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© 2021 The Somerville Times. All rights reserved.
Mayor Joseph Curtatone spoke at the “Build Bridges, Not Walls” rally, organized by The Welcome Project in 2019. – Photo courtesy of The Welcome Project
By Shira Laucharoen
Somerville officials and local organizations have been responding to the Trump administration’s decision to deploy 100 border patrol agents to ten major sanctuary cities, including Somerville, in February. These officers will be assisting with run of the mill immigration arrests, in cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Mayor Joseph Curtatone called the new plan, which will last until May, “a despicable election stunt that puts hard working people seeking to escape violence and poverty in the crosshairs.” Leaders of Somerville groups like The Welcome Project, a social services and advocacy organization for immigrants, said that the tactic does more than menace individuals.
Ben Echevarria, Executive Director of The Welcome Project, stated that this action could have negative effects relating to the upcoming census and the number of congressional seats Massachusetts has.
“We have doorknockers and other people coming from the census. Now you know that there are these tactical units that are in these communities. The likelihood of somebody answering the door is going to become less. That’s going to hurt us,” said Echevarria. “If they need to do a physical count for people, that’s going to hurt us in a lot of ways. Because we know we have high immigrant populations, and if they’re not counted, that’s going to impact us financially for our schools, roadways, and a host of other things, for our congressional delegations as well.”
Somerville is a sanctuary city, a municipality that has policies protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation, unless they are charged with a serious crime. These cities likely have been targeted by the Trump administration for their refusal to cooperate with ICE, said Echevarria. The SWAT team-like agents include members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, heavily armed officers who typically deal with violent criminals, not common cases with mild offenses.
The city will continue to uphold the rights of its immigrant communities, Curtatone explained in an email. Somerville will build trust among its constituents and work with programs, such as The Welcome Project and SomerViva Office of Immigrant Affairs, that support the immigrants who live there. The neighborhood will persevere in its efforts to preserve their safety, according to the mayor.
“We will remain a welcoming city, a sanctuary city,” wrote Curtatone. “We will continue to work to be sure our residents know their rights, have the full support of our community, and have access to the immigration legal support and citizenship services needed so they can secure their legal status. Congress meanwhile needs to fix our broken immigration system and create a path for the hardworking immigrants who come here for a better life and who in turn make our nation stronger.”
The Welcome Project has raised its level of activity around alerting and supporting immigrant constituents, said Echevarria. The organization launched the Somerville Response Network, a text based system that notifies the community of ICE activity, in 2018. In reaction to the deployment of border patrol agents, The Welcome Project has been spreading awareness about the network through social media and flyers to ensure individuals have the information they need. The non-profit has also been working with partners, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, to make sure that lawyers are accessible, in the event of a raid.
Curtatone wrote that there is legislation that still needs to be passed, to protect Massachusetts’ immigrant populations. The Safe Communities Act is a bill that respects immigrants’ rights by preventing law enforcement from asking them about their immigrant status, unless required by law. It also calls for the defense of due process and the limitation of notifications to ICE.
Currently, Boston has instated the Trust Act, which prohibits police from working with ICE for civil immigration enforcement purposes, allowing them to cooperate only in the cases of serious crimes. Policies like the Trust Act have conflicted with the Trump administration’s approach to immigration. Locally, Echevarria said that he would like to see more translation and interpretation services for immigrants.
Diversity is an integral part of Somerville’s identity as a city, said Echevarria. Without its immigrant communities, Somerville would not be the neighborhood that it is, he said.
“We’ve always been a city of immigrants,” said Echevarria. “That’s the value that we hold. It’s part of who we are, in so many different ways. We believe that people have dignity and people add value to our community.”
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The federal government is only enforcing the laws of our land due to the neglect of local officials to honor their oath of office. I’m certain that if surrounding communities declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuary cities and the federal government came in to support gun laws, our local hypocrites would be lauding the support and aiding the federal government.
This is not about anti-immigrant sentiment. It’s about supporting the law. Legal immigrants should have nothing to fear and if they truly believe in our laws they should be welcoming this effort.
The folks running this town are moving further and further away from U.S. law, their oath to uphold the constitution and the law, and common sense. In an effort to divide us, they display their arrogance with hollow rhetoric that those who oppose illegal immigration are racists. To support their hollow rhetoric they remove the distinction between illegals and those who followed the process and immigrated here legally.
Our elected local officials should not be allowed to selectively decide which federal laws they will support and which laws they’ll work to selectively prevent the police from supporting. They took an unconditional oath to uphold the law. If the law is broken, they should work to fix it, not break it. If they feel strongly about matters that need to be addressed at the federal level they would better serve the public by resigning their local offices and moving to Washington to work on their passion at the appropriate federal level.
We have had laws in place for years that worked for the most part. But in this current climate, the law only serves to harm the notion of what this country stands for, which is freedom and humanitarian aid.
Children taken away from parents and kept in cages tells you how bad things have gotten. To simply wait until laws can be changed through proper channels will not fix things right now.
To know that local governments are willing to step up and oppose what they feel violates human rights is something to support, not something to condemn. Nothing was this bad until we got our current federal government in place, a regime that seeks to undo and remove every protection put in place, whether it be environmental or financial.
Yes, illegal immigrants should seek to go through legal channels. But if you are fleeing a country where you and your family are in danger for their lives, being told that upholding the law is stronger than humanity is not the answer. We are fortunate that we live in a nation that we don’t have to escape from, at least not yet.
We have seriously lost compassion in this country since 2016, and we need to hold on to what little of it we have left, until we can get someone in the White House that at least understands common humanity and changes the laws so that they are no longer cruel and inhumane.
We can uphold the laws regarding illegal immigration without resorting to slamming the door in the face of people seeking sanctuary. No law should be absolute, except the ones that were written in stone.
The main thing that is being done is the removal of illegal criminals. Their is too much hype in this and misinformation. The president regardless if you like him or not has said from the start he is after criminal illegals and not illegals with US values at heart. This is just the media and politic stuff. I haven’t spent much time promoting my plan but will be doing so shortly. There are ways to handle this. I am not sure I can get either side to work with me but I am trying. But the big thing is to get the criminal element out. We as Americans need to do that and for the illegals who are good people they don’t want them either. It makes them look bad. But we can’t give criminals and gong members and drug dealers a way to get out of it. We need to work together and use some common sense here. And look back to what other presidents did with this from either side.
TheoNa, they are complying with the law, but they are not going beyond the law.
Section 1373 says federal, state or local government entities or officials may not prohibit or restrict the exchange of information with federal immigration officers regarding the citizenship or immigration status of any individual. We do that. What we do not do is honor an ICE detainer request which carries no legal force and does not authorize state and local officials to hold anyone in custody — it is not an arrest warrant and does not provide probable cause for arrest.
Please get informed on how the law works rather than just citing an opinion.