On any given day, you can drive past Lexington’s Battle Green and see guided tours of the historical landmark led by Lexington Visitor Center guides.
Or better yet, you can join one.
But on Friday of last week, a different type of guided tour joined the mix in the Center — an ICE bus tour.
This tour wasn’t as joyful as one of the Battle Green, but just as informative.
“People need to know what’s happening in their backyard,” Ellen Dussourd, a Sudbury resident and organizer of the ICE bus tour, told the Observer. What’s happening is, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) has been flying detainees out of Hanscom to large detention centers in southern states.
In protest of that, Dussourd and a group of 11 others gathered on Depot Square before boarding the MBTA route 76 bus (which stops at Hanscom) from Massachusetts Avenue and Depot Square. On the grassy common, the group listened to guide Judith Black, a Marblehead resident, explain ICE’s operations out of Hanscom and the conditions local detainees are living in.
“The fact that our government is sponsoring torture, and that we, as citizens, are paying for that, is beyond the pale and it has to stop,” Black told the Observer.
After Black’s speech, the crowd boarded the bus.
Two other riders, who weren’t protesting, were on the bus already, and wished the group “good luck” when they departed a couple stops later.
Along the entire bus route, the group held homemade posters reading, “De-ICE Signature Aviation” and “Signature Aviation supports torture,” among other messages, up to the windows so people outside could see. Signature Aviation is an airfield operation services provider at Hanscom that services planes, including those that transport ICE detainees, out of Hanscom.
“I’m protesting because this is going on in our country, in our backyard, in 2026. It is mind boggling to me,” Deb Olken, a Cambridge resident, told the Observer. “I wanted to see it with my own eyes…we have to bring this to the populace’s attention.”
After the bus tour, Dussourd and her husband drove back to Hanscom to join another ICE protest nearby.
Local advocacy groups such as Lexington Alarm, among others, have observed thousands of people in shackles being transported from the same handful of vans and buses onto airplanes at Hanscom. They’ve then tracked those flights to states like Louisiana where there are large federal detention centers.
Sonia Yamileth Reyes Arauz, an ICE detainee, filed a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus (which allows her to challenge the lawfulness of her detention before a judge) a few months after being detained by DHS and ICE in her Connecticut hometown in Sept. 2025. She was transferred from Connecticut to Rhode Island, and then to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, ME. She was then transferred to Burlington, MA, in January 2026, and from there, to Hanscom to be flown down to Louisiana.
Reyes Arauz detailed her experience on the flight in legal documentation.
“Ms. Reyes was loaded onto a bus that, once again, had the heat turned up high. Ms. Reyes was then forced to wait on the bus for around 3 ½ hours. They were then led onto the plane, still in chains, where they were forced to wait an additional hour before taking off. Ms. Reyes had not been allowed to use the bathroom, nor had anyone else who was detained on the flight. One woman got so sick that she started vomiting blood, but ICE still refused to take off her chains until a lot later. Finally, after they had been in the air for 3 hours, Ms. Reyes was allowed to use the bathroom. Upon arrival to Louisiana and getting off the plane, Ms. Reyes vomited. By then, the only food she had been given all day was a bottle of water and an apple,” the document reads.
“What the Trump administration is doing is, overnight, it’s making people illegal — people who have temporary protective status, even for decades, who have families, who have jobs, who own businesses, suddenly, overnight, they become unlawfully present in the US and I think that’s wrong,” Dussourd told the Observer.
Dussourd and her husband have been protesting President Donald Trump’s agenda for the past decade. During his first presidency, or what Dussourd called “Trump one-point-oh,” she traveled to Washington for the Women’s March and the Peoples’ Climate Change March in 2017, and then the March for Our Lives in 2018. During Trump-two-point-oh, Dussourd and her husband have been going to the Bearing Witness protests outside the Burlington ICE office every week and protested Citizens’ financial support of ICE detention centers earlier this year.
“We need to stop the mass deportation agenda, this ethnic cleansing of the United States is not in our interest,” Dussourd said. “It’s damaging to us as a nation, to what we stand for, to our economy, it’s very damaging to our image to the world, and, of course, it destroys the lives of so many people.”
Dussourd told the Observer that among other topics, immigration will be a guiding factor in her vote this November.
Can someone share how Trump deportations differ from those carried out by President Obama, who was called “The deporter in chief”? He awarded a medal to the same Tom Homan who is again doing an effective job. It is widely known Obama put detainees in cages and separated families. Maybe the food was better?
The current situation and giving false legitimacy to people who entered the US without visas or documents, greatly worsened by President Biden has required strong measure to fix. Trump was elected to clean up Biden’s messes, and ICE is doing that job when illegal immigrants choose to not cooperate and get a free trip home with cash. Voters were shocked by the downfall of Europe caused by a flood of migrants allowed in. Europe is also trying to fix the problems caused by bad leaders. They have had enough of all the added crimes including rapes by refugees there and riots in Paris and elsewhere.
Women who paid human traffickers in Mexico to be smuggled into the US also suffered horrible abuse that ended once President Trump made the borders secure along with greatly defunding the criminal cartels who have also seen loss of drug revenue.
If people want to revert back to open borders, elect the next president who promises that. A better option is to once again vet applicants based on labor needs as done by other countries like Australia. For now, deporting illegal immigrants, fake asylum claimants, visa overstayers, and “temporary” status holders lasting over 10 years, from over 100 different countries is what elected President Trump. He is doing what he promised and also, finally rooting out the medical and welfare fraud often carried out by these same migrants that was enabled by Democrat politicians looking the other way and offering sanctuary to criminals.