Williston, Vermont, is a town of roughly 10,000 people, mostly farmland and historic buildings on the outskirts of Burlington. It has seen few large-scale immigration raids. Yet for two years it has been the site of sustained protests drawing hundreds of people, all aimed at a single low-slung building with a glass-and-metal facade: ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC.

The NCATC collects data from publicly available sources, including social media feeds, to help ICE officers across the eastern United States identify and arrest deportation targets. Its presence, along with other Department of Homeland Security offices clustered nearby, turned a quiet Vermont suburb into one of the more contested addresses in the country’s immigration enforcement debate.

Now state and federal prosecutors have filed charges against 18 people connected to protests at the facility. The timing, relative to a planned week of coordinated protest actions, has drawn direct scrutiny from the activists involved.

Two Waves of Charges, Weeks Apart

The first wave came in late September 2026, when Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark filed surprise misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters. The charges relate to a July 24 sit-in at the NCATC, during which roughly 30 people gathered at the facility starting at 7:30 a.m. with the stated goal of blocking ICE employees from entering at the start of the workday.

Vermont State Police arrested 13 of those protesters and transported them to the state police barracks in Williston. At least a dozen were charged with unlawful trespass after entering the privately owned building and refusing to leave when asked by the property owner. All 13 were released after processing. Those arrested ranged in age from 20 to 74.

The second wave arrived the following week. Federal prosecutors announced charges against five people for allegedly obstructing access to a federal facility on multiple occasions. Some of those five were already facing the state-level trespass charges filed by Clark. The five defendants facing federal charges range in age from 22 to 80.

What the Chittenden County local prosecutor had repeatedly declined to do, the state attorney general and federal prosecutors together accomplished in a matter of weeks.

A Pattern the Local Prosecutor Had Resisted

The legal trajectory in Williston had been notably different from what protesters faced in other parts of the country. The local Chittenden County prosecutor had repeatedly chosen not to pursue cases against people arrested at the NCATC. VTDigger reported that Clark’s office stepped in precisely because the local prosecutor declined to bring charges from the July sit-in.

That local restraint stood in contrast to what anti-ICE protesters experienced elsewhere. The Intercept documented undercover police operations against protesters in New Jersey and Minneapolis, as well as prison sentences handed down to protesters in Texas. Vermont had, until September, been an exception to that pattern.

The Question of Timing

Activists in Vermont were direct about what they saw in the sequence of events. The charges from Clark’s office came in late September. The federal charges followed days later. Both announcements arrived as organizers were preparing for a concentrated week of protest actions against the NCATC.

Julie Macuga, an anti-ICE organizer involved in the protests, described the read among activists plainly. “Our assumption has been that they did this so close to the week of action in order to try to intimidate people, in order to make people think twice about doing civil disobedience, for fear that they’re going to get charged,” Macuga told The Intercept.

Neither Clark’s office nor federal prosecutors publicly addressed the timing question. The Justice Department’s announcement described the charges as relating to people who “disrupted operations” at the NCATC on multiple occasions, without reference to any upcoming protest activity.

What the NCATC Does

The facility at the center of the protests is one of several DHS offices concentrated in and around Williston. Just down the road from the NCATC, ICE operates a national tip line out of a separate building. The NCATC itself is housed in Williston’s White Cap Business Park off Industrial Avenue.

Federal records describe the NCATC as drawing on publicly available data sources, including social media, to support arrest operations by ICE officers throughout the eastern United States. Protest organizers have repeatedly stated they want to draw public attention to that function specifically, arguing that a surveillance operation of national scope should not go unnoticed because of its suburban Vermont address.

Moki Fox, a Williston resident who joined the July protest, put the point simply: “I just find it reprehensible that this is in our town. It’s just wrong. If I don’t stand up, who will?”

The July Protest in Detail

The July 24 action was organized partly in response to the fatal shootings by ICE agents of people in Maine and Texas earlier that month, according to organizers. Participants gathered inside and outside the NCATC beginning at 7:30 a.m. Both state and Williston police officers carried some protesters out of an east-facing entrance around 10 a.m. Others walked out alongside officers.

Those who remained in the parking lot held banners and chanted “shame” at police and “you are not alone” at those being arrested. Some of those taken into custody were driven away in an unmarked black van. All 13 arrested were released after processing at the state police barracks.

Macuga noted that most of those arrested had come to the protest prepared to be detained. Planned arrests are a standard feature of civil disobedience. What was less anticipated, participants said, was the months-long delay before charges arrived, and the involvement of the attorney general’s office rather than the local prosecutor who had previously declined to act.

State, Then Federal

The two-track charging strategy, state misdemeanors followed by federal obstruction charges, adds a layer of legal complexity for the defendants. Some now face proceedings in both systems simultaneously. Federal charges for obstructing access to a federal facility carry penalties beyond what a state misdemeanor trespass would typically involve.

The Intercept has documented similar patterns of overlapping or escalating charges against anti-ICE protesters in other states, including Minneapolis and Texas. Whether Vermont prosecutors and federal authorities coordinated the timing of their respective announcements is not established in public records. What is documented is the sequence: two sets of charges, filed in rapid succession, weeks before a planned protest action that organizers had publicized in advance.

The question that remains open is whether the week of action the charges were meant to deter will proceed, and whether additional prosecutions will follow.

This article draws on reporting from The Intercept, VTDigger, and Vermont Public.

Want to go deeper? Ask NEX, the Decrypted Matrix research assistant, about the documents behind this story. It indexes every article here the day it is published and cites its sources.