With cries of “Si se puede” (“Yes, we can do it!”) and signs reading “Para Dios No Hay Extranjeros” (“For God There Are No Strangers”) an estimated 1,500 people of every hue and class from New Haven and way beyond — including this contingent of young people from Hartford — poured onto Blatchley Avenue in front of St. Rose of Lima Church in ardent support of immigrant rights and, specifically, the 31 Fair Haveners who were taken into custody in a federal raid.
The Thursday night demonstration was characterized by patient, even disciplined moral defiance; it well may turn out to be of historic importance for the immigration debate that now embroils the nation.
Those entering the church a half-hour earlier for a special mass were asked to sign up, in an act of defiance, to receive New Haven’s municipal ID card, the approval of which, on Monday night, was largely seen by the crowd as the trigger for the raid.
This young woman, Maria Vives and her four-year-old niece Sophia Nugent, were there early and eager to sign up. An Argentinean immigrant herself, who is now a citizen and student at Gateway Community College, she said, “Look around. It’s not just Hispanic people this can happen to. Yesterday it was them. Tomorrow it will be someone else. These people are hard-working. They are not terrorists. And should not be treated as criminals”
Vives knows. She works in customer service at C‑Town in Fair Haven and knows undocumented people who are extremely hard-working. “I help them with paying their bills, with filling out forms, establishing accounts with the electric company,” she said. “Everyone needs a helping hand, not what happened to them on Wednesday. When I finished school two years ago, I was number ten in a class of 300 at Wilbur Cross. I had offers of scholarship, but I couldn’t go because I didn’t have a social security number at the time. I mean I knew one of the people who was taken when I saw her face on TV. I used to see her at the store twice a week.”
Speakers such as Kica Matos (on the right), who spearheaded the municipal i.d. card for the city, said, “At the beginning of this week, our alderman took a courageous step in approving the municipal ID. card. Today we are picking up the pieces from raiding of our houses, taking people away, and traumatizing children. We’re here to say: New Haven is not backing down. We will continue to create a path for justice.”
More than anything, however, the outpouring was a way for more than 1,000 people like Vives to come together and to say in a thousand different ways to each other, to quote, Reverend Jim Manship of St. Rose, “We will not allow fear to keep us from moving ahead together.”
“Si se puede!” the crowd called out.
Here are some more individual stories: Khalil Iskaraos was wearing one of the signs distributed by Elm City Congregations Organized (ECCO). He has papers, very good ones: citizenship and a job as a research scientist in linguistics for a laboratory affiliated with Yale.
“Look around,” he said. “I see people here of all kinds, of all colors, and they are saying to the government: You can’t do this to people. The goal of the government, through the raids, is to put everyone in fear. The only way to combat that is to fight it. That’s why I’m here.
“More people need to understand who these undocumented people are. In their home countries, often for reasons of American policies like NAFTA, they are starving. They are forced here, and all they want to do is work. I know people from Egypt who are here living five and ten to a room.
“These raids for small things, it’s a kind of double punishment. It must be combated, and it will because progressives in New Haven are real fighters.”
Alejandro Gallindo came to New Haven 22 years ago from Peru. “I’m a citizen,” he said, “as he stood beside a statue of St. Rose herself, the patroness of Latin America, as mass finished up in the sanctuary, “but I have many friends who are not, here, in West Haven, elsewhere. There is so much fear. It is much worse now than it used to be.”
Teresa Britto Padilla (on the right with St. Rose parishioner Florangelica Tena) is a family advocate at Lulac Headstart on Cedar Street in the Hill. “I had parents call me on Wednesday and say to us, ‘I’m too scared to come and get my child. One mother called on her cell phone and said she was hiding in a cardboard box! She said, I’m afraid I’ll be picked up if I go outside. How can I get my child? And are you going to charge me for the extra hours!’
“People are really scared. She was not the only one. I knew several other parents who kept their kids home today. They were afraid they might get picked up! We had to call up all the families and explain to them. We told them we’d deliver their kids to them right here at St. Rose or whatever it took. So much fear to deal with now. These people are hard working. They have no place to go in their home countries. They are here because they have no opportunity at home, and now they are very scared. I have no doubt the government is trying to get back at us in New Haven for what we did with the ID card
And these two young women, Heather Munro, on the left, and Margaret Youngberg, both college students were there because of their experiences a few years ago at Wilbur Cross.
“I went to Cross, “said Munro, who grew up in Bethany, “on the Project Choice program. I was bussed in, because I wanted the experience. Cross was great, a wide variety of students (including Youngberg, whom she met there). I had a friend who was undocumented, and others who were in the process of getting their papers. I saw their difficulties in understanding things even like high school graduation requirements.”
Now Munro, a junior at Connecticut College is working, as her summer internship project, on a resource program for immigrant families in the school system.
At the evening’s end, Father Jim looked out on Blatchley Avenue, filled from Chapel to Saltonstall, and said, in the quiet disciplined tones of someone who knows, “The people who were taken are going to be helped. It will take time. But of this I am sure: Tonight we are making history for our country right here. We are going to make our country more welcome for our brothers and our sisters.
There were more cries of “Si se puede!” and then a quiet dispersal, as parishioners solicited a few more names to add to the many hundreds on the sheets to be taken to City Hall. The names included those of Maria Vives and Teresa Padilla, and many others, which a reporter noted: from Klein to Rojas, from Smith to Sanchez to Horowitz.
It is sad to see anyone frightened with the threat of deporting. Especially hard working people that are productive and hard working.
But the facts are the facts. They chose to come here illegaly. It was their choice. If we do not enforce these laws we may as well wipe the laws from the books and swing open the gates at the borders and let everyone in that wants to come in.