Members of the union UNITE HERE Local 5 met on Tuesday with a coalition that was formed in response to the stories of ICE raids taking place across the country.
Gaye Chan is a volunteer and one of the driving forces behind the Oʻahu Rapid Response Coalition. She joined HPR to share their mission to monitor ICE officers on Oʻahu and to train the public to know and exercise their rights.
Interview Highlights
On ORRC’s membership
GAYE CHAN: Our members are very, very diverse. In terms of age, they are from their 20s to their 80s. Some people have never gotten involved with political activities before, maybe going to one protest or something like that. We have some members who've been organizers or activists for a longer period of time.
And what brings us together is really our shared concern of what's happening around us. We worry about the cruelty and lawlessness that's occurring through ICE raids, and speaking for myself and what I hear from my fellow members, we are the type of people that can't stand it when our neighbors are just being unfairly treated, and we can't just sit at home and doomscroll, and we want to do something. And so that's really what brings us together.
On Hawaiʻi’s immigrant population
CHAN: I'm an immigrant myself, and I think Hawaiʻi, (has a) very high proportion of immigrants or even fourth, fifth-generation immigrants. So there's an embedded history in our awareness. … So while we’re talking about protecting immigrants, I think that the way that they're going about enforcing the arrests and the detainments, it really involves all of us. The line between who they call immigrants or undocumented people and the rest of us is very thin. Many of the people that they have arrested are citizens or green card holders or other kinds of legal status. So it doesn't seem to really concern them very much. So we're all just going to become part of this intensive violent dragnet.
On training the public and their members
CHAN: We go through different things. We have a section that goes over what is the most recent news and statistics about ICE raids and arrests. We go through a section about how to even identify ICE, because they're very easy to misidentify. We go through people's constitutional and civil rights, what we can do and what we can't do, and then we go through a number of role-playing scenarios so that we actually apply what we learn. …
We will have fellow members who act as ICE agents, and kind of perform what we see on videos that constantly pop up in our social media feeds, and then the members practice how to photograph, how to respond. We, as an organization, do not impede and we do not interfere. Our purpose is to be there to bear witness and to record in case there's any kind of abuse.
On news of ICE officers being armed with shock gloves
CHAN: We strongly oppose the deployment of this new dangerous technology of the shock gloves. It's really a reckless and dangerous waste of tax dollars. There's no demonstrated reason that they even need it. They're already equipped with comprehensive protective gear and lethal force weaponry. They have handguns, tasers, pepper sprays, so many forms of restraint, and all of it is more than adequate for them to do their duties. You know, one thing that's different about the gloves from other equipment is that unlike tasers, these gloves leave no traces when they're being used. So their interest aligns with ICE's history of avoiding accountability.
The Oʻahu Rapid Response Coalition has a hotline number that members of the public can call if they see and wish to report ICE raids on Oʻahu.
The number is 808-824-4707. More information about the ORRC can be found on their website.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 1, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
