Mary Richards spent three years looking for someone to replace the leaking slate roof on her 160-year-old farmhouse in Cornwall. Every company she reached said it was overbooked or understaffed. Some just didn’t return her calls.
Finally, in early August — after water spots and cracks began to spread across her dining room ceiling — a South Burlington company sent a crew of roofers to her rural Addison County home. Around noon on their second day of work, Richards peered out her window and noticed three SUVs with tinted windows parked out front.
She rushed outside to find several U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in her yard. The roofers had scattered. Two hid in the high branches of a maple tree beside her house; others fled across a nearby field.
A crowd quickly formed of neighbors and passing cyclists, who tried to intervene. Richards yelled at the agents to show a warrant for coming onto her property. Without a word, they loaded two handcuffed roofers into a vehicle and drove off as Richards shouted after them: “You can’t just take people!”
The agents had come and gone in less than 10 minutes.
Amid a recent national surge, detentions by ICE have spiked in Vermont this year: 117 by the end of July, compared to 34 in all of 2025, according to federal data released by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA. Those figures are an undercount of all immigration detentions, as they don’t include interior arrests by U.S. Border Patrol. Eighty-five percent of those detained by ICE in Vermont in 2026 had no criminal convictions, according to ICE data.
Workers in Vermont’s roofing and construction industries are frequent targets. At least 30 have been detained at 13 worksite raids and traffic stops so far this year, according to a tally by farmworker advocacy group Migrant Justice. The detentions — and fear of them — have upended the lives of workers and crippled an industry that has become increasingly dependent on Latin American migrants to fix Vermont’s roofs and build its homes.
“It was nearly impossible to get a roofer,” Richards said. “Then, when I do, ICE comes. It’s crazy.”
Last Friday, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) visited five ICE detainees at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans. In a video posted after the visit, Welch said he met three farmworkers, a truck driver and a roofer. None had been convicted of a crime, he said.
“This is so wrong and so cruel,” Welch said in the video. “This mass roundup — that is just something that the Trump administration won’t stop — has to stop. These are good people that are here — working people, with families, making a contribution to our farms and to our community, to construction of the housing that we need.”
The day before the raid in Cornwall, five members of a construction crew were detained near Londonderry while driving to a jobsite. A couple of weeks later, on August 24, two more workers were arrested leaving a construction site in Derby Line. On September 4, federal agents detained three roofers shortly after they arrived at a worksite in Morristown.
The Morristown crew had been hired by Five Star Roofing, a contractor with offices in Shelburne and Plattsburgh, N.Y. In a lengthy Facebook post the day after the raid, the company set out to “address several misconceptions” about its hiring practices and workers, including “an assumption that Five Star seeks out undocumented workers as a source of ‘cheap labor.’”
“That could not be further from the reality of our business or the roofing industry,” the company wrote. “Vermont has a serious workforce shortage, particularly in the skilled trades,” making it “extraordinarily difficult” for companies to find enough qualified roofers, the statement said.
The shortage is so severe that Five Star recently went to Texas to recruit a crew willing to come to Vermont to work, the statement says. The company also disputed the idea that its Latino workers earn less, saying roofers typically make $300 to $400 a day, depending on their experience.
Five Star Roofing did not respond to interview requests.
Peter Bermeo Ronquillo, 32, was one of the five workers detained in Londonderry on August 7. He migrated from Ecuador in 2023 to seek asylum, he said, and came straight to Vermont to work as a roofer. He now works for a local subcontractor.
ICE agents pulled over Bermeo Ronquillo while he was driving with his crew to a jobsite. He said he told the agents he had a pending asylum case with a court hearing in 2027; they detained him anyway.
“I entered through the Arizona border and registered,” he said in Spanish. “Obviously, it was legal because it was the same government that processed us.”
He said the detentions felt unjust.
“All of us who were detained are just here to work,” he said. “We aren’t hurting anyone.”
All five workers have been released on bond following hearings before immigration judges. The Vermont Freedom Fund, a bail and bond fund for immigrants, covered their $40,000 in bail.
All of us who were detained are just here to work.
Peter Bermeo Ronquillo
The arrests have shone a light on the changing demographics of Vermont’s roofing industry, which is the latest sector to turn to migrant workers amid a labor shortage. For decades, dairy farms have relied on migrant workers from Mexico, many of them undocumented.
But the feds have largely avoided raiding the farms where these workers live. Construction crews, meanwhile, have faced repeated raids and arrests, in part because of how exposed they are to passersby.
That’s what led to the detentions in Cornwall. ICE agent Colton Riley was driving from a “target address” in Middlebury to another in Shoreham when he happened to pass Richards’ home around 11:15 a.m. on August 8, according to an incident report he wrote. He spotted roofers “covering their heads and faces with hoods and neck coverings,” which he found “suspicious.”
Riley decided to run the registrations on the work vans. One was in the name of a person with a deportation order, he wrote. Another was registered to someone who he determined was “illegal”; Riley wrote that they were “under proceedings,” with a prior immigration court date in 2024 and “nothing further scheduled.”
Riley called his supervisor, who sent more agents. They “surrounded the residence,” Riley wrote, and detained two of the nine workers, according to the report. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
After the agents left, someone called Migrant Justice, which helped connect the detained workers with legal support. A GoFundMe launched by advocates in Addison County has raised $7,600 on their behalf.
Both workers are from rural Ecuador, according to Maria Tixe, whose husband, Angel, and younger brother, Alex, were swept up in the raid. Tixe, who lives in Essex, said she migrated to the U.S. in 2024 to seek asylum, leaving behind a life of subsistence farming. Violence and threats in the troubled South American country had become widespread.
She and her family moved to Vermont about a year ago, following work opportunities in the roofing industry.
Tixe said her husband, Angel, has a pending asylum case. He was released on bail by an immigration judge after 15 days in detention. She is still fighting for her brother’s release.
Alex is 30 years old with a wife and 18-month-old son, she said.
“We aren’t criminals,” Tixe said in Spanish. “We came to work and to help our children get ahead.”
Roofing companies often hire subcontractors who provide workers rather than employing them directly as their own staff. That allows the companies “to lower their costs and access workers who don’t have a legal right to work, because both the pay and documentation go through the subcontractor,” said David Stoll, a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College who studies debt and migration.
This system can help bring in much-needed workers while insulating companies from some of the liability they might otherwise face, Stoll said.
The company Richards hired for the Cornwall job used subcontractors. Brianna Valero Luna, general manager of the company’s South Burlington branch, said she doesn’t “go above and beyond” to check the immigration status of those workers.
“I don’t ask the question, ‘Do you have your residency; do you have a visa?’” she said. “That’s not something legally I’m allowed to ask, for one. But for two, an opportunity is an opportunity for anybody who wants to change their lives.”
“All my foremen are documented,” she added. “I pay the foreman — the owner of the business — and they pay their employees.”
After the raid at Richards’ home, Valero Luna brought in another crew that same afternoon to finish the job. Neighbors shared pizzas and stood watch in case ICE returned. Some even climbed onto the roof to help the workers lay shingles. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Roof Raids | Laborers in construction and roofing are being targeted as ICE detentions spike in Vermont”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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