ICE Takes Aim At Immigrant Kids In Big Island’s Coffee Belt

At the start of March, a Big Island first grader was taken into custody at his elementary school by a Hawaiʻi Police Department school resource officer and turned over to Child Welfare Services. 

The agency then turned him over to federal immigration authorities, who earlier that day had arrested his father. And both were deported.

That same week, federal immigration law enforcement agents descended on a small blue house in South Kona’s coffee belt region and interrogated a mother and her three children. They returned the next day with warrants to apprehend all four, who within a week were deported to Honduras.

A month later, federal agents took a 17-year-old South Kona high school student into custody. The teenager is now reportedly being held in a youth detention center in Texas. 

Gone. Gone. And gone.

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants is going well beyond the hardened criminals he rails against, snaring undocumented immigrant children and the adults in their lives.

The strategy was outlined in an immigration enforcement playbook developed by the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency, or ICE,  days after the new administration took office. 

Seemingly overnight, the Big Island, with the state’s largest and fastest-growing Latino population, has become its proving ground.

Federal officials say the objective is to check on the welfare of Unaccompanied Alien Children, a term used to describe youth apprehended crossing the U.S. border alone. Those children were then placed by the government with sponsors in the country – guardians who are generally parents or relatives. 

The goal outlined in official documents is to make sure the children are safe and not involved in criminal activity. Advocates call it an excuse for going after highly vulnerable immigrants and using the knowledge of their whereabouts to entrap the adults charged with caring for them.

“My concern is that these ‘welfare checks’ are a Trojan horse,” said Becky Wolozin, senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law in Washington, D.C. “The ICE directive suggests that ICE has discretion to use the information they collect during these visits to carry out arrests and detentions of unaccompanied children and the adults in their homes.”

The tactic, she said, “is cruel and fundamentally at odds with a child’s wellbeing, and it seems to have happened quickly in Hawaii.”

The enforcement effort has hit the island’s coffee-growing west side with particular force, sowing fear among immigrants there. 

“I have no peace,” said Juan, a Honduran immigrant listed as the sponsor for his teenage niece, who crossed the southern U.S. border on her own a few years ago. He spoke on condition of anonymity, seated outside a store along the Mamalahoa Highway overlooking coffee farms that slope to the ocean.

Three weeks ago, Juan returned from work to hear from his neighbors that ICE agents had come looking for him and his niece. Now he and his family – his three U.S.-born children attend South Kona schools – leave the house at the crack of dawn and stay away until evening. His niece no longer goes to school.

At night, he watches for agents coming up the road to his home. At work – he is employed by different coffee farmers and farms his own five leased acres of coffee trees – he scouts exit routes.

“I’m always worried about what can happen,” he said, speaking in Spanish.

‘A Place To Do The Work’

The Hawaiʻi Police Department had a bit part in each of those three Big Island apprehensions. It has cooperation agreements with the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, a unit of ICE, to work together investigating crimes such as human and drug trafficking and other serious felonies.

Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz has said that his department doesn’t want to enforce immigration laws and that the agreements do not authorize that activity. But advocates for immigrants say the agreements put local police on a perilous path toward joining in Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

In the case of the 7-year-old boy whose father had been arrested, Hawaiʻi “law enforcement took the child into protective custody since there was no guardian available,” said Assistant Hawaiʻi Police Chief Sherry Bird. 

In the case of the mother and three children, after federal agents picked them up, they were held in a room at the Kona police station to await transport to Oʻahu. Moszkowicz previously said his police department supplied a conference room for the family so they didn’t have to sit in a van for hours.

In the case of the 17-year-old boy, he was held at the Kona Police station while Homeland Security Investigations agents processed him after detaining him, Bird said. 

That evening, in a last-ditch effort to win the teenager’s release, teachers who knew him raced to the police department lobby on Hale Makai Place north of Kailua Kona carrying documents they believed would show his aunt had custody of him and that he should be released to her. They recorded the interaction on their cellphones.

“There’s formal paperwork that establishes guardianship in emergency contact situations,” Justin Brown, a Kealakehe High School teacher who helped gather the paperwork, tells Homeland Security Investigations Supervisory Special Agent Isra Harahap on the recording.

“Noted, and we’ll put it in the file,” Harahap responds.

Asked whether the group could continue to contact him at the department that night if they needed anything, Harahap says of the police department: “They were just kind enough to give us a place to do the work, the paperwork and that kind of stuff.”

That incident and others in which local police assisted immigration agents have borne out advocates’ fears that local police are getting wrapped up in immigration crackdowns, said Rose Bautista, a Big Island attorney who spoke against the cooperation agreements in hearings in March at the Hawaiʻi County Council.

ICE and HSI are “utilizing” local police, Bautista said. “They’re using county resources. And, you know, it’s going to get worse.”

Under the deal with the police department, Homeland Security Investigations has two desks in the department’s offices and can deputize officers for certain crime-fighting operations not related to immigration.  

The impression the public takes away from the ways police action has overlapped with immigration enforcement, said Hawaiʻi County Council member Rebecca Villegas, highlights the problem with the agreements. She was in the minority who voted against a resolution allowing the mayor to sign them in April.

“No, the police didn’t participate, but they used our police station. And the public does not decipher the legal jurisdictions between different law enforcement agencies,” Villegas said. “So legally, with the I’s and the T’s, our police department is covered. But from a tactile, tangible, ‘What happened?’ standpoint, my constituent was not protected by my local police department.”

With each apprehension, rumors flourished.

With the first grader, there was speculation that school officials cooperated with ICE. According to state Department of Education spokesperson Nanea Ching, that did not happen and, “No ICE enforcement actions to remove students have occurred on (Hawaiʻi) public school campuses to date.”

For the 17-year-old, different reports swirled in the community about where he was picked up, none that Civil Beat was able to confirm, including that he was apprehended on the way home from school. 

By other accounts, two more school-age children were detained farther east, in Pahala, in the days since the 17-year-old was taken away. None could be nailed down.

While ICE has publicized some of its larger, more dramatic enforcement operations elsewhere in the nation, it has not talked about its activity in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu-based Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Erin Musso said that data about how many unaccompanied children or adults have been detained on the Big Island since Trump took office, is still being compiled.

In that void of information, anxiety and alarm grow.

“Even if something’s a rumor, in that moment it doesn’t matter,” said Graciela Del Rio, a member of ALOHA United, a Big Island nonprofit that supports immigrants. “People are just terrified.”

Schools, workplaces and community spaces are feeling it. More students are staying home. Workers are not showing up. Attendance was down at a popular Easter egg hunt.

“The understanding among a lot of our students who feel really vulnerable is, ‘I’m not safe at my house. I’m not safe in the community. I’m not safe at school,’” said Brown, the Kealakehe High School teacher. “There’s just so much fear right now. The fear is changing the behavior.”

Ely Pacheco arrived in the United States in 2016 as an unaccompanied minor himself, soon to be reunited with his father on the Big Island. His father was deported in 2018, during the first Trump administration. Today Pacheco is 24, runs a landscaping company and is in the process of getting a green card.

When ICE started detaining Big Island immigrants, his employees didn’t come to work for more than a week, Pacheco said.

“They said, ‘Immigration is all over.’ They’re like, ‘We don’t want to get deported.’”

Pedro, an undocumented immigrant from Oaxaca, has been on the Big Island 19 years. He worked for a decade in restaurants and then on coffee farms. Married with four U.S.-born children, he is a good basketball player who used to play in a community park.

Nowadays, there’s no more basketball, only the most critical trips to the grocery store. No more occasional dinners out. 

These days, he and his wife go to work and take the kids to school, said Pedro, who spoke on condition of anonymity. And dropping his children off at school and picking them up feels suddenly risky.

“We try to send them to school to get a better future,” he said, “but on the same time, we have hard time to do it because we are afraid to get caught.”

Why The Big Island

A majority of coffee from Hawaiʻi is grown on the Big Island, where the industry already has been under siege from Coffee Leaf Rust and labor shortages. At least 4,000 acres of coffee trees are farmed in Kona by more than 600 farms, according to the Hawaiʻi Coffee Association.

After hearing that ICE agents were roaming the area, South Kona coffee farmer Armando Rodriguez took to locking his driveway gate for the first time ever. A founder of ALOHA Latinos, Rodriguez is a U.S. citizen but he doesn’t like feeling that, as a Latino, he might be questioned at any moment.

Statements by immigration agents that advocates could be arrested if they interfere with enforcement operations are worrying too, he said.

“We don’t feel safe and we never thought this was something that would happen in Hawaiʻii, because, you know, this is Aloha state,” he said.

Rodriguez said the crackdown is deterring residents from California and Arizona who would typically fly into Hawaiʻi to work during the upcoming coffee harvest. He said a fellow farmer who employs about 40 such migrant workers every year is bracing to lose nearly a third of his crop.

“They told us they’re not going to come this year,” Rodriguez said. “I’m predicting we’re going to lose a lot of coffee because there’s a lot of coffee on the trees.”

It’s not clear whether the high number of Latino immigrant workers in the coffee industry — many of them Mexican but in recent years increasingly from Honduras as well — is what has attracted ICE’s attention. Sweeps of the Big Island happened during the first Trump administration as well.

The four-page ICE memo that immigration agents seem to be following now offers few clues. Titled Unaccompanied Alien Children Joint Initiative Field Implementation, it was issued on Jan. 27 but did not gain much notice at first.

It lays out four phases of the operation, starting with prioritizing which immigrant youth to focus on — from those who didn’t show up at an immigration hearing, to others the government has not been able to contact since they were placed with sponsors, to youth “considered a threat to public safety,” to those with deportation orders.

Subsequent phases include “target packets” created by Homeland Security Investigations field offices, which coordinate with ICE to detain and remove immigrants found in violation of immigration laws.

Since 2014, 170 unaccompanied immigrant children have been released to sponsors in the state of Hawaiʻi, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Liza Ryan Gill, co-coordinator of the Hawaiʻi Coalition for Immigrant Rights, said immigration enforcement officials have told her that they are working off a list of about 100 children, most them on Hawai’i Island.

The ICE memo describes the initiative as a way to make sure unaccompanied children are up to date with their immigration legalities and “conducting investigative activities to ensure (unaccompanied children) are not subjected to crimes of human trafficking or other exploitation.”

With each immigrant apprehended, that rings more false to advocates – especially as the administration has taken steps, currently blocked by a court order, to cut funding to programs that provide legal representation to unaccompanied migrant children.

“They call it wellness checks. I would call it a mass raid,” said Kara Teng, managing attorney of the Honolulu-based Pacific Gateway Center’s Unaccompanied Children Program, which offers legal services to young immigrants. “Everyone is pretty much collateral damage when ICE conducts these wellness checks.”