With cars and cameras, an activist network rises in Port Washington amid fears over ICE

Jeffrey Siegel scanned the Port Washington parking lot from behind the wheel of his dark gray Volvo S60 sedan, a Canon EOS 90D camera resting on his lap. A dashcam recording his drive was affixed to the windshield and a red whistle rested above the car’s air vents.

Siegel’s adrenaline spiked on the chilly November morning at the sight of three black SUVs parked next to each other.

“If there were three or four men standing around," Siegel said, he "would stop."  

He would have pulled over, grabbed his camera and started blowing the whistle, he said. And he would have sent out an alert: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were in town.

But on this day, he kept driving. False alarm.

Siegel, 67, is part of Port Washington's Rapid Response Network, a collection of dozens of residents who came together last summer following the sightings of ICE agents on the peninsula. The activism was prompted in large part after ICE agents in June arrested Fernando Mejia, the manager of a popular bagel shop.

The members function as their immigrant neighbors’ eyes and ears: In addition to the regular drives, which are conducted about four times a day, when word spreads of an ICE sighting, members take several steps in quick succession: They share an alert through a group chat before driving to the scene. They lower their windows and scream into the streets: “ICE is here! ICE is here!”

The members provide immigrants information about their rights, help them complete guardianship paperwork if they have children and connect them with attorneys. On their lawns, group members have signs emblazoned with a QR code linking to a website with resources. 

The group's members said they seek to provide protection and comfort as the Trump administration carries out its mass deportation policy. More than 65,000 people were being held in ICE detention centers across the United States as of Nov. 30, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering organization that analyzes immigration trends. President Donald Trump has said the policy is aimed at deporting the "worst of the worst" from the United States. But nearly 74% of the detainees do not have a criminal record, according to TRAC's database.

Confrontations or run-ins with ICE agents are not without risk, and the group's members get regular reminders of the dangers.

On Wednesday, an ICE officer shot and killed an unarmed woman driving in Minneapolis as the federal government launched a crackdown in the state with the arrival of more than 2,000 agents. Federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, said the shooting was in self-defense. Noem said the mother of three, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, “attempted to run [ICE agents] over and rammed them with her vehicle." But the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, and Gov. Tim Walz, both Democrats, disputed federal officials' account, calling for an independent probe of the incident.

Locally, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for governor, has expressed support for Trump's plan. Last February, the county authorized 10 of its police detectives to work with ICE to arrest and deport immigrants accused of a crime, Newsday reported. Nassau police have transferred at least 64 people, most of whom were accused of low-level offenses, to ICE last year, according to data analyzed by Newsday.

There have been at least three ICE sightings in Port Washington, RRN members said. 

ICE did not respond to requests for comment. 

ICE officials told Newsday in June the agency "does not indiscriminately conduct enforcement actions on random people. ICE officers conduct targeted enforcement actions that are based on intelligence-driven leads focused on aliens identified for arrest and removal from the United States."

Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said in an interview that anti-ICE activists have a right to protest. But they need to know “where to draw the line,” he said.

“When you start encroaching on personal space, and those kinds of things, that’s when things are going to get physical,” Giacalone said. “Once you put yourself into the middle of it, you are no longer a protester, you are a participant, and you’re going to be dealt with accordingly.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Republican members of Congress have been particularly critical of digital apps that track ICE operations. During an interview on Fox News in July, Bondi said one of the largest ones, ICEBlock, alerts people with bad intentions to the presence of agents and "is threatening the lives of our law enforcement officers throughout this country."

In October, Google and Apple blocked apps from being downloaded that alert ICE sightings to the public.

Large wealth gap

The work of RRN — its members call themselves allies — transcends demographic boundaries.

The Port Washington peninsula includes several villages, as well as an unincorporated area of 16,753 residents, where the median household income is $183,964, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2020 and 2023, respectively. The area was fictionalized as “East Egg” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel “The Great Gatsby” as a playground for the extremely wealthy, with extravagant mansions overlooking the waterfront.

That spirit still flows through parts of the peninsula, but other walks of life are represented too: Much of the allies’ work focuses on Manorhaven, a village of about 7,000 where 30% of the population is foreign-born, according to the Census Bureau. About 2,500 residents in the village are Hispanic or Latino, the data shows, and the median household income is $93,322. 

“There’s a large disparity in privilege and access to wealth,” Evan Freed, an RRN member and small-business owner from the unincorporated part of Port Washington, said in an interview. 

They are their neighbors

Long Island is among the most racially segregated regions in the nation, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Erase Racism. But to those in the RRN, the people they are looking to protect are not anonymous faces who happen to share an area code. They are their neighbors, the members said. 

Margaret Maher, 66, lives in Merrick, which is mostly white, but in recent months she's been performing Rapid Response work in Freeport, which is more diverse and shares a border with Merrick. 

"I feel a responsibility as a human," Maher said in an interview. "Whether somebody lives next door, or somebody lives one town or five towns away from you, if they're getting treated inhumanely ... it’s wrong."

The work does not come without risk. After Wednesday's fatal shooting in Minneapolis, Freed said he was spooked by the incident.

“It’s scary, but we’re going to continue to do it, and trust that we won’t get shot and killed,” Freed said. “I know no one is going to back away because of this, but [we are] definitely going to be a little more, I’m sure, cautious the next time we interact with ICE.”

In Charlotte, North Carolina, two women were arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents in November for allegedly interfering with operations, according to news reports. The Border Patrol agents smashed the car window of the vehicle the women were in before detaining them, according to reports.

In Nassau, Port Washington RRN member David Chapman was arrested after following an ICE agent in his car, according to a copy of the charging statement. He was charged with reckless endangerment and obstructing governmental administration, both second-degree misdemeanors, according to a department spokesperson. He was also charged with first-degree harassment, also a misdemeanor, the department said.

Chapman pleaded guilty to a "reduced charge" for a "parking violation," according to a transcript from the Dec. 9 court hearing. A representative for the Nassau district attorney's office said during the hearing that "the remaining charges would all be dismissed in satisfaction," according to the transcript.

Chapman's arrest has hardly deterred the RRN members. During Siegel's drives around the peninsula searching for ICE agents, he thinks back to Mejia, the bagel shop manager who was arrested by ICE agents in July. Mejia opted for "voluntary departure" back to his home country of El Salvador in November. 

“My biggest concern,” Siegel said as he pulled into a parking lot, peeking his head around a dark corner, “is that I’ll accidentally not see something that I should have.”

'We're all there together'

RRN members said they do not know how many of their neighbors have been detained by ICE.

Nearly 2,200 ICE detainees have been held at the Nassau County jail in East Meadow since February, Newsday reported in October. ICE arrested more than 1,600 people with prior convictions on Long Island through August, the agency told Newsday, but it did not answer questions about how many people it arrested without convictions. 

The arrest of Mejia, who had no prior criminal record, has galvanized the Port Washington community.

He had long been the public face of Schmear Bagels & Cafe on Main Street. He would dress up in costume on Halloween and hand out candy around Christmas.

In July, Siegel started hosting weekly vigils in honor of Mejia and other immigrants detained by ICE across the country. The vigils, which are typically attended by dozens of people, have continued into 2026, with the first held on Jan. 5.

"It wasn't something I ever imagined, that people were going to come together," Mejia said in a Zoom interview through a translator in December from El Salvador. "The biggest thing for me is that my story is shared. I want to share with others, for them to understand the things that may happen to them, in order to protect them."

The vigils are held Monday evenings in front of Port Washington’s LIRR station, just across the street from Schmear. Members discuss the news of the day and trade tips about spotting ICE agents.

And they sing.

Hours after the Minneapolis shooting on Wednesday, the allies had gathered at the Port Washington train station for an impromptu march down Main Street.

“Say her name!” Chapman shouted into a megaphone, leading the group of about 40 as they passed Schmear. “Renee Nicole Good!”

The call-and-response continued for about 10 minutes until the crowd reached the big Christmas tree at Blumenfeld Family Park.

“What happened today,” Chapman said, as the tree glistened behind him, “needs to be a catalyst for something bigger to happen in this country.”

Efforts across Long Island

The activism has spread to other parts of Long Island. In addition to Port Washington, Rapid Response Networks have cropped up in the villages of Westbury and Freeport, as well as in the hamlet of Central Islip. The advocacy group Islip Forward runs a tracker that crowdsources images of ICE activity around Long Island with time stamps and locations.

Hazel Leon, 31, of Freeport, has helped organize the village's Rapid Response Network and informs immigrants of their rights. A first-generation Guatemalan American, she said the Trump administration's deportation plan has hit particularly hard.

There've been at least four ICE sightings in Freeport since September, according to Islip Forward's tracker.

"I don't want to hear that people are even scared to come outside of their homes because they're afraid ICE is going to take them to a country they might not even be connected to anymore," Leon said. 

The issue feels particularly urgent in Glen Cove, where one-third of the city’s population is Hispanic and 29% were born outside the U.S., according to the census data. In November, about 200 people gathered to protest Trump’s immigration policies.

Roger Street Friedman, a singer-songwriter from Sea Cliff, joined neighboring Glen Clove’s Rapid Response Network.

There are kids in Glen Cove who fear their parents won't be home when they return from school, he said.

"People are afraid to leave their houses," Friedman, 63 said in a phone interview. "They're taking taxi cabs instead of walking for five minutes because they're afraid they're going to be picked up."

Glen Cove Mayor Pamela Panzenbeck, a Republican, said ICE activity "has died down" in the city since earlier last year. In June, ICE placed several people in custody near the train station's parking lot, a police official confirmed to Newsday.

"There's a misunderstanding that they're just taking people," Panzenbeck said in a phone interview. "They're picking up criminals ... and if somebody is a criminal, we don't want them there amongst our population."

On the first Friday in October, Stacey Mellus and other RNN members raced to Port Washington Boulevard when they learned ICE agents had appeared. By the time she arrived at the scene, the agents were detaining three people, she said.

Mellus, 49, a communications consultant from Port Washington, opened her phone and started recording.

Mellus did not know the names of the men handcuffed and led into cars, she said, but that did not matter. To her, they were her neighbors.

Newsday's Sam Kmack and Joseph Ostapiuk contributed to this story.