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Business owners confront ICE agents during arrest at Great Barrington job site [1]
['Heather Bellow', 'The Berkshire Eagle', 'Video Provided Linda Shafiroff', 'Amanda Burke', 'Maryjane Williams', 'Greg Sukiennik']
Date: 2025-06
GREAT BARRINGTON — Federal agents arrested one of two men at their landscaping job site on Friday morning, but their clients confronted the agents and prevented the second man from being taken into custody.
Multiple officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at Creative Building Solutions at around 11 a.m. to arrest the man, according to Linda Shafiroff, co-owner of the home design and construction business off Maple Avenue.
The two men targeted by ICE were gardening outside the business, Shafiroff said.
While the officers were targeting one man, the other came around to the office door, and an employee told him to “get in” — so he did. When Shafiroff later went to look for him, she found him crouched in a corner of the kitchenette. “A grown man,” she said.
Shafiroff said that she and her business partner, Sarah Stiner, argued with approximately six to eight officers during the incident, asking them to take off their masks and present some form of identification or warrants. The officers refused, she said.
Shafiroff said she began videotaping part of the incident after it was already underway.
“Not one of them would take his [or her] mask off or show us ID,” Shafiroff said. “No rights were read, no reason why [was given]. They were rude, they were military-style and I felt like I was on an island where there were no rights.”
The incident lasted roughly 30 minutes, according to Shafiroff.
On the video Shafiroff can be heard grilling the ICE officers about their unwillingness to provide information or take off their masks.
“How do we know you’re federal?” Shafiroff asked them.
“You can call the locals,” one responded. Stiner can be heard saying that they did call local police.
One of the ICE officers asks Shafiroff, “You want people driving drunk around here?” — suggesting a possible reason for the arrest.
“I don't want people driving drunk around here,” she responded. "I have asked for IDs."
After an officer with a DEA — Drug Enforcement Administration — vest put the man in a car with his hands cuffed behind his back, they told Shafiroff that she was “interfering” with the arrest by demanding answers.
Shafiroff later said that one of the officers moved close to her to block her from going near the man being arrested.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for information about the man who was arrested and the reason why. An ICE spokesman previously told The Eagle that without names or “alien registration numbers" the agency cannot release information.
The arrest is the latest in a series of detentions of Berkshire County immigrants since the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies were put into motion.
The first raid was in March, and resulted in the capture and detention of 13 people.
At least five have since returned to the county as of two weeks ago, according to activists who have been keeping track of those detained.
Earlier this month witnesses tried to stop heavily armed officers from arresting a man in his downtown Great Barrington apartment, and marched through the Triplex Cinema parking lot.
Unverified reports have surfaced of other arrests in Great Barrington in the last two days. Pittsfield has also had reports of ICE sightings in recent weeks.
Shafiroff said that ICE appears to have staked out the business. A black Toyota Corolla was seen parked there for around two hours before the officers arrived in other vehicles — it didn’t raise any concerns, she said, because there are other offices in her building, and different cars were parked there.
She said the incident made for “the most bizarre morning of my life.”
“I felt like I was in North Korea,” Shafiroff said. “This put a fire in me.”
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/southern_berkshires/ice-arrests-berkshires-great-barrington/article_f90f2550-5409-46c9-93a2-5d8daab8c82f.html
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