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By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

We just celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday. For many of us, that meant a long weekend spending time with family, watching some football and doing some shopping. We truly have it good, leading lives with more blessings than we can count. Yet, at the end of it, anyone who turned on the news or opened up a social media app saw images of our country firing tear gas at children along our southern border.

Most of these people are coming from Honduras, where I visited this past summer. They are fleeing it for their lives because murder is a daily hazard in their home country. They live with the constant fear that someone in their family will be killed. They cannot count the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Yet they arrive at the doorstep of our nation on a weekend where we celebrate our comforts and we fire tear gas at them, even though it is perfectly lawful to seek asylum in our country. Earlier this year we allowed people to enter, then ripped apart families, effectively kidnapping the children in an effort to scare off potential refugees. The inhumanity of it should shock the conscience of anyone.

However, what I want people to realize is the shabby treatment of people who have come to our country is not just an issue taking place far away on the Mexican border. It is happening right here where we live. Federal authorities have been changing the rules on documented immigrants, putting their status in constant jeopardy. The only thing you can call it is a purge.

Unlike many municipalities, our city has an Office of Immigrant Affairs, called SomerViva. It’s staffed by Portuguese, Spanish and Haitian Creole speakers. It helps people with housing, school and general living issues. It works to ensure language is neither a barrier to participation in our public discussions nor to accessing city services. We created it to ensure our sizable immigrant population–roughly 20,000 people—can plug into city efforts and participate in our community as a whole. Over the past two years the mission has taken on much higher stakes.

We have families in Somerville in danger of being ripped apart. People afraid they’ll be torn away from the lives they’ve built for themselves. These are our neighbors. We’re holding community meetings at schools and in churches, and we’re being inundated with people seeking legal advice for how they can stay here. We estimate that SomerViva will serve 4,000 residents this year. It is more than double the number from 2016, and a sizable increase is being driven by people with immigration-related issues.

Meanwhile, within our schools, our Parent Information Center, our Somerville Family Learning Collaborative, our district administration and social service staff, our bilingual parent liaisons, and our teachers who have organized into Educators for One Somerville, have similarly ramped up their efforts to address the needs of our immigrant students and citizen students who are part of mixed status families. And across our community, local advocates and nonprofit leaders as well as City and School staff and concerned residents, have joined together to form the Sanctuary City Steering Committee. This dedicated group has been meeting weekly since the fall of 2016 to share information about immigration-related issues and coordinate numerous interventions to support those impacted. They’ve run themselves ragged doing everything from hosting legal clinics and Know Your Rights workshops to coordinating assistance to families suddenly caught up in the web of rule changes and detainments.

The average person doesn’t keep track of things like the DACA program or Temporary Protected Status. We don’t go to immigration courts where people sometimes find themselves fighting deportation because of paperwork errors. You cannot truly appreciate the bureaucratic hammer being slammed down upon our immigrant population until you see the distress it injects into the lives of real people. Heroic efforts are being undertaken by our fellow community members not to mention the pro bono legal counsel seeking to help these people navigate a system increasingly designed to expel them from our country.

It isn’t as violent as tear gas, but the bureaucratic attack taking place also treats our immigrant population as something undesirable, something other, something less than. I’m proud that we’ve been able to rally behind so many and help them keep their lives intact, but I also recognize we are the exception, not the rule. Most places don’t have a SomerViva, or an Educators for One Somerville, or a Sanctuary City Steering Committee, or so many caring organizations and residents. In most places, people are left to fend for themselves.

It also should be mentioned, this inordinately affects people in blue collar labor and service jobs. It’s people who, like many of the refugees at our border, came here with nothing. They’ve worked hard to gain a foothold for themselves and their families. They don’t have the benefits of generational wealth. More than most of us, they are deeply thankful for the good things they have in their lives, because they understand what real deprivation is. There is something seriously wrong with going after the people who have the least.

So, when you see things that chill you to your core taking place along the Mexican border, remember it is connected to a nationwide anti-immigrant push that reaches into our community. These are not isolated incidents or anomalies. There is a concentrated effort not just to drive people away, but to drive out people who live here. Our federal government is trying to rip away documented status from as many people as it can.

We see it taking place because we’re one of the cities that has set up a mechanism to help our immigrant population. But, of course, we need to do more. These are critical and uneasy times for thousands of people in Somerville.