By Zach Ahmad , New York Civil Liberties Union | Editorial credit: Ameer Mussard-Afcari / shutterstock.com
Trump’s efforts to expel millions of immigrants are a threat to all of us.
New York State is home to nearly 700,000 undocumented immigrants. Most of them have lived in New York for more than a decade. They are our friends, neighbors, coworkers and classmates and they are essential members of our communities.
These New Yorkers fill critical jobs throughout the state including as farmworkers, home health care aids, daycare workers, cooks, and construction workers. They contribute more than $3 billion in taxes to our state and local coffers. Around 70 percent of them are essential workers.
We know Trump’s attacks won’t just impact undocumented immigrants, especially since many immigrants live in homes with people who have different immigration statuses. Our state relies heavily on all immigrant New Yorkers who contribute $61 billion dollars in taxes and constitute $138 billion dollars in spending power every year. Nearly half of small businesses are immigrant-run in New York City — that includes beloved restaurants, clothing stores, laundry services, nail salons, and more.
We know what a Trump presidency looks like. We remember the screams of young children who were snatched from their parents’ arms, the chaos unleashed by travel bans, and the families separated, with some still hoping to be reunited nearly a decade later.
Now Donald Trump promises to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” This will rip families, neighborhoods, and entire communities apart while devastating our economy and tarnishing New York’s legacy as a place where immigrants help our state thrive.
Parents of American citizens will be forced to choose between taking their children with them to countries where they could face life-threatening danger, or leave them in the U.S. to fend for themselves. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan seems to relish this possibility, saying in an interview that the best way to avoid family separation is for families to “be deported together.”
Kids could come to school to find that their friends have been deported. New Yorkers could wake up to find their neighbors have vanished. These are not far-fetched scenarios. They are likely to play out if Trump gets his way.
Trump cannot, and does not plan to, carry out mass deportations on his own. He and his advisors have been plain about their intentions to enlist state and local authorities in their campaign of cruelty, leaning on local police and jails to help arrest and detain our immigrant neighbors. New York’s state leaders must not be complicit.
New York for All
All New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status, want to live free lives, participate in their communities, and provide for their family. But for some New Yorkers, their immigration status means they live in fear that interacting with a government agency could have catastrophic consequences for themselves or their loved ones.
The President-elect has made clear he wants state and local law enforcement to help him carry out his mass deportations, and more broadly, he wants local and state governments to collude with him to uproot millions of immigrants. Before and after Trump’s first presidency, ICE’s raids and scare tactics separated families, and for many years, ICE has leaned on local law enforcement and government agencies to aid their arrests, deportations, and family separation. The new Trump Administration is guaranteed to super-charge these efforts.
In this climate of intense fear, families may be scared to seek life-saving medical care. Parents might wonder if it’s safe to send their children to school. Survivors of domestic violence could think twice about reaching out for support.
This kind of environment in which many New Yorkers are terrified to reach out for help won’t make any of us safer. Data shows that crime is lower in places where officials do not divert time and resources for a hostile immigration agenda.
A bill in the state legislature called the New York for All Act would keep our state out of the cruelty that Trump will inflict and would help prevent New York immigrants from losing trust in local and state governments. The legislation explicitly prevents local law enforcement and state agencies from colluding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport our immigrant neighbors.
California, Washington, and Illinois have already enacted protections like these. New York must follow suit before it’s too late.
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Related News:
Document: The New York For All Act
Listen Now: Immigration News: Mass Deportation
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Dignity Not Detention
For Trump to make his mass deportation plans work, he will need a lot of space to detain immigrants before they are deported. ICE has around 42,000 beds under current congressional funding, but Trump wants to deport millions of people. The incoming administration will likely rely heavily on renting space inside local jails to house the people officials want to deport.
Here too New York must not be a part of this abject cruelty.
Long before Trump announced his deportation agenda, ICE has contracted with county jails across the country to detain immigrants in its custody, effectively outsourcing the responsibility of detaining immigrants in removal proceedings to local governments. Now things are about to get much worse.
In counties like Orange, Rensselaer, and others across the state, ICE counts on local jails to warehouse immigrants. Conditions inside immigration detention facilities are notoriously poor, with reports of sexual abuse, denial of health care, and unsanitary conditions.
New York can make sure that it is not unnecessarily facilitating these kinds of human rights violations. The Dignity Not Detention Act would take steps towards ending ICE detention in New York. It would prohibit new contracts, renewals, and expansions of agreements with counties, and it would require counties to terminate existing contracts with ICE.
A Lawyer by Their Side
Trump’s mass deportation plans mean that many more people will inevitably be facing the prospect of deportation in immigration court. People in removal proceedings have a right to an attorney, but unlike in criminal court, they are not appointed a lawyer if they cannot afford one. New York can make sure those facing deportation have a lawyer by their side.
Immigration cases are incredibly complex, and it is immensely helpful for those in deportation proceedings to have legal representation. People are much more likely to win their immigration cases and avoid getting kicked out of the country if they have an attorney.
That’s why state lawmakers must pass the Access to Representation Act, which would ensure that every New Yorker facing deportation proceedings has the right to a lawyer funded by the state. The legislature must simultaneously make sure that it builds on past commitments by adequately funding immigration legal services, and invests in training and development to meet an increasing need for legal services.
Fighting Mass Deportations is Good Politics
Moving on these legislative initiatives is more important than ever and doing so is politically wise. New Yorkers – and New York voters – don’t want what’s about to come from a more emboldened Trump.
A million more New York voters rejected Trump than went for him. That means millions and millions more are looking for New York to defend our freedoms and fight Trump’s cruelty. Beyond that, data shows that many of the votes for Trump should not be seen as an embrace of his immigration policies but rather as a rejection of the status quo and our broken immigration system. In fact, we have hard proof pro-immigrant policies are political winners with New York voters.
The NYCLU ran surveys earlier this year in two representative battleground congressional districts. We found nearly two-thirds of voters in these districts backed pathways to citizenship and recognized the important contributions of immigrants to our state’s communities.
Nearly half of these voters said they’d be more likely to vote for their candidates for backing a pathway to citizenship and protecting longtime residents and DREAMers.
Even in battleground districts, pro-immigrant messaging has traction when politicians don’t cede the issue of immigration to MAGA extremism.
New York lawmakers must act quickly to shore up our defenses against Trump’s plans that will destroy families, damage our economy, and make us all less safe.
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