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Danbury Unites for Immigrants (DUFI) co-founder Juan Fonseca Tapia stood in front of a crowd on Saturday to deliver a racial sermon, a fundraising pitch, and a history lesson that would not survive the most basic scrutiny. He said ICE was inflicting “fear and terror” and that officers were among those who sided with “Nazis that are trying to terrorize.” He also told the white people in the plaza to shut up at one point.
“Especially, I’m talking to you all white people,” he said. “Right now is not the moment for you to engage in conversations with us and tell us that we’re all immigrants. Please do not tell us that.”
The whole project depends on erasing the distinction between legal and illegal. Fonseca Tapia will not allow that distinction. Without that distinction, ICE is enforcing the law—they are not "Nazis" running a race war.
He claimed agents “saw four brown people… four brown men going into a car to go to work, and they literally got out of their cars and run towards them. They will never do that to you… They will never do that to your white kids, to your white daughter.”
Treating every enforcement stop as a racial hunt is how you turn a simple removal order into propaganda about “ethnic cleansing” — a phrase he used at a 2025 courthouse rally with Sen. Blumenthal standing beside him.
Then came a history lesson.
“The people that came… from Europe… invaded this continent. Whether you like it or not, that is the reality. They committed a genocide… Black people didn’t immigrate here. They were kidnapped, stolen, and put in chains and brought here… We didn’t cross any f*cking border. The border crossed us!”
Start with the slave trade, because that line is designed to shut down argument. Africans were kidnapped. They were also sold — by African kingdoms and traders who captured rivals and sold them to European and American buyers. Both facts are true. “Stolen” as the only verb is not compassion for Black Americans. It is a talking point that deletes African sellers so the only villain left on stage is “white people.”
“The border crossed us” relies on the same trick. Yes, the boundary changed in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. But that does not confer a hereditary right to ignore federal immigration law in Connecticut in 2026.
Advocate counts of “over 50 families this week” getting "abducted" and statewide tallies have not been confirmed by DHS. Suffice it to say, none of that is Auschwitz. Calling it Nazism is how you make a federal immigration arrest sound like a war crime so the crowd will open its wallet. And he was explicit about the wallet.
“I’m gonna be honest with you. We need your money,” Fonseca Tapia said.
He even asked the governor to kill Flock cameras (he alleges ICE is using them “to kidnap our people”) and to “create a fund” from Connecticut’s alleged “three billion dollar surplus.”
That is the operation Gov. Ned Lamont’s office treated as a community partner on Aug. 26, when Fonseca Tapia shared the Kennedy Park stage with Lamont during a press conference.
The governor’s office followed the presser by promoting a “Know Your Rights” toolkit for residents “regardless of their legal status” and then steered people to local rapid response teams, naming DUFI as the Danbury contact. Danbury Mayor Alves has been telling residents to join DUFI and pointing them to the donation link, too.
“Get angry, get angry… I have not slept, and my friend is like, how do you function? I’m like, anger, yeah, that’s my fuel,” said Fonseca Tapia.
He said it himself. Not compassion. Anger.
Public records searches do not show DUFI as a registered 501(c) charity or a PAC. No public EIN or Form 990 turned up under that name. It shows up as a grassroots collective on Action Network and Grassroots Fund — founded around the 2024 election.
Wednesday, September 2, is the next act: “Un Día Sin Inmigrantes” — no work, no school, close the businesses, buy nothing, then a 5 p.m. march at Library Plaza on Main Street. The flyer does not distinguish legal from illegal. That omission is the point. If the strike treated lawful residents as distinct from people ICE can detain, the moral theater would shrink to its actual size.
Fonseca Tapia closed on Saturday by telling the crowd not to engage “a person that is full of hate,” because history and “their grandchildren” would be ashamed, and the textbooks would record “the Nazis.”
By his own account, his fuel is anger. He told the crowd not to waste energy on people ‘full of hate.’ He did not apply that standard to himself.
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