Feds Charged Activists Just Before Major Anti-ICE Protest in a Tiny Vermont Town
The Intercept · L · trust 34/100
Authorities are taking unprecedented steps to charge protesters in a sleepy Vermont town that hosts an ICE intelligence and targeting center.
Share Copy link Share on Facebook Share on Bluesky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Share on WhatsApp A demonstrator is arrested at a protest at ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vt., on Feb. 9, 2026. Photo: Glenn Russell/VTDigger Williston, a small Vermont town of 10,000 people, is best known as a bucolic suburb of Burlington laden with historic buildings and farmland.
Like the rest of the state, the hamlet is about 90 percent white. Williston has seen few of the sorts of large-scale Trump administration immigration operations that have sparked raucous protests. Aside from a few raids against migrant farm workers, there has been little in the way of detentions by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The town is, in other words, a surprising scene for the robust protests that erupted there over the past two years, with hundreds protesting against ICE.
The explanation lies in a low-slung modern building with façade of glass and dark-blue ribbed sheet metal: ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center , a facility designed to help identify, track, and arrest deportation targets across the country. Along with other Department of Homeland Security infrastructure in the area, the NCATC made Williston into a hub of anti-immigration enforcement.
The protests, however, weren’t initially met with the sorts of crackdown against speech experienced by other anti-ICE protesters . The local prosecutor for Chittenden County, where the surveillance center is located, repeatedly opted not to prosecute protesters arrested at the facility.
As the Trump administration ramped up its attacks against left-wing protesters, however, Williston was not spared. Beginning in September, state and federal authorities have found ways to levy criminal charges against activists.
“Our assumption has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people.”
In late September, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark introduced surprise misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters for allegedly participating in a July sit-in at the NCATC. Then, last week, federal prosecutors unveiled surprise charges against five people, some of whom were already being charged by Clark. The five people facing federal charges, ranging in age from 22 to 80 years old, are alleged by federal authorities to have disrupted operations at the NCATC on multiple occasions.
Activists in Vermont took note of the timing: The cases came as they ramped up to launch a concerted week of protest actions against the ICE intelligence hub.
“Our assumption,” said Julie Macuga, an anti-ICE organizer involved in the protests, “has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people, in order to make people think twice about doing civil disobedience, for fear that they’re going to get charged.”
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As ICE’s budget has ballooned under the Trump administration, the agency poured billions of dollars into development projects designed to expand surveillance capabilities. With astronomical goals for its deportations and a growing crackdown against dissenters, the surveillance infrastructure would provide the agency with a network of spyware for tracking migrants , protesters, and political opponents.
“What we’re seeing is this really huge increase in access to surveillance at both the national, state, and local level,” Michelle Dahl, an attorney who serves as the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We’re seeing that play out now in these types of surveillance dragnet centers.”
The NCATC is one of only two facilities like it in the nation. It is designed to rapidly respond to requests for information from field agents by using both open-source intelligence gathering and advanced surveillance tools to scour the internet and trawl social media for leads.
Although ICE has had facilities in Williston for years, significant efforts have been made to expand the scope of facility’s operations under the Trump administration.
According to government contractor recruiting documents first posted by ICE in 2025 and reposted this August, the NCATC is designed to employ at least a dozen analysts to answer requests 24 hours a day, coming up with target information in as little as 30 minutes. The facility operates in tandem with the office running ICE’s national tipline and its National Law Enforcement Support Center — two other major ICE facilities based in Williston.
Dahl said that despite its location, the gathering of resources in Williston is characteristic of the “fusion center” model designed to allow rapid dissemination of information between national facilities, federal agents, and local police departments.
“The fusion centers don’t have to be located in any place to collect surveillance — that’s how highly networked surveillance is across the country,” she said. “They could put it literally anywhere and be able to access the entire nationwide network.”
As a result of ICE’s expansion in Vermont, the NCATC has quickly become the subject of one of the the state’s largest recurring protests. Over the past year, hundreds of people attended rallies outside the center.
Some demonstrators took up nonviolent direct action. In one instance, clergy entered the halls and blocked an entrance . Dozens were arrested as part of the protests, but none were charged — until late September, when Clark, Vermont’s attorney general, began taking up cases that Sarah George, the state’s…
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