More than 100 protesters expressed outrage on Wednesday afternoon that ICE agents are using the Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport to transport detained immigrants as part of President Donald Trump’s massive deportation operation.
The protesters spilled into a hallway outside a room at the airport where the Burlington Airport Commission met. During the public comment period of the session, the protesters made impassioned pleas for stopping ICE’s use of the airport.
“I hope and pray that you people act bravely,” Chuck Derusso of Montpelier told commissioners. “I’m a veteran. Some of you may be veterans. We fought for this democracy … We can’t be participating in renditions.”
The meeting followed the publication by VTDigger of videos shot by activists of what appears to be Homeland Security agents escorting someone through a side door at the airport in the dead of night. Activists recorded their interaction with the agents and called the airport police, asking them to verify that the action was legal. A person who answered the airport police’s telephone number said the agents were with ICE and refused the activist’s request to ask them for any documentation.
Many who spoke out said they know or work with immigrants and are fearful of what is happening to them.
“It is well documented that ICE strategically moves people they have illegally detained to further separate them from their lawyers, from their families, from their whole support systems,” said Dee Graham, a Burlington resident.
Some drew parallels between the forced deportations occurring today with those that occurred during the Holocaust.
“Now is the time to know if you would have hidden Anne Frank,” Sherri Wormser said. “We now know that the Burlington Airport holds the position that they would let the world know where she was hiding, lead the agents to her and give them passage to concentration camps.”
“I want to believe that BTV is going to be brave in the face of all of this and do whatever it can to help,” said Julie Macuga, an activist shown in one of the videos. “Sadly, what we’ve been told by the airport has repeatedly been different than what we’ve observed.”
The public comments lasted two and a half hours.
Prior to the meeting, Airport officials sought legal advice from Kaplan Kirsch, a national law firm. The firm provided a memo outlining the airport’s authority in regard to ICE.
“ICE has the broad legal authority to enforce federal immigration law and operate at and through the public areas of the Airport,” its memo says. It goes on to note that the airport could take some limited action, such as limiting access to “restricted, non-public areas” of the facility and enforcing parking restrictions.
In a city council meeting on Monday night, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said the city can’t do anything about ICE’s use of the airport.
“Even though this is an airport for which the city has oversight, federal agencies in physical spaces, especially related to operations, are different to what the city actually has legal authority over,” she said. “It is a tricky and frustrating dynamic, but the FAA, TSA, ICE and Homeland Security have access to both public and secure locations within the airport that we do not have oversight over.”
On Wednesday, the airport’s director of aviation, Nic Longo, referred to the mayor’s comments toward the conclusion of the commission’s meeting and added some of his own. Longo stressed that his staff don’t directly interact with ICE and said he has limited capacity to impact what its agents do at the airport.
“We have a lot of work to do, and we have a lot of limitations from a legal standpoint,” he said. “I know we hear the community and certainly the folks today, and outside of today, that we will do everything we can within our powers to make sure that we can help, again, where we can.”
Correction, August 8, 2025: Sherri Wormser was misidentified in an earlier version of this story.
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