Building rapid response networks in immigrant communities
Who you are, and how you define safety, are at the core of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” signed his first Tuesday in office.
For Rev. Juan Carlos Ruiz, and people throughout the United States who have felt the sting and fear of ICE, safety is in a gossamer network of cell phones.
Ruiz is sitting in a corner of the recreation hall at St. Jacobi Lutheran Church on 4th Avenue in Sunset Park. It’s a neighborhood known for enormous numbers of immigrants and a place where Ruiz is worried a lot of people will feel the impact of EO 13768.
“People are being trapped and taken away on their way to work,” he tells the neighbors gathered with him around folding tables.
“It’s a very vulnerable position. And the fear that has been injected in our communities, it’s huge. And everybody, right after Trump took power, everybody feels it. Citizens, and no citizens, and legal residents.”
Many were hoping this EO was more bluster from a man who rose to the presidency on fiery rhetoric, but, as ICE bragged on its website:
“between Jan. 22 and April 29, 2017, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) deportation officers administratively arrested 41,318 individuals on civil immigration charges. Between Jan. 24 and April 30, 2016, ERO arrested 30,028.”
As organizers like Ruiz turn for legal advice, they are learning how to help more incisively.
“There’s an old legal adage,” says Allan Wernick, an immigration lawyer well-known for his weekly “Ask A Lawyer” column in the Daily News.
“If you have the facts, pound the facts. If you have the law, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table.”
In fact, says Wernick, INS doesn’t have the operating capacity to make the impact Trump would like to see. There has always been discretion in deportation. This came to light in 1972 when Richard Nixon was trying to deport John Lennon for overstaying a tourist visa. Lennon hired a lawyer who discovered that INS was regularly making prosecutorial decisions on who to deport.
ICE also needs to make sure they don’t put the Immigration and Naturalization Service in a bad light, according to Wernick, who thinks faith organizations have a significant role to play in combatting the anti-immigrant activity coming from Trump.
Pew Research Center released a report on April 25 that in 2015 there were approximately 11 million people living in the United States without proper documentation. And according to Detention Watch Network, there are approximately 400,000 people held in detention centers in the United States each year.
Ruiz is taking multiple tacks. In his role as co-founder of the New Sanctuary Coalition, a NYC-based immigrant rights group, he is out organizing neighbors, threading them together, block-by-block.
A buddy system is one of the things Ruiz is suggesting since an arrest of a parent on their way to work may leave children at home alone for an undetermined amount of time.
“If you are a citizen, we are asking you to buddy up with somebody that doesn’t have the proper documentation,” he says.
“And by ‘buddy up’ with that person,” he tells them, he means “becoming a friend. It’s a huge responsibility, as you can see. From thinking about scenarios like if you are taken away, who’s going to take care of your children? Am I going to be that person? Am I going to be that person who is going to be on the outside [of the detention center] filing for you so that you can be released?”
He also recommends buddies call each other every day at a certain time to be sure the undocumented neighbor is safe.
Trump’s Executive Order hoped it could expand the reach of ICE by forcing cities to help the Federal agency. Trump would like to see local police departments hold criminals for ICE even without a judicial warrant. What the EO specifically threatened was the withholding of funds to cities who call themselves “Sanctuary Cities” and refuse to help ICE.
Cities have been resisting. In late April, the New York Times reported that the City Council had introduced a series of bills expanding protection for undocumented immigrants.
Activists like Ruiz are glad for the local legislative and political support, but beyond a buddy network, they are also working to create a rapid response system among neighbors that will connect an undocumented person who has been arrested, to lawyers and the rest of their community.
“This is the time when we do a phone tree,” he tells the group gathered at St. Jacobi. “We appoint different people, two or three people. And those two or three people communicate with three more people, and those three with three more.”
Meanwhile, on May 22, Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote his first memo implementing Trump’s Executive Order.
The memo reads, in part, “In accordance with my duties as Attorney General, I have determined that section 9(a) of the Executive Order, which is directed to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, will be applied solely to federal grants administered by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security, and not to other sources of federal funding.”
While politicians and legal pundits continue to argue over the meaning and legality of Trump’s Executive Order, and how it might play out in police funding, in neighborhoods like Sunset Park, the networking continue.
“We believe that this crisis is a community crisis, a humanity crisis,” Ruiz says. “It does bespeak of the dire need of really coming together and acknowledging our common humanity and respecting and building from that.”
