Reporter on Vermont immigrant detainee series guest on Hot Off The Press

By Timothy Page on December 18, 2025 • ( Leave a comment )

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*Vermont Public reporter Peter Hirschfeld (right), reporter of four-part series on federal detaining of immigrants, is our guest on Thursday’s Hot Off The Press. Vermont Public photos.*

By Guy Page

Vermont Public reporter Peter Hirschfeld was our guest on the Vermont Daily Chronicle’s Hot Off The Press call-in radio show today at 11:05 AM on WDEV AM 550, FM 96.1, and livestreamed on WDEVradio.com.

Hirschfeld, a Mount Mansfield Union High grad and longtime State House reporter for Vermont Public and previously for the Rutland Herald – Times Argus, recently produced and reported a four-part series entitled “Sudden Separations: As the Trump administration has abandoned norms and aggressively expanded immigration enforcement, migrant communities in Vermont are grappling with the consequences.”

Rather than rely solely on government reports and official quotes, Hirschfeld and his team interviewed many members of Vermont’s estimated 3,000 strong illegal immigrants – referred to as ‘immigrants’ in the series, generally without any qualifier about their legal status – to determine how the Trump administration’s ramping up of detentions has affected their lives.

Part 1: Trump’s deportation campaign has hit Vermont. Immigrants say they’re here to stay

Part 2: In Winooski, 3 arrests upend a family’s quiet life

Part 3: An Ecuadorian family’s path to asylum hangs in the balance

Part 4: She fought for the right to attend college in Vermont. Now she’s facing deportation

The four-part series covers the immigration crisis from the immigrants point of view, focusing more on their life experience than on the legal issue or their impact on housing, services, and the criminal justice system. For example:

In Vermont, detentions of immigrants based on their legal status so far this year total about 100, according to Migrant Justice, an advocacy organization. Last year MJ recorded only 20 detentions.

From Jan. 20 to Dec. 2 last year, ICE made 2,044 arrests and 933 removals in the Boston area of responsibility, which includes Vermont and five other New England states. Over the same period this year, ICE reported 8,848 arrests and 9,987 removals — roughly a tenfold increase in deportations.

In at least one case, men who were detained by the Trump administration were held in a federal detention facility, then released on bond and are back with their families in Winooski.

Some of the immigrants interviewed by Vermont Public come from countries savaged by violent revolution, and genuinely fear returning to those countries.

Listen to every Hot Off the Press podcast on the WDEV podcast page or right here on the Vermont Daily Chronicle podcast page.

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