Northeast Kingdom Women Fight to Free a Detained Asylum Seeker

For the past few years, Daisy McCoy has opened up her spare bedroom in Lyndon to asylum seekers from all over the world.

They’ve come from Togo, Honduras, Uganda, Cuba and Yemen to the Northeast Kingdom town where McCoy — a 74-year-old retired math professor — and a team of volunteers have eagerly received them.

Led by a group of mostly retired women in and around St. Johnsbury, the Northeast Kingdom Asylum Seekers’ Assistance Network was formed in 2020 to sponsor and support asylum seekers as they forge new lives in the U.S. The group has helped about 15 people who have fled violence or oppression in their home countries by providing housing and grocery stipends, rides around town, and a warm welcome in a region that does not usually attract many immigrants.

“We had no clue that he would be detained or that that was a possibility.”

Daisy McCoy

But as immigration enforcement has ramped up under the Trump administration, the group has found itself in difficult new territory. During a routine check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in St. Albans in May, McCoy’s latest guest, an asylum seeker from West Africa named Nafiou Lamidi, was arrested without warning. He was sent to a federal prison in New Hampshire and has been confined there ever since.

“We had no clue that he would be detained or that that was a possibility,” McCoy said. “Nafiou is the fourth asylum seeker that’s stayed with me. He’s the first one that has had any problem with ICE.”

For the volunteers, Lamidi’s arrest was an abrupt introduction to a complicated and perilous new immigration-enforcement landscape. Until recently, the volunteers, who are not formally trained in law, focused on registering newcomers for English classes, outfitting them for winter conditions, and organizing picnics and birthday parties. Now, they spend their days parsing the finer points of immigration law with attorneys, organizing rallies and raising money to pay the mounting legal fees to free Lamidi from prison.

“The whole tenor of the group has really changed,” said Nancy Toney, 78, a member of the network’s board. A retired foreign-languages teacher, Toney helped found the group after she got involved writing letters to immigrants held in detention centers near the U.S.-Mexico border. Some of the first asylum seekers the group sponsored to bring to Vermont were people with whom Toney had corresponded.

But Lamidi is the first asylum seeker to be detained while under their care. About once a week, Toney, McCoy and other volunteers drive an hour and a half to the Federal Correctional Institution in Berlin, N.H., where Lamidi is detained. They have grown familiar with the rituals of prison visits: surrendering their IDs to security guards, passing through metal detectors and shuffling through a series of locked chambers to a visitation room, where Lamidi meets them.

“I’m afraid to be deported to my country. I am not a criminal; I’m a gentle person.”

Nafiou Lamidi

In a call from prison, Lamidi told Seven Days he fled his home country, Benin, due to threats against him and his family that he did not elaborate on.

“I came here to ask for protection because I have a credible fear in my country,” Lamidi said in halting English. “I’m afraid to be deported to my country. I am not a criminal; I’m a gentle person.”

The Northeast Kingdom — a conservative-leaning region with few big population centers — might seem an unlikely destination for an asylum seeker from West Africa.

But Lamidi, 36, had heard of Vermont well before he arrived in January.

Years earlier, the same support network had helped a childhood friend of his who also sought asylum, and Lamidi hoped he would find support and a familiar face if he could make it to the Green Mountain State. Last August, he left his wife and three children behind, eventually crossing into the U.S. from Mexico in November.

Border patrol agents intercepted and detained him in Arizona, records show. Lamidi requested asylum, claiming a fear of persecution in Benin. He was released in January on condition that he report to scheduled check-ins with immigration officials.

Lamidi’s release meant he was legally permitted to stay in the country while his asylum case wound through the immigration court system, a process that can take years. Lamidi flew to Vermont, where he moved in with McCoy and checked in with ICE in February without issue. He completed his formal application for asylum in April with help from Seth Lipschutz, a retired public defender in Montpelier who works asylum cases pro bono.

In recent years, presidential administrations from both parties implemented restrictions on asylum seekers in an attempt to discourage unauthorized border crossings. But the right to asylum is a “bedrock foundation of human rights law,” Lipschutz said, and these restrictions have often run up against legal challenges in the courts.

“This administration is trying to narrow that as much as possible,” Lipschutz said.

The Trump administration has tested the limits of presidential power by vastly expanding the categories of immigrants who can be detained and deported without bond hearings or other forms of due process that had been previously observed.

Months into his time in Vermont, Lamidi was ensnared in that web. After his arrest, an immigration judge ruled that Lamidi had no right to a bond hearing, citing a May 15 directive from the federal Board of Immigration Appeals. He would have to remain in detention until his asylum case could be heard. Now that he was behind bars, the process would be expedited; a hearing is scheduled for mid-September.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

The network, part of a grouping of eight organizations in Vermont and New Hampshire that help asylum seekers, organized a rally to bring attention to Lamidi’s case and call for his release. Lamidi’s attorney, Kristen Connors, appealed to the ACLU of New Hampshire, which earlier this month filed a habeas petition on Lamidi’s behalf in federal court, challenging the immigration judge’s earlier decision denying him a bond hearing.

Lamidi’s arrest has thrust the network’s members into one of the nation’s most explosive issues. But as a registered nonprofit in a region that tilted more pro-Trump in last year’s election than much of the rest of the state, the group is careful to avoid taking an overtly political stance that might invite unwanted attention.

“We can’t afford to be political,” said Libby Hillhouse, the network’s president. But the group still maintains that Lamidi is being wrongly detained.

Hillhouse said the network previously enjoyed friendly relationships with law enforcement, to the point that border patrol agents would sometimes call on members to seek help for asylum seekers who had been intercepted near the border and needed food, shelter and transportation to their final destination.

“With the tightening that’s coming from this administration, it’s just making everything more urgent and more stressful,” Hillhouse said on a recent morning at her home in Danville. “There’s just this kind of paranoia.”

Hillhouse, 78, worked as a preschool special ed teacher and once briefly taught English in Israel and the West Bank. Before joining the network, she volunteered at the Community Restorative Justice Center, working with people coming out of prison in St. Johnsbury. The entryway to her home is decorated with handmade signs that welcome immigrants in Spanish and Luganda, a language spoken in Uganda.

Since Lamidi’s arrest, Hillhouse and her fellow volunteers have shifted tactics by helping asylum seekers request ICE check-ins online, rather than in person, in hopes of reducing the risk of detention.

Recent reported sightings of ICE vehicles in St. Johnsbury have heightened their fears. The group’s members, who had been in the habit of organizing regular social get-togethers for the 10 asylum seekers they support, including families with children, say they feel less safe gathering in public.

Such worries recently prompted members to hold an event at someone’s house “on a dirt road,” said Karyn Jilk, a volunteer. “So it’s just us and nobody has to worry about anything.”

Even amid the uncertainties, the group has celebrated some recent wins. A few months ago, one of the people they had sponsored the longest, a man from Uganda, faced his final asylum hearing. He attended the online appointment from his apartment in St. Johnsbury. Volunteers waited outside.

“He came down the stairs at the end of his hearing, and he opened the door and had a big smile, and we knew — he had won his case,” Hillhouse said. “So he is now an asylee.”

Another asylum seeker, from Yemen, whom Seven Days agreed not to name, said he came to Vermont in November after hearing from a friend about the network. The man had been living in the U.S. but struggled to find trustworthy legal help for his asylum case and needed support while awaiting a work permit. The network has rendered aid beyond the basic necessities, he said.

“They gave me a sense of family that I lost when I came here,” the asylum seeker said. “I have a mother back home. Now I have, like, six mothers.”

For now, the group’s immediate focus is Lamidi. An oral argument on the ACLU’s habeas petition is scheduled for September 11, separate from his scheduled asylum hearing. The volunteers continue to visit Lamidi in prison and talk by phone when he gets the chance to call.

His room in McCoy’s home is just how he left it on the morning he was suddenly detained. The bed is neatly made. A prayer rug McCoy gave him is rolled up and tucked away. And in the closet hang Lamidi’s winter clothes, essentials of his nascent Vermont life.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Asylum Angst | Volunteers helping asylum seekers in the Northeast Kingdom face a perilous new immigration landscape”

 

This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.

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