GUILDERLAND — When Nancy Cavillones held the first meeting of Guilderland Indivisible last summer in the Helderberg Room of the Guilderland Public Library, five people showed up.

On Monday, the same room was crowded with over 50 people, and more were in line at the door, waiting to come in.

They sat around tables, assembling kits for whistleblowers.

The practice started in September in Chicago in September when the Trump administration started a deportation crackdown. Short blasts signal that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are in the area. Long blasts on the whistle mean that ICE is detaining someone.

Whistleblowing has spread to other cities, including Minneapolis where Renee Nicole Macklin Good was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent on Jan. 7. Her wife, Becca Good, who was with her when she died, said later, “We had whistles. They had guns.”

“I’m very concerned with what is going on in our country and I wanted to do what I can to help,” said Donna Vincent as she assembled a whistle kit on Monday evening.

Each kit consists of a bright orange whistle on a lanyard; a booklet from the not-for-profit Migra Whistle, which produced them; and yellow a “Know Your Rights” card produced by nokings.org with instructions about rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and with advice like a warrant needs to be signed by a judge before an agent can enter a home.

The booklet says that whistleblowing forms an instant alert system, faster than social media, and “turns silence into community action.” It advises people to wear the whistles around their necks, to teach family and neighbors the long and short codes, and says, “Protect each other, always.”

Vincent instructed Ellie Hunt on how to cut the printed sheets to make a booklet before putting it in a bag with the whistle and card.

“Is it biodegradable?” Hunt asked about the bag. It was.

Asked what brought her out to the library to make the whistleblower kits, Hunt said, “The murder of Renee Nicole Good —”

She paused there for a long moment, finally concluding, “I can’t think of a word bad enough to describe it; it was shocking.”

Cavillones said she set up Monday’s event “because it’s really important for the community to come together.”

She herself has seen ICE agents, Cavillones said. “I keep driving because I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Blowing a whistle, she said, does two things: “It says stay away from vulnerable people and it brings others in as witnesses.”

Cavillones went on, “It’s taking tangible action instead of complaining.”

She noted that the Guilderland Indivisible website prominently displays this quote from Joan Baez: “The antidote to despair is action.”

While No Kings protests have largely brought out older people, Cavillones said on Monday, “I’m so happy to see young people here.”

Asked why she thought that was, Cavillones said, “Young people want to feel like they’re actually doing something, a tangible action that has results. And this is a social activity. They can hang out with like-minded people.”

Cavillones herself is 46. She grew up in Guilderland and now works at the University at Albany as a program support specialist for the Office of Economic Development, Entrepreneurship, and Industry Partnership.

In June, she was aware of the first No Kings small protest organized by Joan Storey near where she lives in Guilderland. But later that evening she saw many more protesters gathered in front of the Guilderland Public Library.

When she found out that the No Kings protest in front of the library on June 14 was organized by someone from Cherry Valley, Cavillones said, she decided Guilderland needed its own Indivisible Chapter. Indivisible is a progressive movement founded during the first Trump administration by congressional staffers.

Indivisible Albany was one of the organizers of a protest Saturday at Wolf Road and Central Avenue in Colonie, drawing about 1,000 people who held signs about the recent shootings in Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon and called for ICE to leave the area.

Cavillones said she was gratified by Monday’s turnout at the Guilderland Library. “It shows more and more people are understanding the time is now; it’s getting really critical.”

She surmised that Good’s death had brought people to act. “They related to her as a white person — as terrible as that sounds,” she said. “It makes people wake up. It can be hard to understand what’s happening unless it happens to someone like you — an American citizen.”

Cavillones said 320 whistles were being put into kits on Monday night. “Everyone will go home, keep one for themselves and hand them out to neighbors and friends,” she said.

GPD view

The Guilderland Police Department’s stance on working with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement can not be simply stated as “We will or will not assist ICE,” said Police Chief Daniel McNally. “There’s a lot of variables to this topic,” he told The Enterprise on Tuesday.

He noted the 18 pages of guidance that New York State Attorney General Letitia James put out in January, posted to her office’s website, which both describes the “legal landscape” governing local departments’ participation in immigration enforcement and also offers model language that can be used to enact local laws limiting participation.

Guilderland has adopted no such local laws.

“The Guilderland Police Department will follow the law. And what we’re looking for from the federal partners is a judicial warrant,” said McNally.

This is because immigration violations are civil, not criminal, the attorney general’s guidance explains, so a judicial warrant is required.

“If that is produced, we will absolutely assist ICE with an arrest …,” said McNally. “Without that, if we have probable cause to make an arrest for any crime, like we do for any other citizen, we will do that. We will assist ICE as necessary. They’re a federal law-enforcement agency. When they’re doing their job legally and with authority, we’re going to assist them.”

Asked, then, what would happen if the ICE agents weren’t doing their job properly as may have been the case with the Jan. 7 fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Murley responded “I always question people about forming opinions from a couple of seconds of a video clip on the news. I think that’s a dangerous practice to comment on things like that before we know all the facts.”

McNally went on about town residents, “If there’s an issue that they’re seeing that they feel is wrong, they can always call the Guilderland Police and we will go and we will look into the matter.”

He cautioned, “But they shouldn’t be taking justice into their own hands because of what happened out there. I mean, that’s a tragic example of what could happen by trying to obstruct ICE,” he said of Good being fatally shot.

Asked how many ICE arrests have been made in Guilderland since Jan. 1, 2025, McNally said, “I do not have that information …. I can’t get that information from the federal agency, from ICE … I know they have been here.”

One incident he did “fully investigate,” McNally said, was in June when ICE agents made an arrest near a Guilderland bus stop.

“They made a lawful arrest there …,” said McNally. “The location was bad, obviously, with kids in a middle-school bus getting on the bus; that became a hot topic.”

He went on about larger issues of local police not being informed about ICE activities, “One of the concerns that law enforcement locally and at the state level continues to have is we don’t know when ICE is working in our area …. They do not and will not provide that information …

“We want to prevent what’s called a blue-on-blue, where you have police officers responding to another police agency’s actions, and we have no knowledge of it. And, unfortunately, we carry guns. So that’s something we’re struggling with and then we’re working with our federal partners trying to get some guidance on.”

McNally reiterated, with emphasis, to distinguish when Guilderland Police will cooperate with ICE and when the department will not: “I’m only enforcing the law based on probable cause that a crime has been committed and a judicial warrant. So if ICE called and said, ‘Can you check a database to see if somebody lives on such-and-such a street?’ we will not do that.”

McNally said that he hopes recently proposed state legislation will help define some of the current “gray areas.”

McNally concluded, “I suggest to anybody, if you’re having concerns and you feel there’s something that ICE is doing wrong in a situation, please call us. And we’ll look into it but I can’t emphasize enough: They should not obstruct ICE in doing their jobs.”