Challenger Jim Newton injected immigration into the mayor’s race, calling City Hall’s municipal ID plan a “cruel hoax” that endangers undocumented workers while giving them “false hope.”
Newton called a press conference outside City Hall Wednesday to speak out against Mayor John DeStefano’s plan to issue immigrant-friendly ID cards beginning July 1. Newton seeks to unseat DeStefano in a Democratic primary on Sept. 11.
“We all have empathy for the immigrants who work hard” to join in “the American dream,” Newton said. But those immigrants made a “conscious choice” to violate the law to come to the country, he argued, and the U.S. must uphold the law.
He called the mayor’s ID plan an inappropriate exercise of municipal authority on a federal issue. The ID cards are being marketed not just to immigrants — who would use them to open bank accounts, and therefore avoid being easy crime victims by carrying around lots of cash — but also to seniors or teens who could use them to obtain library cards or access city services.
“This action is simply a cruel hoax at the expense of the illegal immigrants who have sacrificed everything to come to the United States seeking a better way of life,” Newton argued. He noted last week’s raids of undocumented workers in the city, which local officials believe occurred in response to the ID card plan. (The feds deny it.) Immigrants who obtain ID cards will believe the cards offer protection from deportation, when in fact the list of cardholders could be used by immigration authorities to track down people more easily, Newton argued.
“My sense is that we does is put a false sense of hope into people,” he said. “Some people are gonna misconstrue that as … having the same relevance as a birth ceritifcate or a license.”
He also claimed the cards “send the wrong message to our children — that it’s OK to break the law.”
Click here to read Newton’s full statement.
Newton claimed at the press conference that the ID cards are a violation of federal law. Questioned, he couldn’t cite a specific law the cards would violate. “It supercedes in my opinion the federal law in terms of the way that things have happened in this country,” he said. “This is an issue that is still being put on the table in Washington in terms of trying to make some determinations.”
Click here to watch his full answer on that question.
Contacted after the press conference, Mayor DeStefano said the cards fall within the law. He also said, “frankly, the undocumented community is the one who has sought” the cards — so, for instance, they’d have cards to show cops who might be investigating landlords who take advantage of immigrants.
DeStefano noted that researchers from Yale’s Law School Clinic found that other communities which make forms of ID available to immigrants have never had the feds asking to see lists. He also noted that many undocumented workers obtain federal Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs), which enable them to pay taxes. The feds have never sought those lists, either, and they’d be far more valuable to investigators than would a municipal ID card list, DeStefano said.
Also at the press conference, Newton introduced his campaign’s new “chief field director operative,” community activists and civil-rights lawyer Michael Jefferson. Jefferson was asked if he agrees with Newton’s recent call for the cops to become more aggressive on the streets of the city. Click on the play arrow to watch his answer.
These people's shifty answers are not a good sign.