ICE Officers in Hampton Bays Again Tuesday

Federal immigration officers again roamed through Hampton Bays and Westhampton on Tuesday morning, detaining multiple people in Hampton Bays before heading west, though it’s not yet known if there were more detentions made there.

Members of the local group of residents who have organized to track and film operations by officers from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, captures images of at least two people being detained in Hampton Bays on Tuesday morning, December 16, one on a sidewalk near the historic Lyzon Hat Shop and another in the parking lot of the movie theater where officers made several detentions earlier this fall.

Members of the OLA of Eastern Long Island response group alerted others to the presence of ICE officers near Antojitos market at about 8:20 a.m. on Tuesday. Several members of the group responded to Hampton Bays Main Street and caught video of a man being detained.

The ICE officers again used the parking lot at a Hampton Bays Fire Department firehouse as their staging area — this time the Ponquogue Avenue substation. Several members of the OLA group also congregated there and filmed the officers as they prepared to leave following the sweep.

“There were five or six cars, maybe six or seven guys. One guy had a pretty big gun, another guy had a paintball gun … they looked like cosplay Nazis” said Anita Boyer, a Hampton Bays resident who has led protests against ICE since the first local sweep in early November — and plans to do so again later this week. “We saw a couple pull in and then watched them all leave. Joe saw a couple of the people who were there with us later on and they said they followed them to Westhampton Beach.”

Joe Pallister, her husband, said that he was told by employees of a local painting company that a man was detained by the officers in the parking lot of the Hampton Bays movie theater shopping center. Images and video shared on social media showed another man being detained near the Lyzon Hat Shop.

A request sent to the ICE public information office for information about Tuesday’s operation has not yet been answered.

Boyer said that her group would stage a protest this coming Friday, December 19, across from the Ponquogue Avenue firehouse.

Following the ICE sweep on November 5, during which dozens of ICE officers had parked their personal vehicles in the parking lot of the HBFD’s main headquarters on Montauk Highway, the fire department was criticized for allowing the officers to use the property. The fire district’s commissioners said that they were powerless to bar the federal officers from using the property and had not been notified of the operation, but Boyer said she hopes the department will at least make a statement saying it does not approve of the federal agents using their property — for the sake of trust in the immigrant community.

“Whether they’re allowed to kick ICE off their property or not, they can make a statement saying they don’t support it so that people can feel safe calling 911,” Boyer said. “This is a larger public safety issue beyond just ICE taking people. If people don’t feel they can call 911 you’re putting people’s lives in danger. It’s disgusting.”