Editor’s note: Don’t miss Katharine Webster’s two-part series about immigrants in New Hampshire. Below is Part II: New State Laws in NH and Immigrants’ Rights. You can read Part 1 here: Immigrants in N.H. Live in Fear – or Disappear
By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
At the end of May, Lebanon and Hanover were placed on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security list of “sanctuary communities” that obstruct federal immigration enforcement efforts.
The list was taken down a few days later, and it’s still unclear what, if any, consequences it could have.
Local officials told news outlets that they were reviewing their policies to make sure they were in compliance with federal laws, and no one has reported major ICE raids on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River Valley yet.
But that could soon change, thanks to two new state laws requiring local cooperation with federal immigration authorities and a growing number of 287(g) cooperation agreements between New Hampshire law enforcement agencies and ICE.
The state’s new Anti-Sanctuary Act requires towns and cities to cooperate with federal immigration detainers and forbids them from enacting policies, such as refusing ICE officers access to jails, that contradict federal immigration directives.
And Senate Bill 62, which was signed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte on May 22 alongside the Anti-Sanctuary Act, says that local governments cannot prevent law enforcement agencies from signing 287(g) agreements with ICE.
The agreements give police and sheriff’s departments some money in exchange for allowing ICE to train some officers (or deputies) to enforce civil immigration laws. Four New Hampshire counties – Belknap, Grafton, Hillsborough and Rockingham – have already signed such agreements, and the state police signed one in late April, at Ayotte’s direction.
Some provisions of SB 62 take effect on July 1, and both bills take full effect on Jan. 1, 2026. Any government body that fails to comply after that date can be sued by the state Attorney General’s Office – an enforcement mechanism that was cheered by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a national group that supports tough immigration policies.
“While New Hampshire does not have any localities that call themselves sanctuary, there are numerous localities according to FAIR’s sanctuary report whose practices function as sanctuary cities,” FAIR said in a statement. “Now, the state attorney general will be able to sue to shut down those policies.”
Immigrants: Criminals or Not?
Martha Tecca, acting lead and consultant to the board of SHARe (Supporting and Helping Asylum-seekers and Refugees) VT-NH, a nonprofit organization in the Upper Valley, said that so far, she had not heard of any workplace raids by ICE in the Hanover-Lebanon area, but only targeted enforcement actions.
She says that most immigrants are law-abiding, regardless of their immigration status, despite politicians’ claims to the contrary. Overstaying a visa or crossing the border without documents is a civil violation, not a criminal offense.
Indeed, ICE’s own statistics through the end of 2024 show that only about 10 to 12 percent of deportees had been convicted of serious crimes. ICE has not posted those statistics since President Trump took office in January.
“The immigrants, they don’t want criminals here either,” Tecca says. “They come to America to not be around criminals.”
Still, even legal immigrants are afraid to go to doctor’s appointments, church, school and work, she says. That affects everyone, because immigrants make up a significant portion of the Upper Valley’s service economy, she says.
“Immigrants are health care workers, farm workers; they work at restaurants, on yard crews, as drivers,” she said. “If you’re going to the hospital and you’re counting on staff being there and they’re not showing up for work, that affects you.
“All of the things that make life more difficult for the people around us affect us all.”
Do Anti-Sanctuary Policies Make Communities Safer?
The sponsors of New Hampshire’s two new anti-sanctuary laws say they will make communities safer by enhancing law enforcement cooperation with ICE.
“We are protecting our families; we are protecting our communities and our state,” the Anti-Sanctuary Act’s prime sponsor, Rep. Joe Sweeney, R-Salem, said at a hearing. “If you are in New Hampshire illegally, you are not welcome here.”
But those who work with immigrants and refugees say the state’s new laws – and the 287(g) agreements between ICE and the state police, the four counties and several cities and towns – will make those communities less safe because they divert police resources and make immigrants afraid to report violent crimes.
Most police “understand that the community is safer when people feel safe cooperating with the police,” says Eva Castillo, director of the New Hampshire Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees.
Castillo, a member of the Manchester Police Commission, has spent nearly two decades helping the city police department build trust with immigrants. Even though Manchester does not have a 287(g) agreement with ICE and is not interested in pursuing one, Castillo says, she’s already seeing that trust evaporate because of federal and state policies.
“I got a call three weeks ago from a victim of domestic violence who was afraid to go to police,” she says.
Supporters of the Anti-Sanctuary Act note that it prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from investigating someone’s immigration status unless that person comes to their attention through a possible violation of state law, and that it contains an exception for some victims and witnesses.
But Castillo says law enforcement officers can just stop and detain someone on suspicion that they’ve violated a law and then ask about their immigration status.
In 2005, some New Hampshire sheriffs and police arrested undocumented immigrants and charged them with criminal trespass for being on U.S. soil without authorization. A court dismissed this novel way of trying to turn a civil immigration violation into a crime, ruling that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, not a state or local one.
But 287(g) agreements muddy the waters, Castillo says.
Most police understand “that their role is to enforce criminal law, not civil law – which is what immigration is,” she says. “When you start mixing one with the other, whatever advances we have made with the community feeling free to report crime to the police, that has gone down the drain.”
ICE agents are already racially profiling people based on their looks and their accents, and Castillo fears that local law enforcement will backslide, too.
“If you look Latino, if you’re Puerto Rican, you’re going to be targeted. There are Mexican Americans who have been here three or four generations,” but many of them are leaving New Hampshire because of the political climate here, she says.
Protests and Lawsuits in New Hampshire
After President Trump called in the National Guard to put down protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles, the New Hampshire chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation called a rapid-response “ICE Out” protest at Nashua District Court, where two immigrants have been arrested in recent months.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) organized a protest in Manchester a few days later, and with a coalition of allies the AFSC holds nonviolent “visibility” protests in Concord every Friday afternoon near Interstate 93, where state lawmakers heading home are likely to see them.
The AFSC also visits and assists detainees in the Strafford County jail, and it offers “welcome receptions” to help detained immigrants once they are released from custody anywhere in the state, including from the federal prison in Berlin.
“We’ve seen the population (in the Strafford County jail) balloon,” says Grace Kindeke, New Hampshire program director for the AFSC.
The AFSC and its partners are also pushing back against the Hillsborough County commissioners’ decision to sign a 287(g) agreement with ICE that could include detaining immigrants in the county jail, Kindeke says. In January 2000, the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service pulled more than 200 detained immigrants from the jail due to complaints of sexual and physical abuse by correctional officers.
“Even for people who have … charges on their record, it certainly doesn’t justify ripping them away from their families and communities,” Kindeke says.
“The AFSC’s stance is that it’s the system that is violent, and even if you are a violent criminal, nothing justifies sending someone to a prison in El Salvador,” as ICE has done with hundreds of Venezuelans, she says.
Ironically, El Salvador is one of the countries whose citizens can apply for temporary protected status and asylum in the United States, due to a high levels of gang violence and political persecution under President Nayib Bukele.
On the legal front, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire has initiated or joined several federal lawsuits alleging that the Department of Homeland Security is violating people’s constitutional rights, most notably by revoking the educational visa of a Dartmouth College student from China with no explanation. (Liu v. Noem et al)
Shortly afterward, the ACLU-NH joined three other ACLU chapters and the Shaheen & Gordon law firm in suing to protect the rights of more than 100 international students in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico who had their student visas revoked without notice or explanation.
The ACLU-NH has also joined other civil liberties and immigrants’ rights groups in a challenge to President Trump’s executive order that would strip some babies born in the U.S. of birthright citizenship.
“Know Your Rights”
The ACLU-NH also is conducting “Know Your Rights” trainings, as are several other legal and immigrant assistance organizations.
North of the notches in Coos County, retired lawyer Ted Bosen has joined the North Country Immigration Rights Committee where, alongside two other lawyers, he is working on “red cards” that spell out people’s basic constitutional rights in English and multiple other languages.
Bosen says that everyone, regardless of their immigration status, has the right to remain silent, the right to know where they’re being taken and the right to a hearing.
“It’s not giving everyone a trial; it just means you’re entitled to a neutral magistrate to review the evidence that you’re in violation of some law,” he says. “Without an independent review, there’s no fairness … before you’re apprehended and put into the gulag.”
He also says that, unless an immigrant is actively committing a crime, ICE must obtain a warrant from a judge before detaining them. ICE has been accused of arresting bystanders, such as family members or co-workers, who happen to be around when they arrest someone for whom they have a warrant.
Bosen and the other retired attorneys will also try to discourage communities in Coos County from signing 287(g) agreements by explaining to them that, if they act as surrogates for ICE and ICE violates the law – for example, by failing to obtain a judicial warrant – the communities can be sued and held financially liable.
Tecca, at SHARe VT-NH, says that anyone can help immigrants by knowing their own rights and simply being kind and welcoming to everyone, without asking their immigration status.
“Where people should put their energy is to understand their own rights, the immigrants among them, anyone around them who may be targeted and what they can do to be kind to their neighbors,” she says.
“I don’t think this is a political issue: we’re talking about the safety of human beings, folks in the country following pathways they have been directed to follow,” she says. “This rhetoric being pushed of violent criminals is just not accurate.”