After Martha's Vineyard ICE arrests, businesses fear for the future

On Martha's Vineyard this week, many workers have seemingly disappeared. Nobody showed up at a farm in West Tisbury for the third straight day. A lumberyard is unusually quiet. Ferryboats from the mainland are missing the essential workers that fill those jobs.

On Tuesday, ICE agents descended on the Vineyard and Nantucket, arresting roughly 40 immigrants and sending a wave of fear through the immigrant community that powers the island. And this impact has some locals worried.

At the lumberyard on Thursday afternoon, Nick Briggs was the only carpenter there. Typically, it's filled with Brazilian contractors; a manager said at least 65% of their customers are immigrants, many of whom arrive daily by ferry.

Briggs said few people are coming to work, including at the job site he's on now.

"The guys I work with, they stop commuting," he said. "They were scared to go on the boat. Hopefully it blows over, so they don't have to live in fear."

The arrests involved several federal agencies and concluded at the Coast Guard station on the southwest of the Vineyard.

Charlie Giordano hopped into his truck as soon as he heard ICE was on the island. He counted two dozen agents. They were armed, wearing tactical vests with magazines and tasers, he said. And their faces covered in black masks.

"Full on paramilitary," Giordano said. "This is the secret police."

Giordano decided to challenge the agents and filmed the encounter. He said he's not an activist — he's never held signs at protests, and never planned on pushing back against immigration police. But as a former boxer, he said he couldn’t stand idle while ICE "terrorized" his island.

"Removing 20 Brazilians, legal or illegal, from Martha's Vineyard doesn't amount to anything," he said. "It's a dog coming into a neighbor's yard and peeing on the ground to say, 'This is my territory. I own it.' "

Giordano has received messages of support from local Brazilians, for standing up to ICE. They say they're proud of what he did.

Martha’s Vineyard is a symbolic place for an ICE operation the day after Memorial Day. It’s a vacation spot for some of President Trump’s most famous opponents and detractors, including the Obama family, Spike Lee, Larry David and Oprah Winfrey. The island was targeted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2022, as he shipped roughly four dozen Venezuelan migrants there, drawing national headlines and schadenfreude among conservatives.

But not everybody on the Vineyard embraces liberal politics.

Sara Piazza, a fourth-generation islander who rents out a room in her historic Edgartown home to vacationers, remembers when the town was all white and Christian. She said she's glad that’s changed, but she doesn't want the island to be a haven for people in the country illegally.

"People are conflating illegal immigration with legal immigration," she said. "People who are taking resources from our own people in need."

Piazza said more immigration enforcement on the Vineyard is welcome, even if some businesses have to adjust to losing workers.

" I think ultimately everything would stabilize," she said. "I think there might be an impact, but again, I don't know the numbers. Are we talking 10,000 people?... I don't know."

Research indicates that about a fifth of the Vineyard's nearly 21,000 year-round residents are Brazilian, though those numbers do not reveal immigration status. The Martha's Vineyard Gazette reported last year that one in three babies born at the island's hospital are of Brazilian descent.

ICE has released few details about those arrested and whether any of them were accused of a crime beyond being in the country without legal status. The agency said in a press release that they include a gang member and a child sex offender. WBUR could not independently verify those assertions.

The arrests, and the fear they've stoked, could have ripple effects on island business owners like Stacy Thomas Waite, who runs a Jamaican restaurant in Oak Bluffs. At this point in the season, Vineyard Caribbean Cuisine caters to immigrant workers wrapping up home renovations and landscaping. But on Tuesday, when ICE arrived, she had almost no customers. She had to throw out the day's batch of jerk chicken — not to mention the curried goat and oxtail.

It was a stark drop off from the holiday weekend.

"We had a great weekend," she said. "People were here for the Memorial Day weekend and then all of a sudden it just went to zero. Like a storm."

Soon tourism season should go into high gear, but Thomas worries about what’s in store with so many workers living in fear of ICE.

“If the tourists can't get the service that they are paying for, they're just going to change and go elsewhere, too," she said. "Because if you don't have workers, the business is definitely not able to function.”

And if the businesses of Martha’s Vineyard can’t function, the whole island economy could feel the pain.