Laura Glesby Photo
Anthony Acri: “Stop looking for party lines. You gotta look at the platform.”
More homeless shelters. More prison re-entry support. More parental veto power on LGBTQ+ school library books. More deportations of undocumented immigrants.
The former CEO of a border surveillance company hopes to bring those values to the Board of Alders on behalf of Morris Cove’s Ward 18 — as he seeks to become New Haven’s first Republican alder in more than a decade.
Anthony Acri has thrown his hat in the race for alder of Ward 18, a seat where incumbent Democrat Sal DeCola has so far not announced plans to run for re-election.
As of early July, two other candidates — Leland Moore and Zelema Harris, both Democrats — have filed to run as well. The Democratic primary election is slated for Sept. 9, with early voting available from Sept. 2 through Sept. 7.
Meanwhile, if no other Republican opponents enter the race, Acri will run in the general election scheduled for Nov. 4, with early voting available from Oct. 20 through Nov. 2.
Acri, who has previously run for State Representative and City Clerk, said he’s long identified as an independent voter and now sees himself as an “independent-slash-Republican.” He’s noticed that the word “Republican” is a conversation-ender for some of his neighbors, a dynamic he laments.
“Republicans have a bad name: the rich class, the upper class, old, stiff,” said Acri. “Stop looking for party lines,” he implored. “You gotta look at the platform.”
He argued that potentially becoming the first Republican on the Board of Alders in well over a decade could come with an advantage: he would be the board’s “third officer” and a minority party representative on various boards and commissions.
In heavily Democratic New Haven, Morris Cove’s Ward 18 is the neighborhood where Republicans tend to receive the most support; in 2024, Donald Trump received 41 percent of the vote in Ward 18, a neighborhood known for high voter turnout.
The most recent Republican member of the Board of Alders, Arlene DePino, represented Ward 18 for a decade — until DeCola, a Democrat, took the seat in 2011.
The ward is home to a mix of coastal parkland and resource-intensive infrastructure used widely across the city. It includes the New Haven portion of Tweed airport, a power plant, a wastewater treatment facility, a coast guard station, the historic Townshend Estate, East Shore Park, the seawall, Lighthouse Point Park, and Nathan Hale Elementary School. According to DataHaven, Morris Cove stands out as the New Haven neighborhood with the highest homeownership rate (80 percent), lowest proportion of low-income residents (9 percent), and highest white population (79 percent).
Acri grew up in Fair Haven Heights and spent most of his life in the Greater New Haven area. About two decades ago, he and his parents built the palatial house where he now lives on Cove Street — a home fit for Architectural Digest, complete with a grand staircase, a fountain, a symmetrical front garden, and a seaside back porch.
Around that time, Acri was serving as the CEO of International Microwave Corp., a company that produced border enforcement technology utilizing microwave communications.
The federal government contracted IMC to implement a $239 million border surveillance network known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System. A 2004 General Services Information Inspector General’s report claimed that the company performed substandard or incomplete work and may have overcharged the government by millions, allegations that Acri denied both at the time and in 2025.
“It was all due to the fact that it was a jealous competitor… and also [a] jealous official that did not want an electronic system that worked for the border patrol,” Acri wrote in a text message, responding to an article about the report. “It’s unfortunate that a great system a great congressman great border patrol agents that love the system have to be the focus of jealousy back in those days.”
He said that the company received praise for its work from the Immigration and Naturalization Service as well as an Eagle Technology Award from the GSA’s Federal Technology Services Agency, Great Lakes Region, as documented in a press release and letter of excellence he provided to the Independent.
Acri later became employed by an Indigenous Alaskan facilities and construction company, Kikiktagruk Inupiat Corporation Development LLC. In 2016, he was charged for bribing a U.S. Army Corp of Engineers employee to contract with his company; he pled guilty and served three years of a five-year sentence in a federal prison in Maryland.
His time in the minimum security prison opened his eyes to generational cycles of incarceration he previously hadn’t been exposed to. “The majority of the camp were African American or Hispanic,” he said. “I would hear stories from one of my bunkmates who got 20 years of prison” in connection with a cannabis offense. “Now, it is legal, and some of my acquaintances and friends there are still in prison. And it’s just horrible.”
His experience in prison gave him a “completely different perspective,” he described. He said that many of the others he met in the camp “had to turn to making some money to support their family and kids,” which led them to enter the drug trade. They got arrested, and “all of a sudden, now you have single mothers and children without fathers,” he said. “I never knew that this was the cycle that was happening.” He said that while in prison, he volunteered in G.E.D. classes and now gives talks about preventing recidivism.
If elected alder, “I would push for more programs” for people transitioning out of prison, he said. “That’s a soft spot on my heart.”
Acri does believe in addressing the drug trade, meanwhile, by increasing deportations of undocumented immigrants.
“I am in support of moving ‘illegals’ out of the country,” he said, arguing that such deportations are a means of stopping the importation of illicit drugs. “I support coming into the country legally,” he said.
So far, in his second term, President Donald Trump has sought to ramp up deportations, restrict pathways to legal residency (including birthright citizenship) in the country, and circumvent the hearing system currently set up to honor the due process rights of people whom the government alleges are undocumented immigrants.
When asked generally whether he supports Trump, Acri responded, “I think right now that the administration is moving in the right direction.”
He noted, “I don’t think it’s connected in the run for alder, and I try to keep the federal politics out of it.”
Another of Acri’s priorities is the belief that “parents should have a say in their child’s curriculum” — especially “books in a couple of libraries in schools teaching about anatomy and sexual behavior.”
He continued, “You have to support what anybody’s personal feelings are, but what I don’t agree with is it being pushed on children.” When asked if he does believe that LGBTQ+ identities are currently being “pushed on children,” he responded that he does in “a number schools in the state of Connecticut and across the country.”
He said he does support A.P. African American Studies, a curriculum recently made available to some New Haven high schoolers that has been targeted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Acri was inspired to start running for political offices a few years ago, he said, by his daughter, who works in the homeless services sector in New York. She had challenged him to find a way to address homelessness in New Haven. Acri said that he would go about this priority by advocating for more shelter space with job training opportunities along with more mixed-income housing.
Another area of focus for Acri is infrastructure upgrades in light of Tweed Airport’s impending expansion into East Haven on the border of the ward.
“The airport’s not going anywhere,” Acri said, “and the airport does give revenue to New Haven.” But he said that the neighborhood should have a stronger advocate on some of the quality-of-life impacts of the expanding airport, including home upgrades to mitigate air pollution and noise as well as “sidewalk issues” and “traffic issues” associated with an increased volume of visitors.
He pointed to a recently-installed roundabout on Dean and Burr Streets as an example of insufficient neighborhood input on infrastructure changes that will most affect Morris Cove residents. The roundable, he said, is “an accident waiting to happen.”
“The Cove has really been a stepchild” of the city as a whole, he said.