Thomas MacMillan Photo
Migdalia Castro (pictured) led the charge.
Two weeks after the mayor pushed back on a new federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program to crack down on illegal immigration, New Haven’s Board of Aldermen has officially joined the resistance.
In a unanimous vote Monday night, the aldermen called upon Gov. Dannel Malloy to refuse to participate in “Secure Communities.”
That’s the new ICE program under which the FBI shares fingerprint information of new arrestees with the immigration enforcement agency, which can then request the arrested people be held for possible investigation for immigration violations.
The Board of Aldermen’s official resolution calls on Gov. Malloy to deny any such requests, unless the person is “identified as a confirmed match in the FBI’s terrorist screening database or convicted of a serious violent criminal offense.”
On Feb. 20, Mayor John DeStefano issued a similar plea to Malloy.
“This program undermines everything we have tried to build in our community,” said Fair Haven Alderwoman Migdalia Castro. The program will destroy relationships between cops and people, who will not talk to them for fear of deportation, she said.
Secure Communities targets the wrong people, those who have committed minor crimes, not serious ones, Castro said. It’s a step toward racial profiling and it will “rip families apart,” she said.
A September 2011 Department of Homeland Security report on Secure Communities found that the program is fundamentally flawed in the ways mentioned by Alderwoman Castro.
Castro said ICE has and will retaliate against people and towns for resisting it’s policies. She quoted at length from this Independent article, about ICE raids in Connecticut 10 days ago immediately following statewide outcry against Secure Communities. ICE raids also came in June 2007, in the wake of aldermanic approval of a new immigrant-friendly municipal ID card. (Last month the agency agreed to pay $350,000 to 11 targets of that 2007 raid who sued the agency for violating their constitutional rights. Read about that here.)
An ICE spokesman said the timing of last month’s sweep was just coincidence. ICE said the same thing about the 2007 raids; subsequent emails showed the agency expressing opposition to the ID program and considering how to try to stop it.
“So they say,” Castro said of ICE’s latest denial. “I say not. … People must see the dominoes falling together here.”
The governor’s point man on the ICE program, Michael Lawlor, the undersecretary for criminal justice, has repeatedly said that the administration supports the program if truly targets people arrested for violent and dangerous crimes. It does not support detaining people accused of petty crimes. He said the state will look at requests on a case-by-case basis, leading to tensions with the federal agency.
