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Shannon McDermott of Burlington, Vt., played a mock tour guide for ICE Tours VT, a group staging a mock tour of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related sites. The project uses guided tours and scripted elements to explore themes of immigration enforcement and public perception.Oliver Parini for The Boston Globe https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/19/metro/ice-tours-vermont-surveillance/
BURLINGTON, Vt. — They didn’t come for the fall foliage, or the skiing — not even for the freshly boiled maple syrup.
Instead of the natural wonders of the Green Mountain State, the two-dozen people who gathered for a bus tour Tuesday in this city’s tourist hot spot had come to see an unwelcome transplant to Vermont — ICE, and not the frozen kind.
“Good morning and welcome to the first-ever tour of a brand-new tour company: ICE Tours VT,” one of the hosts said through a microphone. “My name is Barb, and I’ll be your tour guide today.”
Her name was not Barb, and this was not a tour company of any vintage. Rather, it was an elaborate work of performance art designed to bring attention to one of Vermont’s least-known specialties: hosting facilities for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other branches of the Department of Homeland Security.
Despite its liberal reputation, the state has become home in recent decades to a large number of DHS facilities, including surveillance centers that fuel its immigration enforcement actions throughout the country.
For the next few hours, “Barb” — real name Shannon McDermott, 58, of Burlington — would lead a group of activists posing as tourists from one government facility to the next. She and her fellow actors would read from cue cards, cataloguing the harms they believe the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement apparatus is causing the nation.
They’d pose for photos outside ICE offices, at one point donning giant inflatable eyeballs to pantomime the spying they said was taking place inside.
This was an elaborate stunt. As the “tourists” prepared to board a pair of rented minibuses, they perused custom-made merchandise and professionally illustrated maps and brochures displayed on an info table in the middle of a pedestrian walkway. Everything, buses included, was emblazoned with the fake company’s fake logo: a masked man wearing an ICE hat next to an outline of Vermont. Each tourist adopted an assumed identity, with name tags and occasional bits of scripted dialogue.
Organizers had been building hype for the project for weeks, taking out an ad in a local newspaper that led readers to an ICE Tours VT website. A video crew was on hand to gather footage intended to go viral.
Behind it all was Blaine Paxton, 56, of Burlington. A supply chain management consultant, Paxton had recently helped convince officials in nearby Williston to issue a condemnation of ICE — even though the agency employs hundreds of people in town.
Activists in Vermont have been protesting the federal outposts for years, but Paxton said he was looking for a more creative way to raise awareness.
“The goal is for the public to take action against these facilities,” he said.
As it has in Minnesota, Maine, and other states, ICE has drawn a higher level of scrutiny in Vermont since an enforcement action last week led to a violent protest in neighboring South Burlington, replete with pepper spray and flashbang grenades. The incident culminated with ICE storming a home, assisted by state and local police, and detaining three undocumented people hiding inside — none of whom were apparently the target of the original enforcement action.
Coincidentally, one of those detained, Christian Humberto Jerez-Andrade, was due for a hearing Tuesday morning in federal court one block away from where the mock tourists assembled. That led to an unexpected interaction near the ICE Tours VT info table when a protester en route to Jerez-Andrade’s hearing stopped to chide the tourists for their choice of tactics.
“Instead of, like, performatively trying to get a clip on TV, maybe you should consider going right now to go support and help them,” the activist told the crowd before walking away in a huff.
“Thank you so much,” said McDermott, who promptly returned to character as Barb and to her script for the ICE tour.
The participants, bundled up for a blustery, late winter morning, crossed a street and crammed into the minibuses. As they zipped around the suburbs and business parks of Chittenden County, McDermott and fellow tour guide Sam — real name Quinn Rol, 36, of Burlington — shared the history of ICE’s outsize presence in Vermont.
Starting in the early 1990s, then-senator Patrick Leahy began steering funding to his home state for what was known at the time as the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. As he rose through the ranks of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the veteran Democrat brought more money, and more government facilities, to Vermont.
They now include ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which helps the agency share intelligence with local police around the country, and the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, which surveils social media and mines other data to track people ICE is seeking to deport. According to ICE Tours VT, Homeland Security operates at least eight sites in the area, making it one of the county’s largest employers.
Public knowledge of what goes on inside some of these outposts is limited. At one nondescript office park in South Burlington, the tour guides hopped out of the buses to describe what little they knew about what they referred to as “the mystery site.”
“This building is unmarked and there are no references to it on the DHS website,” McDermott said, feigning ignorance and surprise. “Employees here say they can’t tell anyone what the operation is that’s going on here. Security is so strict, lunch deliveries are not even allowed.”
McDermott gasped, leaning into her dopey persona as Barb the tour guide.
“How am I going to get my acai bowl?” she asked.
As Rol walked into the vestibule to investigate further, security officers disappeared and workers on the building’s first floor drew their blinds.
“It looks like there’s no one who wants to talk to us,” he reported upon reemerging.
Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to requests for comment about the bus tour or the the South Burlington site.
Between stops, the guides held an ICE trivia quiz, awarding a toy Blackhawk helicopter and a pair of handcuffs to the winners, and engaged in scripted banter. After telling her passengers to refrain from chewing gum or eating candy on the bus, McDermott began munching conspicuously on something she had slipped into her mouth.
“I’m sorry. Did you think those rules are for everyone?” she said. “Some rules are for you, and some rules are for me. ICE could teach you that rules aren’t for everyone.”
At the Law Enforcement Support Center in Williston, Paxton helped unfurl a banner featuring the phone number for a national ICE tip line. Calls are answered at the center and, last fall, it sought to hire 100 new customer service representatives.
McDermott encouraged the traveling crew to call the tip line and report “the worst of the worst” criminals. One suggested dropping a dime on White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
Down the road, at the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, also in Williston, McDermott noted the facility was expanding its use of artificial intelligence for surveillance. Organizers handed the passengers giant inflatable eyeballs and asked them to pose for a group photo in front of the center’s tinted windows.
“Everybody face the parking lot and just put those eyes right in front of your face, if you would,” she said. “Yeah, make it look like you’re looking around — looking around with your big eyeballs, spying on the world.”
“Everybody say, ‘Visine,’ ” someone suggested.
“Visine!” the crowd shouted in unison, eyeballs aloft.
Near the end of the tour, Maryann Bock, 73, of Burlington, said she hoped ICE Tours VT would “bring the facts to the forefront” to those unaware of the agency’s sprawling activities, in Vermont and beyond.
“The larger hope is that this kind of information gets spread throughout the country,” she said. “And events like this get repeated throughout the country to make people more aware of facts — not just ‘ICE out’ signs.”
As for whether ICE Tours VT would continue operating after its debut, Paxton said more than 100 people had already signed up on its website.
“We’ve been surprised by the level of potential demand for this kind of tour,” he said.
Paul Heintz can be reached at paul.heintz@globe.com. Follow him on X @paulheintz.
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