How Siembra NC Sorts Fact From Fiction

About two months ago, a Greensboro-based advocacy group got a call from two Durham residents who had seen unfamiliar vehicles looping around their Northgate Park neighborhood. They saw law enforcement officers with their faces covered, and they thought they knew what was happening: an ICE raid.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put three men in handcuffs and drove them away, the pair said. They sent in video of someone wearing a Customs and Border Protection badge.

Alisa Cullison and Emily Ingebretsen had called a hotline run by Siembra NC, a nonprofit organization that works to support Latino residents across the state. Members of Siembra NC’s administrative staff jumped into action. They drove to the neighborhood to speak to the families of the men, who the organization said were from India. The team offered support and referrals for immigration lawyers, the organization told The Assembly. The names of the men have not been made public, and it’s unclear where they were taken. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Siembra NC’s hotline service, which launched in 2018 after the organization formed the year before, has served as a resource to help immigrants and other community members sort fact from fiction when it comes to raids and deportations. That’s especially crucial as panic-inducing misinformation has spread through social media posts in the months since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for a second term.

Republican politicians and other critics say groups like Siembra NC prevent immigration authorities from doing their jobs. Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of Siembra NC, said verifying ICE’s presence in a neighborhood helps residents better understand what’s happening. 

“These neighbors are seeing a kind of operation that looks scary to them,” she said. “They can call to get some of those questions answered about why this operation is happening in their neighborhood. It’s also part of what’s really important at such a supercharged time like this.”

The hotline is part of a larger story within Siembra NC, a base-building organization that enlists grassroots organizations from across several counties in North Carolina, with committees in Durham, Guilford, Wake, Randolph, Alamance, Orange, Johnston, and Cabarrus counties to advocate for Latino workers’ rights and strengthen their political bloc. 

Spread of Misinformation

The spread of false or unverified information is not new. When Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina in September, social media posts wrongly said that volunteers were turned away or that certain roads were closed, causing confusion and risking recovery efforts. Marín Baena saw this firsthand when she set out to deliver supplies to affected communities after the damage, including chainsaws, tortillas, cans of beans, and Maseca corn flour. She heard rumors that two intersections had been closed, though she was able to get through. 

Yesenia Polanco, an immigration attorney in Durham, said the confusion about ICE’s activities complicates life for immigrants, some of whom are still reeling from Trump’s first administration when the president tried to reshape U.S. immigration enforcement. 

Shortly after he took office in 2017, the president banned travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim countries. He pushed to build a wall at the country’s southern border to stop immigrants from entering. The “Remain in Mexico” policy enacted in 2019 required some asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border to stay in Mexico while awaiting immigration hearings. Although the policy was revoked under Joe Biden’s administration, Trump has moved to bring it back. 

When a series of ICE raids swept across North Carolina in 2018, many people took to social media to post rumors about immigration agents hiding in grocery store parking lots and lurking around after-school programs. 

“But there’s something about this time that feels even more brazen—almost like there’s less concern about backlash or legal boundaries or due process or the rule of law, not to mention the humanity of each immigrant,” Polanco said.

Fears of being deported have left some immigrants too scared to go to work, seek medical help, or send their children to school. Some have stopped going to church since Trump issued a directive that allows immigration agents to enter places of worship. 

Administration officials have privately discussed trying to deport a million immigrants in Trump’s first year, The Washington Post recently reported. And they have targeted people who generally didn’t face enforcement actions in prior administrations.

Hundreds of college students across the country have had their student visas revoked, including more than a dozen at UNC System schools. N.C. State was the first in North Carolina to announce that two of their students had been affected. 

Many of the students haven’t been told why their status changed, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the Trump administration is focusing on those who participate in political activism. 

And there are other unexpected cases. A Venezuelan asylum seeker who was living in North Carolina legally and did not have a criminal record was deported in January when he went to the Charlotte ICE office for a routine check-in. 

Fear intensified 

Before Trump took office again in January, most of the calls to Siembra NC’s hotline were from immigrants reporting wage theft at their jobs or looking for immigration attorneys, according to Marín Baena. Some asked for advice on how to assemble emergency plans for undocumented relatives. 

During the first two weeks following Trump’s inauguration, the hotline received nearly 300 calls. Many were from people asking operators to verify a rumored ICE appearance. Some inquired about unmarked vehicles on their street or shared information about friends who saw something suspicious or heard through the grapevine. Others shared reports they saw on social media or messaging channels like WhatsApp. 

Calls to the hotline have increased, with Siembra NC receiving more than 600 calls last month. 

Some of the rumors called into the hotline have swirled around Hispanic grocery stores and businesses. 

Compare Foods on Avondale Drive in Durham was the target of a hoax in January when someone drove around the parking lot in a truck bearing an ICE logo. The store wrote on Instagram that the incident was a prank and that police were notified. 

“What’s most concerning is that these actions were carried out with malicious intent, aimed at spreading fear and misinformation in a time when our community is already in a fragile and sensitive climate,” the store wrote. “Fear, especially in such uncertain times, can spread like wildfire.”

When someone calls the hotline to report an incident, the operator asks if they personally witnessed the event. If the caller didn’t see any ICE personnel firsthand, the hotline staff will ask to get in touch with the person who witnessed the event, posted on social media, or whoever started the conversation. 

“This is where that rumor type comes in,” Marlene Martinez, a rapid response coordinator at Siembra, said a few weeks after the inauguration. “Because the majority of the calls that we’ve gotten over the last few weeks have not been from anybody that saw anything with their two eyes. It’s a post that went viral, or so and so dropped in the family chat and said there were suspicious people, but nobody saw anything.”

If the caller did witness something, operators gather details like the time, what they saw, and where it took place. Reports that are old or vague are usually logged and/or discarded, and callers are asked to call again if more information becomes available. But if they see that the sighting is credible and actively taking place, they send out a team to observe the scene. 

With the Northgate Park raid, Marín Baena said the call echoed similar reports they had heard from other places where other federal agencies were carrying out immigration enforcement. But the team was surprised, she said, to find out the raid was being reported in Durham. 

U.S. Rep. Mark Harris, a North Carolina Republican, posted on X in late February that Siembra NC is “openly impeding ICE immigration enforcement and helping illegal aliens.” 

The group says its teams are trained not to interfere with any law enforcement actions, but simply observe and identify the agency involved. Siembra will also routinely send verifiers into areas known for frequent ICE sightings or where rumors have spread to reassure the community that federal agents aren’t around. In many cases, the activity that people originally reported to the hotline will end up being local police and not ICE.

Martinez said the organization has noticed a shift in how people engage with the hotline. The first two weeks were incredibly intense, with a flood of calls and people reporting everything they saw. Now she’s noticing callers more consistently asking thoughtful questions or telling people within their social circles to share their firsthand information with Siembra NC.

“There’s a growing awareness that panic and unchecked sharing—especially of posts with no clear source—only add to the fear in our community,” she said. “And that’s not what we want. We’re seeing people start to ground themselves in that understanding, and as a result, the volume of calls has also begun to settle down.”

Over the last few months, the group has hosted a series of ICE watch trainings to teach community members how to dispel rumors and verify potential sightings. Marín Baena said that’s the best tool to navigate the Trump administration. 

She cited the Trump administration’s promise to carry out mass deportations, which he’s said he hopes will be the largest domestic deportation operation in U.S. history that he predicted “will be a bloody story.” Much of the uncertainty and anti-immigration rhetoric will drive people to “self–deport,” Marín Baena said. She’s already hearing this from immigrants in North Carolina, specifically people from Mexico, who have said they’re making plans to leave.

“Part of our job as an organization that cares about Latinos being able to live as dignified a life as they possibly can in North Carolina is to help the community tell the difference between what is really happening and what is someone saying to make good television,” she said. 

Heidi Pérez-Moreno is a reporter at the Border Belt Independent. She previously wrote for the Washington City Paper and spent nine months covering travel and local transportation for The Washington Post. She graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, and she calls Miami home.