“We’re all in the same storm, but we’re on different ships,” senior immigration attorney Heather Yountz said to a room packed full of area residents. “If you’re a white U.S. citizen, you’re on a very strong ship right now — a lot of people are on pretty weak ships.”
The forum on immigration policy, co-hosted by the Needham Area Immigration Justice Task Force and Needham Human Rights Committee, was standing-room only, with just under 300 attending in-person at the Center at the Heights and online. The event gave Needham a glimpse into the perspective and efforts of those supporting immigrants in the face of current federal administration policies and actions.
Entitled “One Year In: The Trump Administration’s Impact on Immigrants in Massachusetts,” the forum Feb. 3 was the second of its kind — the first held last year.
“Our hope is that people have a clear understanding of the immigration issue and what is happening, and what people are doing on all different levels,” said Cheryl Aglio-Girelli, co-chair for NAIJTF.
Yountz, the keynote presenter at both forums, is a Needham resident who has spent the bulk of her career defending immigrant rights. Listed as one of Boston Magazine’s Top Lawyers of 2022-2024, Yountz’s national reputation stems from her role in reversing the first Muslim Ban — prompting what she now calls her “side hustle” of suing the president.
Against a backdrop of pictures highlighting her work and recent events, Yountz defined basic terms (“ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement”) before exploring the impact of 2025 on immigrant communities.
“What we’re witnessing is a large-scale mass deportation of immigrants, particularly immigrants of color,” Yountz said. “The strategy is not only to deport as many immigrants as possible, but also to terrorize immigrants into self-deportment.”
The current administration’s announced goal, Yountz reminded those in attendance, is the deportation of one million immigrants per year. Tactics used to achieve this goal, she said, have included dehumanizing rhetoric, scare tactics intended to prompt self-deportation, “slow-walking” to delay processing for necessary documentation, removing status, denying visas, introducing new rules and data-mining.
“This is 10 times worse than the first administration,” she said. “They’re moving more quickly and more ruthlessly, with more impunity than they did the first time.”
Offering take-these-with-a-grain-of-salt numbers — “The government has not been totally honest about these numbers, but these are as close as I can get” — Yountz noted that ICE detentions rose about 75% last year. In 2024, 39,000 individuals were detained; by December 2025, the number increased to 66,000.
Deportation rates, however, went down, said Yountz. In 2025, Trump deported 500,000 immigrants. This is lower than the last two years of Biden’s presidency. In 2024, Biden deported 650,000 immigrants and 590,000 immigrants were deported in 2023.
Difficulty in deporting those who have been detained, she said, is due to their lack of criminal history or unlawful presence.
The DHS website states that the vast majority of those deported have criminal records, but the bar is low for immigrants to be tagged as a “criminal,” Yountz said.
According to the federal website, “DHS has arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens across the country, including gang members, rapists, kidnappers, and drug traffickers, thanks to the brave men and women of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), CBP, and other law enforcement immigration enforcement agencies. Seventy percent of those arrested by ICE are criminal illegal aliens who have been charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.”
Yountz pointed to reporting by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in D.C.
Cato published data leaked from DHS showing that 73% of individuals in ICE detention facilities since October 2025 had no criminal convictions of any kind (arrests were not included). Only 5% had violent criminal convictions. This data, Cato states, was obtained directly from ICE via Freedom of Information Act requests by the Deportation Data Project.
How low is the bar for calling immigrants criminals?
“There is a guy in Guantanamo Bay right now that was riding his bike the wrong way down a street in Miami,” Yountz said.
Anxiety in Massachusetts
This pressure on immigrant communities is particularly relevant for states like Massachusetts, said Yountz, where 1 in 5 residents are foreign-born. The American Immigration Council notes that, as of 2023, 27% of Massachusetts’ foreign-born residents are entrepreneurs, 29% STEM workers and 39% health aides.
Many of these residents, she noted, are getting booked at Burlington in the state’s largest processing center, before being taken to the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, transported to the Air Force base and then flown to border facilities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
In May of 2025, 1,461 Massachusetts immigrants were arrested during Operation Patriot. In September 2025, 1,406 more were arrested during Operation Patriot 2.0. Yountz estimates that only a quarter of those arrested had criminal convictions.
“I love these communities,” Yountz said. “These are people who have trusted me with their deepest, darkest secrets. These are people who have whispered to me, ‘I was raped,’ ‘I was tortured,’ ‘I was detained because I campaigned against the current president,’ or ‘My sister was the target of a gang, and I tried to protect her, so they strangled me.’ And I helped them tell these secrets to a judge or to an asylum officer with the explanation, ‘If you explain this, it will set you free. You can have asylum, you can stay, you can get a green card;’ and they believed me — and I believed me. And it’s just a really raw time right now because some of those very people have been picked up and detained and sent back.”
The increased pressure on immigrant communities, she said, has resulted in more than a thousand students in the Chelsea school system no longer attending school.
“We have students in Needham who are afraid to go to school, whose parents are keeping them home,” said Yountz.
Because immigrants broadly — not only undocumented immigrants — have been swept up in arrests and detentions, volunteer immigrant attorney Michael Diener notes that even clients with legitimate status are concerned about the possibility of deportation.
“People hear stories, and there’s just a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety,” Diener said. “I have a client who is from Ireland. He has been a green card holder for over 30 years, and he’s anxious because he had a traffic violation like 10 years ago.”
In the Q&A session following the forum, one Needham resident who asked not to be named spoke up as a newly naturalized American citizen: “What exactly do we do if we get stopped?”
Take a “Know Your Rights” course online, Yountz replied. Immigrants, like every individual, have constitutional rights based on personhood, not documentation.
“It’s possible that people will not understand what rights you have, so you need to make sure you understand them.”
A range of response
Local responses to the current federal landscape are multi-tiered, Yountz stated.
They include educating immigrants against the possibility of their own detainments, and developing state legislation to anticipate federal actions. They include a statewide litigation response to the administration — “We just sue the hell out of them at every turn” — and weekly meetings between people on national, state and local levels. They include a habeas corpus project, pairing immigration attorneys with federal attorneys to file petitions within an hour of arrest to free those unlawfully detained; this effort resulted in more than 130 filed petitions since April 2025, Yountz said, and has prompted neighboring states to begin their own habeas projects.
The list goes on.
“We have 20-plus attorneys that have been hired by the state with $5 million each year so that they can represent people who are detained,” said Yountz. “Maura Healey just came out with a protected areas bill that would make schools, courthouses, places of worship, hospitals safe.”
In Needham, high schoolers are creating organizations like STITCCH, to support low-income immigrant and first-generation families by providing free chorus and violin lessons to their children.
The Needham Area Immigration Justice Task Force and Needham Human Rights Committee have cultivated spaces like the forum on immigration policy for people to absorb information and be moved toward action.
“We get so immobilized by the injustice and the inhumanity,” Aglio-Girelli said. “I think [Yountz] did a really nice job of saying, but look, we were ready for this. There’s lots of different ways that we can make a difference.”
Those attending the forum were encouraged to come alongside immigrant neighbors in whichever way felt most natural to them — donating, participating in local protests, volunteering, joining task forces and committees, writing to senators, offering rides and housing to families post-arrests.
“Just being here is one of the many steps you’ve already taken,” Yountz said. “And so now the work is to figure out what your next step is going to be, because change doesn’t happen all at once.”
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