Tabitha Sookdeo’s phone rang in the middle of her climate change solutions class. It was John Lugo, the lead organizer of Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), letting her know that federal immigration authorities had seized an undocumented Wilbur Cross High School student named Esdrás Zabaleta-Ra mirez. “Something inside of me was tugging,” Sookdeo said as she thought back to that late July phone call. “I said, Please dear God, I hope this is not one of our members.” She would soon find out that Zabaleta-Ramirez, an 18-year-old from Guatemala, was indeed a member of Connecticut Students for a Dream (C4D), the statewide youth immigrant advocacy organization that Sookdeo leads. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained him on July 21 as part of a workplace raid of a Southington car wash. Lugo was calling to ask for help putting together a “red folder,” a compilation of every possible document that could help an attorney on the Cross student’s behalf.  Sookdeo, 32 — who herself was once undocumented — agreed to help. She would spend most waking hours for the following months leading protests in Zabaleta-Ramirez’s name, raising funds for his legal defense, compiling documents for court, coordinating political advocacy that reached the halls of Congress, and eventually posting his $1,500 bond. Sookdeo and C4D’s advocacy on behalf of Zabaleta-Ramirez made a difference, according to his lawyer, Tina Colón Williams. Colón Williams successfully made the case to a judge in late August that Zabaleta-Ramirez had strong ties to the New Haven community, and Zabaleta-Ramirez was finally able to come home. The advocates had managed to stop the Trump administration from fast-tracking the deportation of a high schooler known to his teachers as a kind, quiet, eager-to-learn kid. Colón Williams observed that Sookdeo and her team at C4D held “a tiny fraction of that institutional power and government backing” compared to ICE. But in her view, they spearheaded a movement characterized by “efficiency and swiftness and force that I think rivals — and in this particular case, can exceed — what the government can do.” All the while, Sookdeo continued running C4D’s day-to-day operations. She continued pursuing a joint degree in law and environmental management through the University of Vermont and Yale. And she continued to serve as the secretary of the Dwight Community Management Team, even though a fire had displaced her from her home in the neighborhood, sending her to live instead on Foxon Boulevard. When it was time to figure out the logistics of who would be driving up to pick up Zabaleta-Ramirez from ICE detention, Sookdeo knew that it had to be her. “How could I not?” she reflected. She had recently become a naturalized citizen after marriage, gaining a level of protection that many of the advocates working on Zabaleta-Ramirez’ behalf lacked. “You have to be a U.S. citizen to go up in there, into a detention facility,” she said. Her citizenship is a “responsibility that I feel to be quite heavy,” she said. “If one of my siblings were in this situation, I would want someone to step up in this way for them.” Which is how Sookdeo found herself in an eerily ordinary Massachusetts parking lot on the first Tuesday of September. It was humid out, around 11 a.m., when Sookdeo first caught sight of Zabaleta-Ramirez. She thought again of her siblings. “I see my family in all of our [C4D] members,” she said. She didn’t need to think about how to act, or what to say. “I felt fiercely protective at that moment,” she recalled of Zabaleta-Ramirez, who had spent the past nearly month and a half in ICE detention.  Sookdeo wrapped her arm around the 18-year-old’s shoulder and shepherded him to the car. For many New Haveners, 2025 was a year marked by renewed fears of ICE crackdowns. By unmarked cars and missing moms and boyfriends in handcuffs. Federal funding in limbo and empty classroom chairs. Men in masks at the courthouse and regular customers nowhere to be found.  It was also a year marked by resistance against those crackdowns. By skeletal sculptures for Día de Muertos and multiple volunteer hotlines. By protests and billboards, lawsuits and block party fundraisers, red cards tucked into city bus windows and the open doors of churches.  For Sookdeo, it was a year indelibly marked by her search for an answer to the question: When a teenager is trapped in an ICE detention center, slated for an expedited deportation, how do you get him home?  “I See My Family In All Our Members” Tabitha Sookdeo (center) speaks about Esdrás Zabaleta-Ramirez to a rally of nearly a thousand people, alongside Scott Marks and Ambar Santiago-Rojas. Credit: Laura Glesby photo Sookdeo was born in Guyana, though she moved with her parents to the island of Sint Maarten when she was an infant. In an interview with National Immigration Forum organizer Jim Tooley, she the island was a way out of the poverty her family endured in Guyana — a place where “my family could have enough food to eat.” Sookdeo became the eldest sister of four. The island was her home for 16 years, until her father attempted to secure permanent residency. As Sookdeo told Tooley, an immigration official requested a bribe of thousands of dollars in order to grant the residency change — and threatened to deport Sookdeo back to Guyana as leverage.  In Sint Maarten, Sookdeo’s father worked as a security guard and her mom worked as a cleaner in hotels. They couldn’t pay the bribe. And so instead, knowing that Sookdeo’s grandmother was an American citizen, they moved to Jacksonville, Florida, as undocumented immigrants. As an adult, Sookdeo found purpose in her career advocating for the rights of immigrants and refugees. After moving to New Haven, she joined the staff of IRIS (Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services), eventually becoming the organization’s director of community engagement.  There, she built out a “Tree Ambassador” program for 50 refugee students in collaboration with the Urban Resources Initiative.  She moved on to become the executive director of C4D in September 2024, as the organization entered its 14th year of existence. By then, C4D had a home base in Bridgeport as well as several hubs around the state, including a New Haven office operating out of the New Haven Pride Center. The organization become a community organizing engine focused specifically on immigrant youth, emerging as a leader in the push for undocumented immigrants’ access to expanded state healthcare options and higher education opportunities.  When Sookdeo first took on the role, she had expected to focus on more typical nonprofit management goals: “operations, streamlining processes, wanting to build out our programs.”  She also had a vision of integrating climate advocacy with the organization’s existing immigration policy work, connecting mass displacement with a rise in severe environmental conditions associated with climate change. Then in November 2024, about two months into Sookdeo’s tenure at C4D, Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president. 2025 Was “Like Whiplash” Tabitha Sookdeo at a press conference on Zabaleta-Ramirez’s return home. Credit: Dereen Shirnekhi Photo After the election, a renewed sense of fear took hold of many undocumented immigrants in Connecticut. “I had a feeling deep down inside of me that things were going to be bad,” Sookdeo said. “But I didn’t realize how quickly things would get bad. It was like whiplash, having to adapt to all the changes that were happening.” As Trump’s second term began, C4D expanded beyond its community organizing roots, taking on new and unexpected roles in the local immigrant advocacy network. Sookdeo found herself writing memos to the governor and helping members through family emergencies.  Upon hearing about a nearby ICE detention, grassroots rapid response groups would often reach out to C4D, and the organization would become a metaphorical emergency room. “We do a quick intake” and “triage,” determining what resources would be needed when, Sookdeo said. C4D might connect the detainee’s family to legal assistance, make sure their fridge is full of groceries, find someone to pick up the kids after school. “The amount of work is just tremendous,” Sookdeo said. “We can’t move as fast as the federal government right now, to respond to [$75] billion being applied to federal immigration enforcement…. It’s difficult, because the need is so great and the coordination is tremendous.” Sookdeo quickly became a unifying force in a network of local activist groups, ranging from large non-profits to scrappy grassroots collectives.  “She is the person who brings people together,” said ULA’s John Lugo, who noted that “without her, it can be hard” to bridge differences between the various organizations. “Working with Tabitha is a pleasure. She’s a strong leader,” Lugo said. “She speaks several languages. When you start talking to her, you get more impressed every day.” Under Sookdeo’s leadership, C4D expanded its scope from focusing strictly on grassroots, youth-centered organizing to filling in all sorts of gaps within the network of local resources for immigrants.  It soon became clear, for instance, that the number of immigration attorneys in the state was not sufficient to address the growing need for legal representation, according to Sookdeo. “We asked everyone if there were any organizations who would be willing to do the work that needed to be done to expand legal resources in the state,” Sookdeo recalled. “Folks were like, ‘Can you guys do it?’” C4D is not a legal organization, Sookdeo emphasized. “It’s not at all what we do.” But someone needed to take on the initiative. “It was an illuminating moment for me,” Sookdeo recalled. “People are burnt out, they’re tired. What this moment calls for is innovation and taking a step back and really looking for the resources that we have.”  In the last couple of months, C4D has convened legal groups and students to brainstorm solutions for the attorney shortage and put together a forthcoming “training hub” for aspiring immigration lawyers.  The organization has also helped organize the rollout of the “Red Folder Project,” working with undocumented immigrants and their family members to proactively compile everything that could possibly be useful for making a legal case should ICE unexpectedly detain them.  “She Made Sure We Were All Safe” C4D’s Yenimar Cortes and Tabitha Sookdeo lead a protest for Zabaleta-Ramirez outside Wilbur Cross. Credit: Maya McFadden Photo All the while, C4D continued its longtime work with high schoolers and young adults, training them in leadership and political advocacy skills while working toward specific legislative goals on the state level.  In 2025, C4D sought to add legal teeth to the TRUST Act, which limits the ability of police to collaborate with ICE — a measure that passed in the state legislature. C4D also advocated for an expansion of healthcare for undocumented youth via HUSKY up to the age of 26, which did not make it through this year. Zabaleta-Ramirez was one of the teens who helped advocate for the HUSKY expansion. He submitted a letter to state legislators, writing, “This matters to me since I am an immigrant and I am one of the many people who do not have health insurance. We all deserve to live with well-being and without unnecessary suffering, and access to medical care is crucial for this.”  Ambar Santiago-Rojas was another one of the HUSKY expansion advocates. Over the course of 2025, she and a group of other teens and young adults joined a new coalition called New Haven Immigrants and formed their social media team. The coalition set up a hotline, 854-666-4472, for people to call in ICE sightings. Once the sightings were verified, Santiago-Rojas and the rest of the social media team would spread the word. Santiago-Rojas she started attending C4D meetings at the New Haven Pride Center in the spring, as she finished up her senior year of high school. For three Thursdays a month, according to Santiago-Rojas, the C4D members gathered to learn about the Husky 4 Immigrants campaign. They strategized on how to speak to state legislators in both English and Spanish, and they took turns role-playing those conversations, practicing interactions with a hypothetical “nice legislator” and “mean legislator.” Eventually, in mid-April, C4D held a “day of action,” bringing youth advocates from across the state up to the Capitol building in Hartford. Inside the Capitol, C4D members were tasked with approaching legislators as they walked by.  “It was very lovely and inspiring to go to the Capitol with all the members,” Santiago-Rojas said. She noticed that even the members who were typically shy about speaking in English “still were confident to walk up” and start conversations with the legislators. “I think it’s very powerful,” she said, “when you realize that the youth is realizing what’s going on.” Some legislators whom C4D encountered “just didn’t listen to us,” Santiago-Rojas said. “Some were like, ‘Ok, thank you!’ Some of them wouldn’t even stop.” But most “were on our side,” she said. “We were really excited and happy.”  Santiago-Rojas’ group boarded a yellow school bus back to Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, buzzing with a sense of pride and accomplishment. During the ride home, a message began to circulate in local immigrant activism group chats that ICE had been spotted near Wilbur Cross. C4D’s New Haven organizer, Yenimar Cortes, broke the news to the students. “It was such a weird experience,” recalled Santiago-Rojas. “A lot of the students are at risk,” and the feeling of excitement that had filled the school bus turned into anxiety. According to Santiago-Rojas, Sookdeo wasn’t supposed to be joining the students that day. Upon hearing about the ICE sighting, however, Sookdeo made sure to be there when the bus pulled in. C4D had coordinated with volunteers at the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, who arrived with water for the students and remained at Wilbur Cross until every last student was accounted for. For students whose family members didn’t feel comfortable driving near a spot where ICE agents had recently been sighted, the volunteers offered them rides home. When the bus arrived, Sookdeo boarded and asked the students what they needed. “She showed up. She came. She made sure we were all safe,” Santiago-Rojas recalled. “She gave everyone a hug. She waited until everyone was safe and got a ride home to leave… She spoke to us in both English and Spanish.”  Now a high school graduate, Santiago-Rojas is an employee of C4D, bolstering the organization’s social media presence. She loves working there. “I’ve had other jobs,” she noted, and C4D’s environment is uniquely “very friendly and heartwarming. Everyone cares for each other.”  “I look up to Tabitha a lot,” Santiago-Rojas said. “She’s a really young person. … She has a lot on her plate. But she still manages to be a heartwarming person and a very kind and understanding person.” As an employee, Santiago-Rojas can now see everyone’s Google Calendar availability. “If I were to type in Tabitha’s schedule, it’s packed all day.” Right now, Sookdeo confirmed, most of her days are packed with back-to-back meetings — or sometimes, two at the same time — from 8:30 in the morning until 9 at night.  These days, Sookdeo’s alarm is set to go off at 6:30 a.m. “I usually snooze it, unless my phone starts to ring at that time,” Sookdeo said. “Which it does.”  Some days, one of her meetings will get interrupted by a flurry of texts and calls informing her that ICE had come. “One Of Our Members” ULA’s Lugo: “We need to stop separating these families.” Credit: Nathaniel Rosenberg File Photo Sookdeo received the call about Zabaleta-Ramirez from Lugo in the middle of July. “We were swamped with other cases,” Lugo said. He knew that Sookdeo wouldn’t hesitate to help. “She started calling everyone all around the city,” he remembered. Sookdeo texted her colleagues, who found out that Zabaleta-Ramirez had indeed been a C4D member. But they didn’t have much information about him, as C4D doesn’t keep detailed records about members. “We start scrambling to try to find anything, because we’re trying to help find out where he is,” Sookdeo remembered. “We don’t have his A number,” the number that could help them locate Zabaleta-Ramirez through ICE’s tracking system. “We don’t have anything.” As ULA communicated with Zabaleta-Ramirez’s family, the two organizations assembled as much information as they could.  When advocates finally located the high school junior, they learned that ICE was keeping him in a detention center in Plymouth, Massachusetts. C4D’s lead New Haven organizer spoke with him over the phone. Zabaleta-Ramirez gave his permission for the advocates to launch a public campaign on his behalf to try and bring him home. So the organizers got to work. Sookdeo and her C4D colleagues worked with other local advocates to spread the word about Zabaleta-Ramirez via news outlets and social media. They launched a fundraiser to help pay for legal costs. They started planning press conferences and rallies.  They reached out to school leaders and politicians, ultimately receiving support from the school district, New Haven Federation of Teachers, the mayor, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and several alders and state senators.  And they connected Zabaleta-Ramirez to Colón Williams, a local immigration lawyer with Esperanza Law Firm who became his attorney of record, while enlisting support from Yale’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic and legal aid. C4D “worked tirelessly,” said Colón Williams. “Tabitha is someone who just works so hard and fights for people. It was just immediate: What do you need? Letters? Done! Here it is, here’s a folder full of letters from all over the city and state.”  Within about a day, C4D had raised over $10,000 to help pay for legal costs and family needs. “There’s a ferocity to their organizing that is compelling,” Colón Williams added of C4D. “There’s a clear sense that they take seriously the impact and the weight of what people are going through. It’s a tireless devotion to the cause that is intense.” “Something Touched A Nerve” Santiago-Rojas led a group of 11 students in a visual protest of Zabaleta-Ramirez’ detention. Credit: Maya McFadden file photo Within nine days of Zabaleta-Ramirez’ detention, Sookdeo found herself speaking about the high schooler’s story to nearly one thousand attendees at a New Haven Rising rally in the sweltering heat.  She led the massive crowd, which filled Scantlebury Park, in a collective chant: “ICE out of Connecticut! ICE out of New Haven!” The next day, Sookdeo, Colón Williams, the New Haven Federation of Teachers, and a host of other youth advocates convened a rally outside of Wilbur Cross, specifically devoted to bringing Zabaleta-Ramirez home.  In the middle of that hot July afternoon, 150 people gathered to support the 18-year-old. “The amount of support that I saw when I was representing Esdrás was pretty remarkable,” Colón Williams recalled. “I could tell from the beginning of that case: something touched a nerve with a lot of people… It woke up a kind of defensiveness. In a good way.” To Sookdeo, one of the most memorable parts of that protest was the spirit of mutual care among the attendees. “Somebody’s blowing bubbles, passing out waters,” she recalled. Someone passed around a collection box. “Then you have older students standing with the younger students, making sure they’re OK… Everybody was pitching in.” Toward the end of the protest, 11 high school students prompted a three-minute moment of silence.  Wordlessly, they emerged in front of the crowd chained together, waist to waist.They had each zip-tied their hands together and painted their palms red. They had left blood-red handprints on posters that read “Hands Off Our Immigrant Students.” Santiago-Rojas had come up with the idea for that protest. “They had asked me to speak at the press conference, but I wanted to do something more symbolic.” She drew inspiration from protests of the conditions in the El Salvador prison that ICE was using to hold migrants captive. Having grown up in a family of activists, Santiago-Rojas said, she viewed the protest as an “If we don’t fight, then who will? kind of situation.”  That same morning, Colón Williams spoke with Zabaleta-Ramirez for the first time. She learned that ICE had flown him to Alexandria Staging Facility, a massive immigrant detention center connected to an airport in Louisiana. An ICE representative told her that the agency planned to send him on a flight to Guatemala the next day, bypassing a hearing through an “expedited removal.” “He was scheduled to be gone the next morning, from Louisiana to Guatemala,” said Colón Williams.  Had she and the many advocates fighting for Zabaleta-Ramirez’s return intervened a day later, he would have been deported. But Colón Williams was able to successfully challenge the expedited removal. By Aug. 14, ICE had sent Zabaleta-Ramirez back to the Massachusetts detention center. And in a virtual hearing on Aug. 28, a judge granted the high schooler bond despite the government’s objections. Andrew Farrell, who represented the Department of Homeland Security in the online proceedings, argued before Judge Christine Olson that Zabaleta-Ramirez was a flight risk, that he hadn’t been in the United States long enough to form meaningful ties to the community. Thanks to the work of the activists who had been fighting for Zabaleta-Ramirez, Colón Williams had ample evidence to the contrary. She pointed to the heap of letters that advocates had compiled, authored by everyone from members of Congress to Zabaleta-Ramirez’s teachers and classmates, and the hearing’s attendees, which included Mayor Justin Elicker, East Rock/Fair Haven Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, and local immigrant rights activist Fatima Rojas.  “The amount of community support — I do believe it made a difference,” said Colón Williams. “There’s a sense of accountability for the government as well. There’s all these people watching.” A Red Bull For The Road Tina Colón Williams and Sookdeo speak at a press conference about Zabaleta-Ramirez’ release. Credit: Dereen Shirnekhi Photo The day that the judge granted Zabaleta-Ramirez bond, Sookdeo pored through the websites of federal agencies, trying to figure out the logistics of how she could get him home to New Haven. While funds for the $1,500 bond had been raised, many lawyers whom Sookdeo consulted weren’t sure how to actually post that bond, given new systems under the Trump administration. “It’s like the wild, wild west,” Sookdeo described. “I got on the website and started to read and hoped for the best.” She found out that the bond would need to be posted in cash. That an individual person — not an organization — would need to sign the agreement ensuring that Zabaleta-Ramirez would appear in court as required. “You have to put your social security number, your address,” Sookdeo said. “You’re creating a contract with the federal government. We can’t ask an organization to do that. It has to be an individual.” She thought to herself, “Obviously, I’m gonna do it.” And so she found herself on a day-long trip to and from Massachusetts with another community organizer in the driver’s seat, ready to finally bring Zabaleta-Ramirez back home. After a logistical whirlwind that involved driving to several unpredictable locations in various parts of the state, Sookdeo met Zabaleta-Ramirez and hurried him into the car. The whole drive home, Zabaleta-Ramirez borrowed a phone to call a familiar voice: Cortes, the New Haven organizer at C4D, who’d been in touch with him all this time as the city rallied for his return. When the teenager was finally in the vehicle, Sookdeo and the other organizer asked him what they could get him to eat or drink.  He asked for a Red Bull. “Anyone who knows me knows that I live off of Red Bulls,” Sookdeo said with a laugh. “And I had to oblige… Yeah man, I will definitely buy you a Red Bull. I got you.” Previous New Haveners of the Year: 2024: Ife-Michelle Gardin 2023: Gaylord Salters 2022: Honda Smith 2021: Giovanni Zinn 2020: Maritza Bond 2019: Anthony Duff 2018: Kim Harris Amy Marx 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio 2016: Corey Menafee 2015: Jim Turcio 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski 2011: Stacy Spell 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr. 2009: Rafael Ramos 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur The post New Havener Of The Year appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less