Paul Bass Photos
Rally outside City Hall Thursday evening.
Palacio at his closed Grand Ave. eatery Thursday.
• Businesses close, 30 rally at City Hall.
• Cops spend thousands per protest.
Palacio’s restaurant.
The handwritten sign at his Mariscos restaurant at 369 Grand read in full “Cerrado — Apoyando a Nuestra Raza” — or “closed in support of our people.”
Moises Ramirez, who came here from Mexico 19 years ago, showed his support by taking a day off from his job at a brake-parts factory.
The men were among dozens of New Haveners who participated in a national “day without immigrants” protest designed to demonstrate the vital role immigrants play in our economy, at a time when many of them face uncertain futures here in the wake of executive orders by President Donald Trump.
The national protest drew visible showings, boycotts and business closings in cities including Austin, Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York. New Haven saw a more ad hoc effort. It was a dry run for a bigger national version of the event planned for May 1.
Palacio’s restaurant.
About 20 local businesses closed and “several dozen” people stayed away from work, according to immigrant-rights organizer John Lugo.
The day ended with a Lugo-led rally on the front steps of City Hall designed to spread the word about the May 1 event as well as ongoing efforts to prepare immigrants for deportation raids and enlist community support for resisting them. (Click here for a full story on that.)
Ramirez warms up in City Hall before venturing outside for the protest.
“We want to keep the voices of immigrants alive,” Lugo said during about a half-hour of bilingual remarks to 30 gathered demonstrators, including Moises Ramirez, as dusk fell. “The community is working together.”
He warned immigrants not to open their doors for people they don’t know, and to insist that any federal agents have judge-signed warrants with their names on them. He also urged them to keep affixed to their doors a list of precautionary steps prepared by immigrant-rights activists.
It was the third rush-hour demonstration in New Haven over the past seven days. As usual, the police had more than a dozen officers assigned to the event. They hung back, mostly in pairs, at the periphery of the crowd and across the street, barely visible but ready in case this demonstration, like many recent ones, ended with protesters marching through the streets.
Sharp, right, with top downtown cop Sgt. Sean Maher.
“You have to have that many if they choose to walk in the street,” said Lt. Herb Sharp, who oversees patrol for the police department. “You really want to have enough officers for officer safety and to make sure the protesters are safe.”
Lugo told officers before the event started that he wasn’t sure if it would end with a march.
Lugo: Raids are coming.
In addition to the 15 officers paired off at a distance but within view of City Hall, another two cops were a block away in case counter-demonstrators were to emerge bent on causing a provocation, another common deployment in this season of perpetual protest.
“I’ve never seen so many protests,” Sharp, who has been on the force 20 years, said while deep-chilling across the street. “It’s going to be a tough year.”
When Lugo finished speaking around 5:40, he and the group decided to fold up their banners.
“It’s cold,” he noted with a smile. And officers went off to other assignments.
The Price Of Protest
Lucy Gellman Photo
Officers moving in to make arrest at the Feb. 10 Calhoun protest.
Unlike Thursday night’s protest, the two prior ones led officers to close downtown streets during rush hour, delaying people’s commutes home and engendering some complaints.
Police spokesman Officer David Hartman said the thrice-weekly or more protests since Trump’s inauguration have hampered cops’ ability to address crime in the rest of town. He also said they have set back taxpayers, disrupted citizens’ lives, and harmed local commerce.
Over the last eight or nine recent protests, police have spent at least $1,651 on staffing — and usually much more.
That figure represents a three-hour protest where organizers have worked with police in advance and don’t steer the crowd in unplanned directions, Hartman said. It covers nine patrol officers who earn just under $33 an hour, as well as two sergeants and two lieutenants (earning roughly $36 and $41 an hour, respectively); at least two mobile patrols (often detectives at around $35 an hour), and often as many as six, scouring nearby streets for possible counterprotesters; and a sergeant spending three hours in the detail room at $36 an hour arranging new assignments.
Hartman said that doesn’t count when officers end up having to work overtime. Or when, as occurred on the night of President Trump’s inauguration, the protesters suddenly change the course of the march. Or when civil disobedience occurs. Or when the protests run long.
“If you consider 60 officers are supposed to patrolling city streets, if you take 15 of them away — that cuts your manpower down to three quarters of what it should be,” Hartman said. “That’s a significant — imagine 15 cops calling in sick on almost a daily basis. That’s what the rest of the city is dealing with.”
Cops are taking longer to respond to other calls as a result, he said. And he is fielding complaints daily from people having trouble mired in standstill rush-hour traffic and businesses reporting that customers can’t make it to their stores.
“People do have a right to protest. People also have a right to go about their daily lives and not be interrupted,” Hartman said. And “it’s hurting commerce.“
“We live in a democracy. We cherish our constitutional rights, including our First Amendment rights to freedom of expression. If fighting for what we believe in and engaging in peaceful acts is something that people frown upon — then we question where we are as a society in terms of our embrace of our democratic principals,” responded organizer Kica Matos when asked about criticism over the costs and inconveniences of this month’s protests.
Matos was arrested in an act of civil disobedience while blocking the intersection of College and Elm Streets last Friday afternoon in a demonstration in favor of changing the name of Yale’s Calhoun College.
“I’ve lived in this city for 16 years,” Matos said. “I pay my taxes like everybody else. I am not a public burden on the city of New Haven. What I was doing was something that I felt was necessary, overdue, and something that deeply hurts and impacts people of color in this community. This is democracy! We are living in a time when our democratic principles are being challenged. I think we cherish our democracy, and we should do everything we can to exercise our constitutional rights, of which free expression is one.”
“Crime was still affecting the community” before the recent wave of marches, Lugo said. “What happened then?”
He said that “we really need these marches” as “this administration starts attacking our community.”
"Police spokesman Officer David Hartman said the thrice-weekly or more protests since Trump's inauguration have hampered cops' ability to address crime in the rest of town. He also said they have set back taxpayers, disrupted citizens' lives, and harmed local commerce"
That, very clearly stated, is the problem here. Residents (i.e. taxpayers) have just as much right to their expectations for the city services they pay for as any protesters do. People who don't subscribe to the same tenets have jobs they need to get to, banking they need to conduct and children to feed after their workday. To interrupt these citizen's routines is at best pompous, at worst, criminal.
I grow tired of hearing how this is directed at immigrants. Bottom line is that immigrants have always been and are still welcomed into this country. ILLEGAL immigrants are not. What could be clearer?