A dozen or more masked men, some with long guns, tried to enter a men’s homeless shelter without identifying themselves in a rural town with a long-standing immigrant community on eastern Long Island in New York. Officials from the local police department later admitted they didn’t know where the masked men came from — only adding to local residents’ concerns.

At the same time, 50 miles to the west, six unmarked cars with masked agents from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, parked within hundreds of feet of an elementary school in a working-class town with a large Latino population. In response, a group of residents gathered to shame the agents, accusing the agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, of lying in wait to snatch the parents of students when school let out.

The Long Island communities in New York City’s suburbs are the latest to be wracked by chaos as the Trump administration ramps up large-scale deportation operations. ICE raids using a hodgepodge of masked federal agents and varying degrees of assistance from local law enforcement agencies are escalating as part of the raids — leaving local immigrants in fear and other residents enraged.

On Long Island, the two federal raids on Tuesday saw emergency communiqués from schools to parents, incorrect information distributed to area media by local authorities, a confrontation with angry demonstrators, and a car accident.

Last week, top ICE officials ordered officers to increase arrests and to get “creative” in their methods, including trying to nab people the officers happen to encounter in what are known as “collateral arrests.” The orders come in the wake of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller setting a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day, along with a sharp rise in protests against the crackdown.

“No Son Padres Ustedes?”

Late Tuesday morning in Westbury, in western Nassau County, parents and nearby residents noticed what they immediately recognized as unmarked federal agent vehicles parked within feet of Park Avenue Elementary School, two eyewitnesses told The Intercept. One of those residents, Allan Oscar Sorto, picked up his phone and began streaming live on Facebook.

As he streamed, a dozen or so people began congregating near the cars, two Nissan Altimas and several Ford SUVs with flashers. People can be heard explaining that they’ve seen these cars around the neighborhood in recent weeks, part of immigration raids. Now the sight of the cars parked so close to the elementary school seemed to spark heightened outrage and fear that federal immigration agents were lurking to surprise parents going to pick up their children from school.

Sorto, from nearby Hempstead, estimated that there were four cars near the school, some within 10 feet of the schoolyard fence, and two other cars on the next block. Another eyewitness, who asked not to be named out of fear of law enforcement retaliation, told The Intercept that he could see uniformed HSI agents sitting in all the cars, most masked.

“No son padres ustedes?” a woman in the video says to the closed window of one of the parked Nissans: “Are you not parents?”

People on the sidewalk yelled at the cars in Spanish and English. “Show your face!” “You feel proud?” “None of us are criminals, we work, we pay taxes like you do.” “Leave the school grounds!”

The Westbury residents’ fears seemed well-founded, considering reports from around the........

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