Thursday, October 1, 2026
When Angel Reyes Rivas approached the microphone at the Glen Street Long Island Rail Road station last week, he barely got a few sentences out before his voice cracked. The 35-year-old Glen Cove resident — known to many as “the phone repair guy” — wiped away tears as he looked over the crowd of neighbors, faith leaders and advocates gathered under the station lights.
Rivas has lived in Glen Cove since he was a teenager. He came to the city from Peru to reunite with his mother and brother, and enrolled at Glen Cove High School “I came to Glen Cove High School started as an ESL student, level one,” he recalled. “It took me a couple years, but I always fell in love with the language. And that’s also why I became an English major.”
Rivas’s life here, however, has been shaped by the precariousness of immigration status. He arrived with a visa at age 15, and later overstayed it. For years, he said, he had “no sort of notion of what it means to be undocumented” — until the system crashed into his family. His mother, who had missed court dates for traffic tickets out of fear of being deported, was ultimately arrested, detained at the Nassau County jail and sent back to Peru. Angel was 18, a junior in high school, when it happened.
“That was the first big thing that opened my eyes to the system,” he said. Forced to support himself and his 13-year-old brother, Rivas left school, later earning his high-school equivalency diploma and a math degree from Nassau Community College. When the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, was created in 2012, he finally gained work authorization. He worked in a supermarket meat department, then at AT&T, where he was promoted to store manager and district manager, and later at Geico.
Alongside those jobs, he threw himself into organizing, working with LatinoJustice on a lawsuit involving Suffolk County police, coordinating a worker center with the Rural & Migrant Ministry on the East End, and helping push for the Farmworker Labor Relations Act, which in 2019 gave farmworkers in New York the right to unionize and earn a weekly day off. Most recently, he helped lead national DACA defense advocacy in advance of a Supreme Court case.
As a DACA recipient, he knows he, too, could be targeted. “I only have DACA, so I could be targeted by ICE, because a lot of DACA recipients have been targeted around the nation,” he said.
That personal history is what brought him to the vigil at the Glen Street station on Nov. 13, where roughly 200 people gathered to denounce recent immigration raids and show solidarity with immigrant residents.
A vigil against fear
The event, organized by Assemblyman Charles Lavine, featured clergy from several faiths and volunteers from the North Shore Rapid Response Network, which monitors immigration enforcement activity on the North Shore.
Lavine told the crowd that the gathering was an effort to stand together against the “dehumanizing immigration policies of the Trump administration” and to show support for families in the community who have been affected.
“I have seen firsthand the devastating impact that these policies are having on our families and on innocent people — people who are hardworking people, mothers and fathers,” he said, “and we must stand together to fight for justice. The mere fact that armed and masked intruders have taken over our streets is something that’s very frightening.”
The vigil took place at the same station where, in June, four unidentified people were taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“Fear is being used to divide neighbors, to dehumanize hardworking people and to justify policies that target the vulnerable, and it’s not a new story,” the Rev. Jesse Lebus, of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Sea Cliff, said. Referring to a 1996 episode of “The Simpsons,” he described how immigrants in the show become scapegoats for unrelated problems — satire that he said has aged a little too well.
“The truth is that fear has always been good at convincing people to stay in their corners, to build walls and to decide who belongs and who doesn’t,” Lebus said. But he noted the crowd of residents and religious leaders “from traditions that once kept their distance” now standing together.
The Rev. Roger Williams, of First Baptist Church in Glen Cove, placed the current moment in the context of earlier American injustices, recalling his grandfather’s stories of Black codes that allowed authorities to arrest formerly enslaved Black men simply for standing together on street corners. “Our immigrant communities now are under siege because of what they look like and who they are,” Williams said.
“Our God is not coming back for a nation with secure borders,” Williams told the crowd. “God is coming back for a people who believe in him and who have been baptized in his love. And that’s what you’re showing here today — love.” Offering a variation on words from the Declaration of Independence, he concluded, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that every immigrant in the world that comes to this nation is created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Let’s stand on that tonight. Let’s make our voices known.”
‘People are afraid’
For Rivas, those rights feel distant for many of his neighbors. Life in Glen Cove, he said, has grown more fearful for immigrant families amid stepped-up enforcement.
“People are not coming out,” he said. “People are taking the taxi just to go do the things that would take them five minutes. They don’t want to walk two blocks to get a phone card, deposit some money downtown. They don’t want to do that, and it’s difficult. People are afraid.”
Rivas described seeing ICE agents outside La Placita, in Glen Cove, approaching people randomly because they “looked Latino.” That, he said, contradicts federal claims that enforcement is narrowly focused. “When they say that they’re going after criminals and they’re going after people with records, that it’s just targeted arrests for people with deportation orders, that’s not true,” he said. “ICE is in our community, going after people that look Latino, and that needs to be said.”
Though speaking out is risky, Rivas said that remaining silent would betray both his community and the ideals he believes the United States was meant to embody. “I believe that the only way to advance justice and to really accomplish an improvement of society comes through the community speaking up,” he said. “Even though I wasn’t born in the U.S., I still think that the U.S. was (meant) to welcome people to pursue happiness and a better life. I think it is part of my responsibility as an immigrant to continue that and to fight for that, which is, I believe, the essence of America.”
Watching ICE — and helping families
Members of the North Shore Rapid Response Network were scattered through the crowd. The volunteer network mobilizes when ICE is reported in the area, trying to document what happens and connect families with help. Roger Street Friedman, of Sea Cliff, a musician, a network volunteer and the grandson of immigrants from Russia and Poland, told the crowd that the immigration debate has left the realm of reality and become driven by fear, myths and political theater.
“We need to talk about what a rational solution looks like, one that respects the rule of law, strengthens our economy and honors the dignity of the people who are already part of the national fabric,” Friedman said. “We are for a rational approach that starts with this simple truth. We cannot deport our way out of this problem, and we shouldn’t try.”
In an email to the Herald, Friedman said that the network has likely responded to between 10 and 20 ICE encounters in and around Glen Cove, though not all resulted in arrests, and data is scarce. “ICE does not provide any transparency on who’s been taken, or how many people have been detained, or their status,” he said. Volunteers, he added, have yet to see agents produce a warrant in any encounter they’ve witnessed.
When ICE is spotted, group members try to get to the scene quickly to document what’s happening, determine whether agents have legal authority to be there, and, if someone is detained, get their name and alert family members. The network also distributes Know Your Rights information, connects families with immigration attorneys and is building the capacity to offer services like food delivery and walking children to school for parents who are afraid to leave home.
In a statement to the Herald, Osman Canales, who works with rapid response networks across Long Island, described an incident in Glen Cove on Sept. 11 in which an immigrant walking to work was detained in an ICE operation, despite having “no criminal background and no record, according to his family.” Volunteers saw him in the back of an ICE vehicle, noted his name and address and notified his family.
“I am happy to report that the father messaged me today to tell me he has been released and will be returning home to his family,” Canales said, adding that without the network’s intervention, “he could have been improperly and unjustly deported.” Canales said that another man, who was detained in a separate encounter that day, and told agents his work authorization was inside his home, is still being held in another state while he fights his case.
City Hall response
Glen Cove Mayor Pamela Panzenbeck said she didn’t know the vigil was taking place until she saw photos online afterward. She said she speaks regularly with the city Police Department about ICE activity in the city.
“As far as we know, there has been no ICE activity for the last couple of weeks,” Panzenbeck said. “We believe it has quieted down at this point. But ICE is just not arresting people because they’re Hispanics. They’re being arrested for reasons. They are not just coming and picking people up out of nowhere. They are looking for specific people.”
Advocates at the vigil stressed that what happens on Glen Cove’s streets is tied to larger systems. Online reports show that under an agreement struck in February between Nassau County and ICE, the county has rented out 50 jail cells at the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow, where it held more than 2,100 ICE detainees between February and October.
Rivas told the crowd that he believes moments like the Glen Street vigil matter. “I’m in contact with families that have been impacted, people that have been detained without a criminal record,” he said,, “even kids with special needs that need their dad.”
