Why should Delaware care?
The Department of Homeland Security has planned a surge of arrests of immigrants in certain “sanctuary cities.” Volunteer groups stationed in each of Delaware’s three counties are banding together to help the First State families left behind to cover rising costs while also searching for loved ones who have been detained.
Her phone buzzed with several missed calls from her husband one morning in March: an unusual sign that something was wrong. Moments later, the Venezuelan mother of two from northern Delaware received a text.
Her son had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She doesn’t remember how she got home from work that day, she said.
The mother, who requested anonymity due to concerns about immigration enforcement, spent three weeks apart from her teenage son while he was detained.
For nearly a month, that Delawarean’s mother, father and sibling — who had all lived in the state for almost a decade — were left with many unanswered questions: Where is he right now? Where will he be taken after? Who can I call?
“I remember there was a day I went without hearing from him for 25 hours,” his mother said. “And I felt like I wanted to die.”
While they searched for answers and their loved one, regular expenses continued to pile up. Through word of mouth, the family connected with New Castle Help, a volunteer group that assists Delaware’s immigrant families impacted by deportation or detention.
The grassroots group provided the family a one-time, $800 stipend to cover rent so they could focus on finding their son.
The volunteers are part of a larger group across the state that has been fielding phone calls and messages from families who are facing similar situations due to drastic increases in immigration enforcement nationwide.
Since the beginning of 2026, Delaware has seen a marked increase in ICE arrests, too. Arrests resulting in detention peaked in May, with 74 people taken into custody. That’s just four fewer than the highest number of detentions recorded in Delaware — 78 detentions in June 2025 — since President Donald Trump started his second term.
The latest figure shows 64 people in Delaware were detained in July, according to the Data Deportation Project.
New Castle Help, in addition to Kent Help and Sussex Help, have already worked with hundreds of impacted families over the past year. They’re relying on private donations and small grants in a race to meet community needs.
“But every family that regains their footing, it seems like it’s being replaced by three or four or five,” said Sussex Help volunteer Jack Dickson.
A ‘pretty sobering’ reality statewide
The young man from Delaware who was recently detained did not have a warrant for his arrest.
His family did not expect ICE to come for them, either.
Dickson says these local instances of warrantless and unexpected searches are “pretty sobering.” Such instances are exactly what prompted him to join the grassroots effort that expanded beyond locals offering educational workshops to the immigrant community about their legal rights when being arrested.
He said those “know your rights” workshops could only work “if their rights were actually being respected.”
“And they weren’t,” he added.
Beth Anne Gluck, a founding volunteer of New Castle Help, said she has seen first-hand how immigration operations in Delaware are not targeting the “worst of the worst,” as the Trump Administration has claimed.
This spring, the retired dual-language teacher from New Castle volunteered to drive three hours from northern Delaware to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center to pick up a Wilmington father who had been detained by ICE.
When she arrived, the man did not even know where he was being held.
“You’re in Pennsylvania,” she remembered telling him. “We’re going to take you home.”
Since then, Gluck has assisted nine more families and is working on building trust among those who fear reaching out.
Across the counties
Sussex Help was founded in October 2025 with a pot of private donations and small community grants. Thirty volunteers worked to assess family needs, taking note of any household bills that could no longer be paid if a family member was detained and working with lawyers to file habeas corpus, or wrongful imprisonment, petitions.
Now they have over 50 volunteers and have raised over $100,000 in funds to support 159 families and 352 children.
A few months after the Sussex Group formed, Gluck helped launch New Castle Help. They knew they had to focus on providing financial and legal assistance for families unexpectedly encountering ICE. Since launching in February, volunteers in northern Delaware partnered with Wilmington’s Latin American Community Center for fiscal assistance.
It was only a matter of time before a similar group of allies gathered in Kent County.
Kent Help is the newest. One of the first volunteers was Ed Bejzak, who is now working to build relationships with families, particularly Haitian community members who recently lost their immigration status.
“I’m the least affected group of all the things going on currently, you know, [as a] white male,” he said. “I would like to, if not be a voice, at least be an ally for the people that need it the most.”
What happens after an arrest?
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would ramp up operations in “sanctuary cities” that limited cooperation with ICE. Delaware is among the states identified as a target.
But Delaware has no immigration court. The nearest is in Philadelphia.
That means every second counts when trying to pinpoint which detention center someone is being held at, said Thomas Crowley, a volunteer attorney with Sussex Help.
Usually, he said, a person who has been detained in Delaware is first taken to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Dover for initial processing. It can take a few hours for federal officials there to verify their identity and collect biometrics — like fingerprints, photos and facial recognition — and issue the detainee an “Alien Registration Number,” if they don’t already have one.
That number can be used as a case number to help find out where a person is being held.
After being processed, individuals are taken to federal detention centers, like the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. But Crowley said he has worked with people who were living in Delaware and have been sent to detention centers as far away as Washington state.
“It’s just chance,” he said.
It is not always simple to find out where people are being held. Earlier this month, ICE stopped providing the location of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.
Filing a legal habeas corpus petition is the best bet to reunite detainees with their family, Crowley said, especially when they’re being held far from home.
The petition challenges the detention itself instead of focusing on the government’s efforts to deport someone, a process that can take months. Filing petitions can become costly, though, ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars, Crowley said.
This is where the three Delaware-based Help organizations work to connect families with pro-bono or low-cost lawyers.
Navigating complications
Even the best legal assistance is not always a sure thing.
Once a habeas corpus petition has been filed, a federal circuit court judge decides whether to grant the request. But not all the courts agree on whether detained immigrants have the right to a hearing that would allow their release from detention.
Two of the country’s 13 federal circuit courts — the fifth and eighth circuits covering states like Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota and Missouri — have required mandatory detention of immigrants.
If a Delawarean is taken to a detention center in one of those areas, the chance of being released through a habeas corpus petition is slim. People detained in other circuit court districts, like those overseeing cases in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, are more likely to be released.
The geographic-based obstacles and working against a federal mandate to increase arrest numbers has made these legal battles increasingly difficult, Crowley said.
“All the lawyers in the immigration field are really maxed out,” Crowley said. “It’s very hard to get people to take cases, not because they don’t want to, but because they just don’t have the bandwidth.”
Dickson also said he wished more policies addressed the obstacles undocumented immigrants face in obtaining legal representation to “try to even the playing field a little bit, so human beings would have a fighting chance against the federal government on this issue.”
While it is a federal mandate for public defenders to be available for those who cannot afford a lawyer for a criminal court proceeding, it is not a requirement for immigration or deportation cases.
Other states have worked to combat this hurdle.
The New York City Council pioneered the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project in 2013 to provide free legal, public aid to low-income immigrants facing deportation and even those being detained in New Jersey. Earlier this year the state proposed larger budget funds for such programs.
Gov. Matt Meyer recently signed a slew of immigration bills, creating safeguards against cops cooperating with ICE and creating safe spaces where federal agents cannot enter like schools and churches.
But the Venezuelan mother says ICE activity and enforcement remains the same.
Dickson also questions how Delaware’s Office of New Americans is being funded to help alleviate the financial burden on immigration families.
In a press conference last week, the governor said the new office has made headway in informing immigrant communities about their rights and answering questions regarding the ending of TPS. or temporary protected status, which granted protection from deportation.
“It does need more. Certainly, with the urgent concerns, that office is overwhelmed right now, and we got to make sure they get the support,” Meyer said last Wednesday.
Life after detainment
Before the Venezuelan mother sat down with Spotlight Delaware for an interview, she received messages from another mother whose husband was detained by ICE.
It was one of many similar messages she has received since her son was detained, she said.
Even for those who are released from detention, their cases continue.
The Venzualen mother’s family initially entered the country under temporary protected status, and her son is back to work. But his deportation case is still pending, since the federal government has since revoked TPS protections for people from 13 countries including Venezuela.
That is part of the reason New Castle Help is keeping in touch.
“This individual was not the worst of the worst,” said Gluck. “[A] family person raising a family, contributing to the community, owning a business, paying taxes, paying taxes into things that they don’t see any benefit from, just trying to provide a good life for their family.”
