Maggie Fogarty sees what’s normally hidden from public view when, every Wednesday morning, she enters Strafford County Jail.
She meets people detained during immigration enforcement actions across New England, who rely on the help of the New Hampshire Immigrant Visitation Program to engage attorney representation and to continue to make progress in their applications for legal status while they remain confined.
“We support them with the emotional and spiritual cost of being incarcerated, the confusion, anxiety and fear of being forced back to a country that isn’t safe for them, the agony of being separated from their family,” said Fogarty, the program coordinator.
Her nonprofit, the Quaker-founded organization American Friends Service Committee, partners with the New Hampshire Conference of the United Church of Christ to run the visitation program. The jail is the only county facility in New Hampshire with a contract to house people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the division’s reach has widened exponentially in the time since President Donald Trump directed it to deputize local and state law enforcement agencies to carry out enforcement actions on its behalf.
Twenty-nine law enforcement agencies across New Hampshire have signed onto these 287(g) agreements with ICE since January 2025, including State Police and locally, the police departments in Weare, Pittsfield and Chichester.
Fogarty continues to meet with detainees and continues to hope for change. She’s part of a coalition of immigration advocacy organizations petitioning Gov. Kelly Ayotte for a meeting to discuss ceasing federal enforcement actions in New Hampshire.
“It has a dramatic force multiplier effect for an agenda that is anti-immigrant, that involves racial profiling, that denies people due process, that dehumanizes entire groups of people based on their country of origin or the color of their skin,” she told the Monitor. “And it erodes and stains any progress made by local law enforcement to convince people that they are about the well-being of the community. Any law enforcement agency associated with the tactics of ICE is no longer credible in those claims.”
Residents of 187 New Hampshire cities and towns, from Acworth to Wolfeboro, have signed the petition, which reads in part that “we are united in opposing the use of local police to assist ICE agents in intimidating families and disrupting community trust and tranquility.”
Last April, when New Hampshire State Police entered into an agreement with ICE, Ayotte rubber-stamped the partnership with emphatic approval, lauding the law enforcement agency for its “continued efforts to protect and serve” the Granite State.
“New Hampshire will not go the way of Massachusetts, where sanctuary policies have enabled violent crime and a billion-dollar illegal immigrant crisis,” Ayotte said in a statement. “Criminals who are in our country illegally and pose a danger to our communities should be apprehended and removed.”
Recent court filings in response to an ACLU lawsuit indicate that the New Hampshire State Police’s partnership with ICE has yielded detentions, but not much in the way of money.
“Between October 29, 2025, and August 8, 2026, NHSP assisted with taking 35 individuals into custody under circumstances relating to immigration, and has not received funds under the [Memorandum of Agreement],” the agency said in a document dated October 2, 2026.
The lawsuit took center stage at a Superior Court hearing Tuesday, where the ACLU of New Hampshire challenged State Police for refusing to respond to four sets of records requests. Beginning in September, 2025, the civil rights organization requested training documents, general records related to encounters with alleged noncitizens and police reports and arrest records related to specifically named individuals, which went unanswered.
A lawyer for the Department of Safety, which encompasses State Police, stressed that the state has received over 2,800 right-to-know requests this year alone and reached an agreement with the ACLU to provide responsive documents by mid-November.
“This information is of massive public import. It’s another reason why we cannot wait any longer just to get a substantive answer on this from the state. Our largest police department in the state of New Hampshire is engaging in immigration detentions. This is something that, until mid-2025, it had never done before,” Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in court.
In Fogarty’s view, agreement inches the state toward greater transparency and accountability on immigration enforcement. Short of concessions from Ayotte, who has encouraged local partnerships with ICE, the coalition’s petition implores departments to be unambiguous about the extent of their participation in enforcement actions and to “shrink their participation to nominal,” Fogarty said.
“This is reaching every police chief, every sheriff, every county commissioner to say, ‘This is not the vision we have for New Hampshire,'” she said.
Retired civil rights attorney Ken Barnes, of Contoocook, hopes the coalition will find an audience with the governor. Barnes authored a similar petition to dissuade the conversion of a vacant warehouse in Merrimack into an immigration processing facility, a plan the U.S. Department of Homeland Security abandoned after Ayotte said she met with Secretary Kristi Noem.
“She realized it was a very unpopular, horrific, antihuman policy, and they eventually backed down,” Barnes said. “These are people who are fleeing for their lives, and they’re hardworking good people, people sending money back to their families in their home countries. They’re members of the community, of faith groups. They’re New Hampshire people.”
Jeremy Margolis contributed reporting to this story.
