PSR_61

Let’s show our
undocumented
friends, relatives,
coworkers,
neighbors,
and other loved
ones that when
we say we’re
going to do everything
in our
power legally to
protect them,
we mean it.
While the anti-immigrant crowd is busy enacting travel
bans on Muslims, telling Spanish-speakers to “go home”
even if home is here, threatening to withhold federal
funding for noncompliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agents, and cheering on agents as they lurk outside
schools, courthouses, hospitals, and other government buildings for
families to disband and livelihoods to disrupt, officials in cities in
California, Massachusetts, and New York have responded by defiantly
proclaiming themselves “sanctuary cities,” promising protection
to immigrants and their families.
In New York, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents
have in recent months detained a 39-year-old man in Manhattan
Criminal Court, three people waiting outside Queens Criminal
Court, a 19-year-old Ossining student on the night of his senior
prom, and scores of others
in both city and countywide
sweeps. In response, local officials
have beefed up funding
for immigrant legal services,
instructed school officials to
turn away agents without warrants,
and advised local police
to no longer grant voluntary
detainer requests. On the state
side, the New York Assembly
has passed or introduced legislation
barring cooperation with
ICE (The Liberty Act), granting
pathways to citizenship (The
DREAM Act), and allowing
undocumented drivers to obtain
licenses (A4050)—though
some Senate leaders have
fiercely opposed these bills and
others like them.
While these are important
efforts, and they should be lauded,
the truth is that they don’t
go nearly far enough. With this
in mind, here are three steps
city and state leaders in New
York and beyond can take right
now to become true sanctuaries for their undocumented residents:
1. Preemptively issue trespass warnings to all ICE and DHS agents and
employees:
For decades in just about every city in America, police, prosecutors,
judges, and an array of staff at different municipal agencies
have used written and verbal trespass warnings to keep people they
deem “problematic” or “undesirable” away from parks, schools, public
housing developments, busses and subways, and they have done it
under threat of arrest and prosecution. Today, however, when these
same city leaders in “progressive” enclaves such as Boston and New
York promise undocumented residents protection, they seem to
keep forgetting that this powerful legal tool is at their disposal. It’s
time we remind them.
Elected officials with the appropriate jurisdiction should immediately
begin ordering the posting of signs such as the following in
prominent positions on all courthouses, schools, hospitals, parks,
pools, ice rinks, busses, subways, bus and subway stations and terminals,
and all other buildings or facilities where essential local government
services are offered:
park slope reader | 23
“Any Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Depart-
ment of Homeland Security (DHS) employee or agent conducting
immigration investigation work on these premises without a valid
warrant signed by a judge in her or his bodily possession is trespassing
pursuant to NYS Penal Law 140.05 and, if in possession of a
firearm, NYS Penal Law 140.17.”
This is an important first step that elected officials can take to
demonstrate to immigrants and their families that they are serious
about using all legal means necessary to provide the largest amount
of physical and geographical protection possible. It’s also something
that homeowners, landlords, and business owners can do, because
private property owners have the authority to post written trespass
warnings prominently on their own premises. The message to federal
immigration agents in any city claiming to be a sanctuary city
must be crystal clear: if you are trying to detain and deport our
friends, neighbors, and loved ones, you’re not welcome here. Go and
get a warrant, Redcoat, or kick rocks.
2. End Broken Windows, and criminal and civil enforcement of petty
infractions:
Broken Windows, marijuana arrests, turnstile-jumping (known
officially as theft of services), and other so-called “quality of life” arrests
have been responsible for funneling thousands of immigrants
at risk of detention and deportation into searchable criminal record
and fingerprint databases that contain court dates, places of abode,
employment details, and other highly sensitive identifying information.
In February, after ICE conducted a citywide immigration raid
that landed 40 people in custody, Karina Garcia, an organizer with
the ANSWER coalition, told the Village Voice: “We cannot claim to
be a sanctuary city when police flood immigrant communities with
cops who are racking up summonses and arrests in huge numbers.”
Ms. Garcia is dead-on. If elected officials in New York and other
cities want to be taken seriously when they invoke the word sanctuary
and offer protection to immigrants, they cannot continue to
support dragnet police practices that substantially heighten the daily
risk of detention and deportation. The city has proposed back-end
measures to reduce the number of days of certain sentences to avoid
triggering immigration consequences, but this is not nearly enough.
A true sanctuary city cannot—and would not—allow its police department
to continue indiscriminately funneling immigrants into a
system that places them in imminent danger of the very thing they’re
supposed to be protecting them from.
3. Repurpose the NYPD Gang Division as the Immigrant Protection Di-
vision:
According to a 2015 report by Babe Howell, criminal law profes-
sor at the City University of New York, the NYPD’s Gang Division
has quadrupled its ranks in recent years despite violent crime being
at its lowest level in decades. This deployment has occurred in the
face of a massive body of criminological data showing that a public
health approach to gang violence is far more effective at preventing
shootings than law enforcement operations, and that it achieves better
results at a fraction of the cost.
In 2016, for example, five employees at an organization called
696 Queensbridge cut shootings down to zero in 96 public housing
buildings in Queens for more than a year. If the City of New York
wants to protect its 3.7 million-plus immigrants who largely live in
the same areas being targeted by the NYPD’s gang raids—neighborhoods
like Harlem, East Flatbush, Queensbridge, and parts of the
Bronx, to name a few—then the city should fund and scale programs
like 696 Queensbridge with the same power of mandate as police.