The Greenfield Safe City Ordinance helps disentangle local government from a federal immigration bureaucracy that dehumanizes and brutalizes target populations. It prevents municipal officials from collecting information about people’s immigration status, so that the city doesn’t feed into that system.
Under the Trump administration, federal agencies like ICE and CBP are systematically separating families seeking asylum, provoking calls to limit their power. Their naked cruelty has grown so extreme and bereft of softening humanitarian rhetoric that it’s easy to forget how cruel U.S. immigration policy has been for the past 30 years, let alone the past 250. We needed this ordinance decades ago!
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton described immigrants with a new rhetoric of “criminality,” thus justifying increased immigration enforcement funding. George W. Bush inherited bloated agencies and pumped even more money into them. After Sept. 11, 2001, a new rhetoric of “terrorism” dominated border policing. Multiple agencies were re-organized under the Department of Homeland Security – a bonanza for opportunists seeking private contracts to surveil and incarcerate target populations.
Some Americans felt the new system didn’t go far enough, and formed their own paramilitary organizations to directly harass Central American population groups along the southern border. Barack Obama introduced a less jarring rhetoric of separating the “good” immigrants from the “criminals”. Nonetheless, under his leadership, federal bureaucracies deported more immigrants from the U.S. than under any other president, including – so far – the one who followed him.
The real immigration fight isn’t between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between the cruelty of nationalism and the solidarity of the global working class. While rising oceans and droughts create more refugees, will Greenfield stand up to the bi-partisan federal system designed to destroy families? Will voters reject the false promise that walls and prisons can somehow protect “OUR Community”? Vote Yes on 2!
Ben Grosscup
Greenfield