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For the nearly 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, businesses on the South Fork of Long Island run full tilt\u2014caterers, builders, landscapers, restaurants. The workforce behind all of that is largely immigrants. So this year, amid President Donald Trump<\/strong>\u2019s ICE crackdown<\/a>, locals are fearing for their families, their livelihoods, and for the local economy.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are on a countdown to Labor Day\u2014it\u2019s actually a day-to-day countdown,\u201d says one owner of multiple restaurants in the Hamptons. \u201cIf we can make it to Labor Day with the staff we have we\u2019ll survive,\u201d this source says. \u201cThey literally hold the keys.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI kept all my staff,\u201d the owner says. \u201cBut many of them were nervous about being deported.\u201d<\/p>\n In June, fear over the nationwide deportation crackdown reached a fever pitch out East. Would such stern measures come to the Hamptons? Erika Padilla,<\/strong> the legal advocate for the advocacy group OLA (Organizaci\u00f3n Latino Americana) of Eastern Long Island<\/a>, says if they did, the economy, already struggling to find workers, would collapse. She estimates that 75% to 80% of workers here are Hispanic and that more than half of them are undocumented or in the process of becoming documented.<\/p>\n According to some employers, there\u2019s a sort of \u201cdon\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell\u201d mentality regarding immigration status. \u201cThey have to be on my payroll,\u201d the restaurant owner says. \u201cThey have to provide us with a social security [number].\u201d<\/p>\n Early in the summer, in response to the fear, some businesses considered closing for a day in case of a raid. Restaurant owners worried that nobody would show up for work, forcing closures in the high season. Some people stopped driving after dark, fearing that a burned-out taillight would get them pulled over. Nextdoor, the hyperlocal networking service, and social media were rife with reports of raids\u2014at a grocery store, Sag Harbor\u2019s local movie theater, a men\u2019s shelter in Riverhead. But Damark\u2019s, a local market<\/a>, posted that rumors of the ICE raid there were untrue<\/a>. East Hampton town Police<\/a> chief Michael Sarlo<\/strong> told The East Hampton Star<\/em><\/a> the rumors of ICE activity in Sag Harbor were \u201cunfounded,\u201d while East Hampton Village mayor Jerry Larsen<\/strong><\/a> said, \u201cwe\u2019ve had no rumors of ICE activity in the village itself.\u201d The Riverhead Police Department<\/a> also released a statement about the rumored raids. They never happened.<\/p>\n But as the end of the summer nears, it seems ICE doesn\u2019t need to kick down the front door of the South Fork of Long Island to deport undocumented workers. Padilla says they\u2019ve been quietly and \u201cmethodically\u201d entering through the back.<\/p>\n Much of the immigrant workforce in the Hamptons lives hours away in less expensive areas of Long Island and sometimes in less-than-ideal conditions like encampments in the woods<\/a>. But, unique perhaps to the Hamptons is that many also actually live locally\u2014in the same neighborhoods in some cases\u2014as the people they work for. They own popular restaurants and<\/a> other businesses<\/a>. They are part of the fabric of the community\u2014shopping at Red Horse<\/a> and having pizza at Sam\u2019s<\/a>. In some local school<\/a> districts<\/a>, more than half the student body is Hispanic or Latino. Everyone enjoys the same spectacular ocean beaches and bay sunsets.<\/p>\n Lady Peralta<\/strong> felt like a part of that community. In 2019, she illegally immigrated to the United States, eventually making her way to Long Island from Ecuador. A manicurist back home, she worked cleaning houses until one of her clients connected her with the owner of Salon Xavier<\/a>, a Sag Harbor spa. She was hired to work a few days a week, continuing to clean houses when she wasn\u2019t doing nails. She was so good at her job, and skilled labor was so tight in the Hamptons, that within weeks, the salon owner hired full time.<\/p>\n From then on, Peralta worked as a nail tech to the power players of the area: \u201cSingers, actresses, business people, Hollywood models, and fashion designers,\u201d she tells Vanity Fair<\/em> of her clientele through translators. \u201cI\u2019d never met people who were so famous.\u201d<\/p>\n Peralta briefly returned to Ecuador to retrieve her young daughter, and after paying $31,000 for an assisted passage for the two of them, spent about one month taking buses and walking across the Mexican-US border illegally. She applied for asylum in January 2023 while she was on US soil.<\/p>\n She says she used what she made at the salon to pay back the people who had loaned her the money to come to the United States. Like many Ecuadorians who arrived in the Hamptons, she says, \u201cWe dreamed of working and getting ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n She was denied asylum in May 2023, and after an appeal, denied again that September. But by that time, through the help of a lawyer, she had also helped her daughter, now 13, apply for Special Immigrant Juvenile status.<\/p>\n Sandra Melendez<\/strong><\/a> of SM Law Group<\/a> is a local immigration lawyer who handles many cases using this classification. Established by Congress in 1990, the SIJ classification<\/a> provides protection to immigrant children who have faced abuse, abandonment, or neglect from one or both parents and gives them a path to permanent US residency. A juvenile court judge must determine that it\u2019s in the child\u2019s best interest to stay in the United States. US Citizenship and Immigration Services generally issues a decision within six months, and then, if approved, they get in line for residency.<\/p>\n By February 2024, Peralta\u2019s daughter\u2019s SIJ status was approved and Peralta was appointed her legal caregiver.<\/p>\n \u201cI had been doing everything right,\u201d she says. With a now legally documented daughter, and documentation that she was appointed her caregiver, Peralta thought she was safe from deportation.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore Trump, that was a reasonable assumption,\u201d Melendez says. \u201cYou have children, status, or ties.\u2026people could happily report.\u201d Caregivers do not need to be documented to be appointed, but they can\u2019t gain legal status based on the SIJ classification either. Now, Melendez says, undocumented guardians of children with the status don\u2019t know what will happen when they present themselves to authorities.<\/p>\n \u201cThis administration, if they don\u2019t care about US citizens who have cancer<\/a> and are still deporting their parents, what do you think they\u2019re gonna do about the SIJ [caregivers] who are illegal here as well, and their kids don\u2019t even have a residency? There\u2019s no empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n Melendez says this is the administration\u2019s backdoor way of deporting people.<\/p>\n During the Biden administration, she says, the appointed caregivers were frequently allowed to remain even without legal status. Immigration judges would often dismiss or close removal proceedings, Melendez notes, if the removal would result in a minor being left alone in the United States. ICE attorneys were also instructed to focus their enforcement efforts on matters of national security, public security, and border security under Biden\u2019s prosecutorial discretion policies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Peralta says she checked in monthly by phone as directed. She had no legal standing in this country, but had remained without issue as ICE prioritized resolving high-priority cases. That\u2019s why, in February, after receiving an email and a phone call notifying her to report in-person at 8 a.m. on March 3 for an ICE appointment in Syosset, she was initially unconcerned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n