On Saturday, June 14th, the same day that Vermonters gathered under the banner of “No Kings,” Border Patrol agents in tactical gear shattered the windows of a car and dragged out two people, Ignacio “Nacho” De La Cruz and his stepdaughter, Heidi Pérez. It was not a random stop. It was an abduction.
No warrant. No warning. Shattered glass, guns, and the unmistakable chill of state violence. Heidi is just eighteen years old. She graduated from Milton High School last week. She dreams of college, of building a future not just for herself, but for others. Nacho is a father, a former dairy worker, and a leader in Migrant Justice, an organization with the mission to build the voice, capacity, and power of the immigrant farmworker community to organize for economic justice and human rights. He has testified at the Vermont State House. He has marched, organized, and sat at negotiation tables so others wouldn’t have to sleep in tractors through Vermont winters, like he once did.
Two days before they were taken, Governor Phil Scott signed a bill expanding housing access for immigrant families. Nacho had been instrumental in that legislative victory. So yes, let’s call this what it is: a targeted act of political retaliation.
The Community Response
That Saturday, people gathered outside the Richford ICE facility in an emergency rally for Nacho and Heidi. It was peaceful. Powerful. Witness-filled. And it was met by agents in military-style gear, two agents had what appeared to be assault rifles and two more were armed with pepper ball launchers. At least two wore full hoods to hide their faces. Vermont, ask yourself: who wears a mask when facing unarmed people holding signs and singing?
On Monday, hundreds rallied again. This time on the steps of the Vermont Statehouse. Rossy Alfaro, Nacho’s partner and Heidi’s mother, told us her son, only 3 years old, refuses to eat or sleep, waiting for his sister and father to return. She told us Heidi’s nails were ripped off during the arrest. She told us about Heidi’s dreams, about the future she and her partner are building. A teacher stood in the crowd, unable to speak through the grief of watching a student stolen before the ink on her diploma had dried.
From Her Teacher Megan Mcloughlin
Heidi Perez, or “Fabi” as she’s known at Milton High School, is described by her teacher as “one of the most hardworking, compassionate, and resilient students” she’s ever taught. Heidi was a bridge for other newcomer students. A leader, a learner, and a girl who loved makeup, her little brother, and her friends. She had just been accepted to Vermont State University at Castleton and was planning to take English courses this summer to prepare.
The System Beneath the Violence
This is not about public safety. This is about sending a message: If you’re brown and breathing, you’re a target.
At least two of our state prisons, Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington and Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, are being used to warehouse people for ICE at $180 a head per night. Many are transferred out of state, far from families, legal support, and community. It is commonplace for detainees to be transferred multiple times, to multiple states, in a disorienting and traumatic fashion. These transfers often occur over the weekends, when communication systems and legal support are unavailable, making it nearly impossible for families or attorneys to track their whereabouts or intervene in time. Nacho and Heidi are not anomalies. They are two of at least 490 people who have been tracked through Vermont’s detention system this calendar year, though that number grows daily. Of those 490:
- 401 have been flagged as immigration detentions.
- At least 62 are proven ICE cases (probably many more that we can’t show for certain due to bureaucratic obfuscation).
- 115 were booked in just the last 30 days.
This is Vermont’s quiet complicity in a federal machine of erasure.
When They Leave, You’ll Feel It
Don’t comfort yourself with the lie that this doesn’t concern you. If detentions continue, if deportations accelerate, if Vermont becomes a place where immigrants must vanish for survival, your world will change, too.
Migrant workers fill some of the most crucial roles of our society. Without them, we will have far fewer workers to pick the crops that feed us. Fewers aides to care for our elders. Fewer builders building homes, while we have a dire housing shortage. We will be missing neighbors. Missing community leaders organizing for justice. For a better world.
No Nacho.
No Heidi.
Just silence.
This Is the Line
We don’t yet have the full scope of everything Nacho and Heidi have done for this state. But what we know already is more than enough to act.
Migrant workers are the architects of a more just Vermont. And now they’ve been taken.
If we do nothing, we are letting them disappear. If we speak, we may fear retaliation. But if we stay silent? Then we’ve already lost.
Photo at top via Migrant Justice.
Su Ughetti is a U.S Coast Guard veteran, a Spanish-speaking immigrant and a concerned citizen who lives in Essex.
