'Can Someone Help Me'
Or, It’s Time to Learn How to React Effectively to the Shit Show
I recently took part in an evening of I.C.E. Rapid-Response Training. During Trump’s first regime, I was a high-school teacher, and I saw students struggle to make it to graduation while their families were deported out from under them.
The rapid-response training was solid, advising participants that our role is not to stop I.C.E. but to document its activities and to find out, if possible, who is being detained and who the detainee might want notified of their plight. We learned how to spot I.C.E., talked about what their strategy was in New Hampshire, practiced a couple of useful Spanish phrases, and were advised how not to get arrested or shot. Simple fare.
The training was on a Wednesday evening. By the next afternoon, I was in a church parking lot, watching a suspicious black SUV.
I’d pulled up around 4:45 to pick up my weekly farm-share delivery—vegetables, mostly of the root variety this late in the season. The driver of the farm-share truck, a Latino man with a strong accent, was a little late that day. The training was still running in my head, and I noticed the SUV the way you notice a thing you’ve been taught to notice.
It wasn’t doing anything, just inertly taking up space in a church parking lot, engine running, which is not inherently suspicious, except that I had just spent two hours being trained to recognize exactly this configuration of details.
I took a photo of the SUV and posted it to a friend-group Signal chat, several members of which had also attended the training. “Of course I see this vehicle at my [farm-share] pickup,” I wrote.
Meantime, the farm-share truck showed up. I got out of my car to make it obvious to whomever was in the SUV that I was paying attention. A pal of mine, part of the Signal chat, who lives close by and works part-time at the church, came to back me up. She alerted the rapid-response hotline and gave an informational flyer to the farm-share driver.
Then, with her filming, I walked up to the passenger-side window of the SUV and knocked, under the guise of asking if they needed any help. What can I say, I’m a helpful guy.
The window went down. The SUV was full of cop-types in riot gear. The clean-shaven, helmeted man closest to the open window said they were fine. The window went back up.
My friend and I stayed, leaning against the hood of my car, until the SUV drove off. We stayed until the farm-share driver went on his way. Then we headed back to our lives. Maybe we’d prevented something gross. Maybe we hadn’t.
I’m a middle-aged white guy who used to report on the police for newspapers. I know, in a way that I don’t have to think about, how to walk up to a vehicle full of armed cops. I’ve knocked on a lot of windows. It’s a credential, not so much earned as born with then refined through a career. The math for that knock was different for me than it would have been for someone who looked or sounded like the farm-share driver. I was protected by privilege.
This is what ICE rapid response training is, at its core: ordinary people trying to deploy whatever they happen to have, including privilege, to address evil. A neighbor shows up with a flyer. Someone keeps an eye on an SUV. A Signal chat lights up. It’s mutual aid improvised from whatever’s nearby.
The ad-hoc system exists because the structural protections have failed.
Around the same time I was hanging out in the parking lot, a document was circulating in Washington that most people in New Hampshire never saw. It was marked “For Official Use Only.” The Department of Homeland Security called it the ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative: $38.3 billion, 92,600 beds, eight large-scale facilities housing up to 10,000 people each, sixteen processing sites, all of it to be operational by Nov. 30, 2026. Nine months from now.
A proposed Merrimack, NH facility—a 324,395 square-foot industrial warehouse at 50 Robert Milligan Parkway—was part of the plan. Four hundred to six hundred beds. The document describes gleaming exteriors and promises of dignity and safety. It has a FAQ section that anticipates community objections the way a developer anticipates zoning board questions. They knew what people would say. They had answers ready.
The document only became public because of a Senate hearing where the acting director of ICE told Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) that DHS had been working with N.H Gov. Kelly Ayotte on the project—a claim Ayotte immediately called ‘simply not true.’ The hearing caught her flat-footed. That afternoon, she released the documents she said she’d just received.
That’s how New Hampshire learned what was being planned for it: through a politician’s embarrassment in a committee room. What followed was resistance at every level.
Merrimack held town meetings. Residents packed the rooms. Local officials sent letters. Protesters showed up with signs—some reading “Camp Ayotte.” The town council chair said they hadn’t been consulted. A Republican state representative from Merrimack sent his own letter to DHS. NH’s all-Democratic congressional delegation introduced the Respect for Local Communities Act, which would require DHS to get local approval before opening any new detention facility. Congresswoman Maggie Goodlander called the DRI “a half-baked $38 billion campaign to commandeer industrial warehouses for the detention of human beings.”
That was Feb. 23. The next day, Ayotte announced that DHS would not move forward with the Merrimack facility. The nationwide initiative is still in effect.
The night before Ayotte’s announcement, ‘No ICE NH’ activists were at Portsmouth’s Pease Airport documenting a deportation flight—an Omni Air International charter that had gotten stranded on the tarmac for twelve hours in the blizzard. The plane was still there. The deportation machinery was still running. Quitting Merrimack just meant it went somewhere else.
High school students across the country have figured this out, the way teenagers often suss out the essential thing before the adults have finished deliberating. “ICE Out” walkouts started after federal agents shot and killed two people in Minneapolis. The protests spread to Virginia, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio. More than 300 students were suspended at Woodbridge Senior High School in Northern Virginia after they walked out in February. They came back the next day and organized nine more walkouts at nine more schools in the same county. In Quakertown, Penn., police moved on the students, arresting several and injuring others. A sign reading ‘No one is illegal on stolen land’ came away covered in someone’s blood.
Virginia’s governor gave them a shout out in the Democratic rebuttal to the State of the Union. Texas’s attorney general opened investigations into teachers suspected of wearing blue in solidarity. Oklahoma’s governor told students to “stay in school, build skills, and make your voice heard responsibly,” which is the kind of advice you give when you’ve decided the thing people are protesting isn’t worth getting upset about.
A student at King High School in Tampa explained why he walked out: his mom had friends who “worked hard every day and they unfortunately got deported for no reason.” He didn’t attend a training. He just voted with his feet and walked out.
Marcelo Gomes da Silva came from Brazil to Milford, Massachusetts when he was six years old. Last May, ICE detained him—they were after his father, but took Marcelo because his childhood visa had expired. He applied for asylum. His immigration officer told him he was protected, that an active asylum case meant he was legally in the country.
Congressman Seth Moulton invited Marcelo to the State of the Union. While Trump spoke, the official DHS account on X posted that Marcelo “is an illegal alien who has no right to be in our nation. We are committed to enforcing the law and fighting for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens like him.” A Moulton staff member pulled Marcelo from the gallery and took him to the Congressman’s office to watch the rest of the speech.
“My immigration officer said it was OK,” Marcelo told reporters. “Everyone said it was OK.”
On Feb. 26, 2026, the same day I started writing this essay—ICE agents entered a Columbia University dormitory at 6:30 a.m. They were dressed in plain clothes. They told the building superintendent they were looking for a missing child. He let them in. Ellie Aghayeva, a neuroscience student and social-media influencer with 100,000 followers, expected to graduate this year, texted her groupchat: ICE is in my house. They are trying to take me away. Can someone help me.
Her roommate opened the door to the agents. Columbia’s president said the federal agents “made misrepresentations to gain entry.” New York’s governor said they lied because they didn’t have the proper warrant. NYC Mayor Mamdani called Trump directly. Aghayeva was released.
DHS says Aghayeva’s an illegal alien from Azerbaijan whose visa was terminated in 2016. The American Association of University Professors says she’s an international student on a valid visa who has been studying in the United States since at least 2021. The facts are disputed. What isn’t disputed is the method: fake identity, fake story, 6:30 in the morning, a roommate who opened a door.
“Can someone help me.”
The rapid-response training I took was designed for exactly this scenario. In a church parking lot in Manchester, I had the tools for that moment: whiteness, training, a neighbor with a flyer, a Signal chat that lit up within minutes. I used what I had. I don’t know if it was enough, or if it was the right thing, or if it was even necessary. I just know that I did it, and we waited, and he drove away safe.
From a Columbia dorm, a student texted “can someone help me” to a groupchat. Her roommate opened the door to bullies and fascists.
Iran is getting the headlines now, but this I.C.E. shit isn’t over. Get your Google on and get trained up.
Works Consulted
Department of Homeland Security. ICE Detention Reengineering Initiative. Released by the Office of Governor Kelly Ayotte, February 12, 2026. https://www.governor.nh.gov/news/2026/02/dhs-releases-new-documents-merrimack-facility
Hanson, Julie. “Teen Detained by ICE Last Year Leaves State of the Union After Being Targeted in DHS Tweet: ‘Everyone Said It Was Ok.’” CBS Boston / WBZ, February 26, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/marcelo-gomes-da-silva-state-of-the-union-ice-dhs/
NHPR Staff. “Ayotte: ICE to Ditch Plan for Detention Facility in Merrimack.” New Hampshire Public Radio, February 24, 2026. https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-02-24/ayotte-ice-detention-merrimack-newhampshire
NHPR Staff. “ICE Detainees Stranded on Plane at Portsmouth Airport Amid Snowstorm.” New Hampshire Public Radio, February 23, 2026. https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-02-23/ice-detainees-plane-flight-portsmouth-airport-snowstorm-blizzard-nh-newhampshire
Office of Congressman Chris Pappas. “Pappas, Shaheen Introduce Bicameral Legislation to Require DHS Notify Congress, Acquire Local Approval Before Opening New Processing and Detention Facilities.” Press release, February 23, 2026. https://pappas.house.gov/media/press-releases/pappas-shaheen-introduce-bicameral-legislation-require-dhs-notify-congress
Rosciglione, Annabella. “ICE’s Sinister Lie to Arrest Ivy League Student Is Exposed.” The Daily Beast, February 26, 2026. https://www.thedailybeast.com/ices-sinister-lie-to-arrest-ivy-league-student-ellie-aghayeva-is-exposed
Skipworth, William. “Ayotte Says DHS Is Backing Away from Plans for an Immigrant Detention Center in Merrimack.” New Hampshire Bulletin, February 24, 2026. https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2026/02/24/ayotte-says-dhs-is-backing-away-from-plans-for-an-immigrant-detention-center-in-merrimack/
Warnke, Tara, and Michael Levenson. “Anti-ICE High School Protests Spark Safety Concerns, Support.” The Hill, February 26, 2026. https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5754978-anti-ice-out-student-protests-virginia-texas-florida/
World Socialist Web Site. “Pennsylvania High School Students Violently Attacked by Police During Anti-ICE Walkout.” WSWS, February 21, 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/nblv-f21.html
Bravo, Rob!
Good writing, great actions!
Did you ever think they would be something necessary in America? I did not.