At any one time, Jaime Martinez says more than 100 volunteers at his immigrants’ rights group are on call and ready to respond to immigration enforcement activity in Western Pennsylvania.
They’re part of a growing network of more than 1,000 total volunteers, he said.
Less than nine months ago, that network — Frontline Dignity — didn’t exist.
Guided by an eclectic ideology mixing his liberal bona fides, Catholic theology and folksy Pittsburghisms, Martinez has rapidly built the organization into an increasingly visible nexus of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement monitoring and advocacy in Western Pennsylvania.
And it’s something he hopes to expand.
“We see how this model has been explosive and scalable,” he said. “We can make that happen anywhere, I’m sure of it.”
Martinez, 23, founded Frontline Dignity in November with a handful of volunteers seeking to track immigration enforcement activity in the region.
The “soft launch” of the organization came just ahead of Operation Metro Surge, which saw the national debate over ICE tactics reach a fever pitch as thousands of federal agents flooded Minnesota, resulting in two deaths.
In that environment, Martinez managed to fill area churches with hundreds of local residents for “know-your-rights” trainings and volunteer sign-ups.
At one session at Pittsburgh’s East Liberty Presbyterian Church, Martinez said nearly 1,000 people showed up.
“The line wrapped around the city block,” he said. “It was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Frontline Dignity’s Facebook and Instagram accounts — where the group posts information about suspected ICE activity throughout the region — each count more than 15,000 followers.
Despite the massive growth, Frontline only has three full-time staff members.
And its home base floats between coffee shops, co-working spaces and Martinez’s Brighton Heights apartment.
As ICE activity continues, Martinez — a onetime political staffer, failed school board candidate and religious pilgrim — said his experiences have cemented the group’s duty-bound ideology and firmly prepared him for his current role.
On the front lines
At its core, Frontline Dignity generally does two things: gathers information on immigration sweeps and aids affected families.
When the organization hears reports of ICE activity, it dispatches observers to the scene to record video and obtain information from witnesses or family members, Martinez said.
Frontline isn’t explicitly anti-ICE, Martinez said, but he takes issue with recent tactics, which he describes as “lawless.”
“We’re not here to prevent them from doing their job. We just want them to do their job according to the rule of law,” he said.
No Frontline volunteers have been arrested or detained, he said.
Rather than being solely reactive, Frontline also actively patrols areas that have seen a heavy ICE presence — such as Cranberry, Beechview and county courthouses, Martinez said.
Jenny Ross has been volunteering as a legal observer for Frontline since January. During that time, she has witnessed around a dozen ICE detainments, she said.
She began volunteering after hearing Martinez speak during a “know-your-rights” training that drew about 500 people to Shadyside Presbyterian Church early this year.
During a detainment, Ross said, volunteers never intervene.
“With Frontline Dignity, it’s always about deescalation and calm,” she said.
Ross said volunteers try to film detainments when possible and gather information from detainees to communicate messages to their families and Frontline.
Volunteers occasionally interact with family members on the scene to gather information and guide them to Frontline resources, she said.
“It’s really hard to tell someone their loved one just got taken,” she said. “It’s emotionally exhausting in that moment.”
Though agents have sometimes taken photos of her, she said they generally haven’t been aggressive toward volunteers. Some have even tried to strike up conversations or debate the merits of their work, Ross said.
Other times, she said, the presence of volunteers with cameras has been enough to drive away agents.
“They know why we’re there, and we know why they’re there,” Ross said.
If the group can gather enough information from a scene, Staysi Rosario often will post a bulletin on Frontline’s social media.
The purpose of the posts is two-fold, said Rosario, Frontline’s director of communications. They expose native-born citizens to ICE activity in their communities, and they help local immigrants know where to avoid.
“I think it’s jarring for people to see videos of ICE detaining their neighbors from the middle of the street,” Rosario said.
As immigration raids have increased, Rosario said, native-born Americans and immigrants often live in separate realities, with fear the reality for immigrants.
One of her goals, she said, is to crash those two realities together, forcing residents to understand the plight of their immigrant neighbors.
A New York City native with roots in the Dominican Republic, Rosario, 31, said she feels a duty to help those targeted by ICE.
“Every single time I’m in touch with one of these immigrants, I see myself in them, and I see my family in them, and I’m like, ‘This could have been me, and it’s just by sheer luck that it’s not,’ ” she said.
Martinez and Rosario met while working at Casa San Jose, a Pittsburgh-based social services and immigrant advocacy nonprofit mainly focused on the region’s Latino population.
There, Martinez said, he helped build the group’s rapid response network, which also gathers information and helps those affected by ICE detainments.
Feeling pulled in several directions by the larger scale of operations at Casa San Jose, Martinez said he decided to break away to more narrowly focus on responding to ICE activity. Rosario said the formation of Frontline also was an effort to expand immigrant advocacy beyond the Latino community.
Unlike Casa San Jose, Frontline does not offer in-house case management, housing assistance or traditional social services.
But Rosario said Frontline often is the first to reach affected families in the aftermath of a detainment.
Much of her job, then, is supporting families in crisis by directing them toward legal services or other immediate requirements, such as help with rent.
“Most of the women that I speak to who are impacted by this, they’re not prepared,” she said. “How do you prepare for one of the most traumatizing experiences of your life?”
Martinez and Rosario agreed: The work can be grueling.
The philosophy
On a recent 130-mile march from ICE’s field office in Pittsburgh’s South Side to Moshannon Valley Processing Center, ICE’s largest detention facility in the Northeast, Martinez and others wore a placard around their necks.
It read: “Dignity is treating people as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end.”
The statement is a not-so-subtle nod to part of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” a foundational theory in duty-based ethics.
Kant argues that to use a person as a means to an end — rather than an end in themselves — is to deny their rationality and free will and, therefore, the source of their humanity.
That duty to humanize others, Martinez said, is the core underpinning of Frontline.
“Immigration is, as of now, the most clear symptom of a deeper moral illness in this country, which is the affront to dignity,” he said.
Also deeply Catholic, Martinez said he takes inspiration from St. Francis, St. Anthony and local “saint” Fred Rogers, a plush of whom he carried throughout the hike to Moshannon.
When asked about safety concerns ahead of the weeklong march, Martinez took a martyr’s tone.
“I have full faith in God that whatever happens on this pilgrimage is meant to happen,” Martinez told TribLive in March.
A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia universities, Rosario said much of her personal beliefs also are inspired by theologian-philosophers like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Despite the Catholic undercurrent within the group, however, Rosario said Frontline is not religiously affiliated.
“Although we take from religious sources and Jaime is Catholic, the organization is not religious,” she said. “We are open to everybody and anybody who wants support or wants to be part of the movement.”
From dirt floors to the White House
Martinez, born in Tampa, is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants.
His father, at one time raised in a home with a tin roof and dirt floors, came to the United States on a university scholarship in the early 2000s, he said.
Martinez said he remembers attending college classes with his dad in Florida as a kid, asking professors questions and taking mock exams.
When he was 9, the family moved to McCandless after Martinez’s father found a job in Pittsburgh.
“I really got to see firsthand what the American dream being built looks like,” he said.
The aftermath of the Parkland high school shooting, which left 17 people dead in a Florida school, was his first moment of political awakening, Martinez said.
He led a student walkout at North Allegheny Intermediate High School and was elected class president.
But Martinez truly cut his political teeth at North Allegheny School Board meetings, debating critical race theory and mask policies with local parents during the tempestuous lockdown era.
He helped found a local political group called NA for Change, which aimed to make the district “more inclusive.”
Freshly graduated, he said the era made for a quick education in modern politics.
“Looking back, it’s like little seeds that are blooming right now, learning to talk to people that disagree with me,” Martinez said.
Martinez attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, majoring in public health and international studies.
As an underclassman, he served as an intern for former U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor and then-Senate Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer.
In Washington, he found bitterness.
A continent away, he found God.
Before his junior year, Martinez hiked 1,000 miles on the Camino de Santiago from Le Puy-en-Velay in southern France to Santiago de Compostela, the supposed site of the tomb of St. James in northern Spain.
The Camino is one of the most famous Catholic pilgrimages in the world, and Martinez said it changed him.
“That was the most transformative experience of my life,” he said.
Later, on a shorter, 350-mile Camino in northern Spain, longtime friend Samantha Podnar said she remembers being frustrated with a grinning Martinez during a particularly arduous slog.
“I was mad because he was so endlessly positive,” she said.
Another of Martinez’s most prominent traits, she said: sociability.
The two can hardly go anywhere without Martinez being recognized or making a new friend, she said.
Podnar, 21, is about to start a community affairs position in Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor’s administration, and she credits Martinez with her introduction to activism during their time at North Allegheny.
“It all comes from within,” she said.
Stateside, Martinez quickly became president of Johns Hopkins’ Catholic Campus Ministry before noticing an opportunity back home.
Fresh off a visit to Joe Biden’s White House through a scholarship program, Martinez opted to run for a vacant seat on North Allegheny School Board.
As a 21-year-old college senior, Martinez said he alternated between his studies in Baltimore and his political campaign in the North Hills for months.
It was for naught.
Though his ticket flipped the board to a Democratic majority, Martinez didn’t manage to capture a seat.
Humiliated, he practically decided to go into exile — preparing to join the Peace Corps in Peru.
After former President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, Martinez jumped right back into politics.
“I realized I can’t watch this election happen from another continent,” he said.
He served as Northwestern Pennsylvania regional political director for the Harris-Walz campaign, managing the campaign in Erie County.
When Trump secured the county by fewer than 1,500 votes, Martinez said, he felt personally culpable.
“I, specifically, did not talk to anyone outside my bubble,” he said. “That’s why I was so confident we were going to win.”
It’s a mistake he said he has vowed not to make again.
Returning to Pittsburgh, he began his work at Casa San Jose before breaking away to form Frontline last November.
When Martinez told Podnar of his plan to form an organization on his own, she said she never really doubted that it would prove successful.
“If anybody could succeed at something like that, it was Jaime,” she said. “He’s relentless.”
The future
For Martinez, the future of Frontline seems to boil down to one word: expansion.
The ultimate goal for the organization is to form a nationwide network of like-minded groups that can replicate the success of Frontline elsewhere, Martinez said.
Those groups don’t necessarily have to fall under the Frontline banner, Martinez said, but he believes his organization’s structure could be a useful template for others.
“We want to be able to give people the tools to build community and address a crisis that’s happening, and build relationships and sister networks that are run on their own but using the lessons we’ve learned,” he said.
Martinez said he already is in contact with several groups in Maine, New York and elsewhere in Pennsylvania.
Later this year, he is planning a six-city tour in Texas to help build networks there.
Rosario and Martinez also alluded to a future where immigration isn’t at the top of Frontline’s agenda, and, as Martinez put it, the full “affront to dignity” can be assessed.
“It’s a movement,” Rosario said. “In the big picture, we’re trying to inspire a movement of people even outside of immigration, of people who are willing to uplift their neighbors.”
Martinez and Rosario recently completed onboarding a third full-time staffer: Paula Miranda, the group’s development and partnerships director.
For the group — dependent on donations and grants — Miranda’s role in the expansion will be vital.
The future of Frontline also is likely to look more independent, Martinez said.
For now, the organization remains technically under the banner of Pittsburgh-based human rights group The Global Switchboard. But Martinez said he hopes to eventually venture out as an independent nonprofit.
As for Martinez, he said his focus is on Frontline, but he didn’t take another run for public office completely off the table.
If he felt “called” to run, Martinez said, it’s something he would consider down the road.
It’s certainly a future Podnar said she could foresee for her friend, whom she already describes as a “power player” in Pittsburgh.
“I think we need more people like him,” she said. “He is exactly the type of person you want working in your community.”