolers release their energy. Youngsters play on the tot’s playground at Riverside Park, a popular spot for the immigrant community in the Near North End. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light It’s not like the North End Mayans and Hondurans, Salvadorans and Dominicans are new to New Bedford. They have been here, documented and undocumented, for decades now. About 10,000 undocumented people reside in New Bedford, according to the most recent estimate provided by the Immigrants’ Assistance Center. Some of them lived through the big raid at the Michael Bianco factory in the South End 18 years ago. Others watched as some of their compatriots got in trouble with the law and ended up getting deported. Latino soccer players at Riverside Park in the North End on a weekday night. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light But never ever, never ever in New Bedford has there been a time like the past five months, when Central American men, and they were all men, have been, out-of-the-blue, literally scooped up off the street by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Well, it’s not just the streets. In at least one home where there were minors present, ICE officers literally rammed through an inside door to get at those they suspected of being in the country without papers. And then pointed a gun at the head of an innocent teenager. The arrests started almost immediately after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. One of the earliest New Bedford abductions — and that’s what they feel like, abductions — took place on Feb. 10 at Guatemala Music and Fashion on the Avenue, a storefront whose former owner had been convicted about a year ago of selling fake IDs. Pedestrians walk up Acushnet Avenue in the North End commercial district. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light Yes, fake IDs are what undocumented immigrants use to get jobs after they’ve fled lives of grinding poverty and violence in their home countries. With those fake IDs, many of them pay into federal benefits like Social Security and Medicare that they will mostly never be able to collect. So some 10 ununiformed ICE agents descended on this store, asked everybody for papers and then detained the one person who did not have them. So much for the administration’s claim that this is all about going after hardened criminal immigrants. This is not the way deportation actions have been conducted in the past. Former President Barack Obama, who actually presided over more deportations than President Trump, followed regulations targeting the perpetrators of serious crimes. The second Trump administration, however, has loosened those practices to allow for detaining people for minor crimes, including a simple misdemeanor of a first-time crossing of the border without permission. The unannounced visits by ICE agents have only gotten more disheartening as weeks turned into months. Three of the workers who wipe down cars at Minit Man Car Wash (the highest-quality service in the city) were taken away as three other workers ran from the scene. Two seafood house workers were arrested in the early morning as they sat in their car with coffee and pastries before heading to their plant. Two of three painters waiting in front of the Market Basket plaza to be taken to a job were abducted when they could not show papers. Two of those abducted have serious medical problems: one has diabetes and another is waiting for a kidney transplant. It doesn’t matter. The point of what’s going on is to pick people up, serious criminals or not. Yes, some of those who have been arrested have had dismissed charges for operating under the influence or domestic abuse or assault. A couple have been convicted of such charges. These are certainly serious matters, but they are not the sort of things that Americans, and even immigrants, are normally hauled off the street over, especially since they have been dismissed by a court. What’s going on with ICE in New Bedford is mainly about power — aggressively checking to see who has papers and who doesn’t. It’s certainly not just looking for someone who had done a serious crime like murder, rape, drug dealing. So far crimes of that sort do not seem to have been perpetrated by most of those who have been picked up in New Bedford. No, ICE seems to be using searches for lower-level crimes as an excuse to pick up anyone who originally came to the country illegally. And why do they come illegally? Because there are not nearly enough visa slots for low-skilled workers from Latin American countries who want to come legally. We learned how far ICE would go the weekend of March 21 after a big roundup across the state in which 370 people were detained. In New Bedford, where at least eight were detained that weekend, that’s when the agents rammed open the door at the Sawyer Street apartment. Showing leadership, Superintendent Andrew O’Leary, at a City Hall rally protesting the violent action, lamented the high school students who had to witness the raid. “On March 21, my sons woke up safe and warm and went to school,” O’Leary told the rally. “Later that day, I learned that some of our students woke up to terror.” The American and POW flags in Riverside Park, the heart of the Central American community in New Bedford. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light Perhaps the most unnerving stop of all the New Bedford arrests so far was the one that occurred April 14 on Tallman Street. An ICE agent violently shattered the window of a car in which Juan Francisco Mendez and his wife, Marilu Domingo Ortiz, were sitting. The Guatemalan couple had told the agents — who had suddenly blocked their egress as they tried to drive from their home — that they would get out of the car as soon as their lawyer arrived. Mendez, who has no criminal record in Massachusetts, is awaiting a hearing on whether he can obtain legal status on his wife’s asylum residence. After the agent broke the window with an axe, Mendez was dragged out of his vehicle and sent to a New Hampshire county jail. It was a month before his lawyers could obtain his release even though he had been charged with nothing more than illegal entry in the U.S. on a first offense. Some said the agents were actually looking for a different man, someone named Antonio. The ICE agents didn’t care; they found Mendez and just apprehended the man in front of them. A first offense of illegal entry into the U.S., by the way, is considered a criminal misdemeanor and subsequent entry a criminal felony. When did we start dragging people out of their cars in this country for this kind of first offense? O’Leary is one of the singular public officials in New Bedford who has stepped forward during this season of disappearances. Congressman Bill Keating, who demanded federal officials explain the violent arrest, is another. Mayor Mitchell has decried the lack of information from federal officials to this kind of violence, but a peaceful couple subjected to this kind of arrest on a public street calls out for a stronger statement from the mayor. One would have expected some sort of statement from the city councilors and state legislators, but with the exception of Rep. Chris Hendricks, whose minority-majority district includes the Central American enclave and who attended the City Hall rally, the local lawmakers have largely sat silent. On ICE’s website, you will find a list of head shots of immigrants from around the country, many of them charged with sexual assaults of minors and others with fraud or drug dealing. But what you won’t find is ICE drawing attention to all the innocent people detained, which in New Bedford has been nearly all cases. Two men, their work knapsacks on their backs, ride along the seafood processing plants on Herman Melville Boulevard. Credit: Jack Spillane / The New Bedford Light You also won’t find the Central American men apprehended in New Bedford who have committed no crime beyond their original entry into the country. You won’t find the names Juan Francisco Mendez or Marvin Yobani Chitic Us there. They — as with many others detained in New Bedford — had no serious criminal record. However, you will find information about several who have pleaded guilty to illegal entry and have now been deported. Here’s the truth: These abductions in New Bedford and elsewhere are performative. They are meant to get the attention of both the immigrant community and the media. The purpose is not to try to round up serious criminal migrants, or to address the country’s broken immigration system. No, they are meant to terrify good, generally law-abiding people into self-deporting, going back to where they came from, which in the case of most brown-skinned immigrants who have come to New Bedford means Central America. Every indication is that the Trump administration intends to keep on this path. We are in for a long hot summer of chaos in New Bedford’s immigrant neighborhoods. Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.