U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested two people on Oct. 17 in Syracuse. It took ICE nearly two weeks to confirm that it had arrested them.
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The first tendrils of sunlight were just over an hour away as two cars careened down Bungalow Terrace on the morning of Oct. 17. Before the first fully stopped, its doors flung open and five people scattered from inside it, sprinting in all directions. Two people jumped out of the second one, chasing them. 

“Police! Stop!” the people from the second car shouted, one tripping as he sprinted down the hill. “Stop! Get on the ground.” 

Video footage reviewed by Central Current showed a person in a vest tackling someone to the ground. 

One person shouted: “Get on the ground. Stop. Stop. Put your hands behind your back.”

A person responded, but only muffled audio can be heard on the video reviewed by Central Current.  

“I don’t care,” the person in the vest said. “Put your hands behind your back.” They repeated the phrase two more times. The video cut out. 

Then, to the public, the five people in the car effectively disappeared. Residents on Bungalow Terrace wondered whether a neighbor had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. City officials struggled to get names and information from an ICE spokesperson. An ICE spokesperson didn’t respond to Central Current requests for information for 10 days, still waiting another two to provide any information. 

“If someone disappears, [their family] wouldn’t know where they’d gone. They wouldn’t be able to tell if they’d been taken,” said Jessica Maxwell, the executive director of Worker’s Center of Central New York. “You don’t know if some other kind of tragedy has happened.” 

Twelve days after the chase, ICE confirmed: It “conducted a targeted enforcement operation in Syracuse,” spokesperson Marie Ferguson wrote. Of the five people who were chased in the video, two were detained and accused of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act, Ferguson said. ICE’s ongoing investigation prevented it from sharing more information, including the names of the detained, she said. 

As of publication, Ferguson had not responded to further questions about what had happened to the other three people in the video.  

The chase is illustrative of ICE’s opaque operations, Maxwell said. Detainees often have to call their families to tell them they were arrested by ICE, which can take weeks, Maxwell said. ICE’s arrests don’t respond to the protocols or accountability mechanisms of other law enforcement agencies, Maxwell said. 

Asked how common it is for people to struggle to get names and information after ICE raids, Maxwell laughed. 

“I would say it’s 100 percent of the time,” she said. 

The void of information was filled by videos, theories and commentary circulated on the Strathmore Neighborhood Facebook group. 

Some questioned if the ICE raid had really happened. One woman wrote that Syracuse Immigrant and Refugee Defense Network usually reported confirmed ICE actions. They hadn’t mentioned this one. 

When Central Current approached neighbors on the day of the raid, nobody was willing to speak on the record. Two people agreed to share security camera footage under the condition of anonymity. A third shared recorded video of a handcuffed person being walked down the street.

The neighbors were uncertain who had been taken and who had taken them. One person thought his own next door neighbor had been detained. That later proved false. 

The ICE agents had called themselves police but later told neighbors they were from a “different agency,” one neighbor alleged. 

In seeking information about the incident, Central Current reached out to Syracuse police, the state police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The FBI replied with a form email stating that due to the current budget lapse, they would not be responding to inquiries. 

All other organizations responded within two business days that they were uninvolved in the arrests.

After Central Current told an ICE spokesperson that there was video footage of an arrest, ICE said that they would need a name or number to search for people in custody. 

Central Current asked for confirmation that ICE was in Syracuse that morning, and reached out to the mayor’s office to see if they could get names. The next day, ICE responded to both the mayor’s office and Central Current to confirm the arrests. They did not provide names. 

Ferguson told Central Current that she was “unable to provide further details regarding this specific incident due to an ongoing investigation.” 

“ICE continues to prioritize the arrest and removal of criminal illegal aliens and others who violate U.S. immigration laws, in alignment with the mandate entrusted to us by the American people,” wrote Ferguson. 

ICE also declined to provide names or further information to city Chief Policy Officer Greg Loh. 

“If there is a matter that is criminal, the police will work as it would with any other criminal, but on routine immigration enforcement, we don’t have any interaction with them,” said Loh. “All we’ve been able to do is take reports and try to seek whatever information they would provide.” 

Loh said that the City was previously having conversations with ICE to seek more information about what it was doing in the region and how they could gain more information in the future. 

But since the federal shutdown began, that conversation has stopped. 

Those conversations were with Terry Dunford, a community relations officer with ICE who is currently furloughed, Dunford said. 

Dunford did not respond to calls to his work phone. Central Current called a personal number. He picked up. He said could not conduct any government business while furloughed, including answering questions. 

Asked to confirm whether the furlough was the reason conversations had stopped with city officials, Dunford replied: “I can’t confirm anything because I can’t conduct government business while I’m on furlough.” 

After the ICE raid, as confusion saturated the neighborhood, two things were left behind – tangible evidence of the people who were taken from the street just minutes before. 

Later that morning, a neighbor found a Chicago Bulls cap laying upside-down in the grass behind the house where ICE had tackled a person to the ground. She picked it up. 

Two weeks later, she still has the cap. She couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. 

The car the five people had been driving sat in the street, blocking a driveway. The person who lived there called the city police and told them the car had been left behind. 

At 6:30 a.m., Syracuse police arrived on the scene. They wrote the car a ticket.

Read more of Central Current’s coverage

Laura Robertson is a staff reporter covering Onondaga County. Prior to joining Central Current, she lived on the edge of the Bering Strait in Nome, Alaska, where she worked as a reporter for a year. She...