Amherst forum explores fears and perspectives on coming immigration crackdown
Published: 12-23-2024 11:35 AM
Modified: 12-23-2024 6:00 PM |
NORTHAMPTON — Even many in Donald Trump’s circle are unsure whether the president-elect intends to follow through on his often expansive, and some would say, hyperbolic rhetoric — the kind of exaggerated speech that heralded a “big, beautiful wall” that never came close to fruition. But immigration advocates from the state are taking the president-elect at his word and bracing for the worst as the countdown to Inauguration Day clocks in at less than a month away.
“I think it’s gonna be bad, even worse than Trump I,” said Javier Luengo-Garrido, an organizing strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
Luengo-Garrido’s remarks came as a panelist at Jones Library in Amherst, alongside Razvan Sibii, professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Daily Hampshire Gazette columnist, and Ariana Keigan, associate director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, in an event sponsored by Amnesty International of Amhers.
Luengo-Garrido did extensive fieldwork in support of the Work and Family Mobility Act — allowing undocumented people to get driver’s licenses, which took effect in Masachusetts last year. He warned those in attendance on Dec. 8: “They are going to start challenging citizenship papers. They are going to start challenging naturalization. For the last 15 to 20 years, we know that they have been analyzing and studying the federalization of the National Guard.”
Despite the clear setbacks Trump promises for those who support immigration, panelists also faulted Democratic leadership, both federal and state, for what’s to come.
“We’re going to run into many issues, but also because of the inaction of the Democratic Party,” said Luengo-Garrido. When the party held control of the House, Senate and presidency in 2020, it “would have been able to create certain conditions to protect minorities, [but] they chose not to do it. ... That’s one of the many, many reasons why we find ourselves where we are right now.”
Sibii concurred, saying there was no federal effort to protect minorities over the following four years, and that Massachusetts, regardless of being among the most liberal states in the country, failed to take key steps such as coordinating housing and jobs for undocumented immigrants.
“They’re dealing supposedly with the crisis in and around Boston — housing crisis, undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers. … Now they’re reducing the period of time that they can stay in the shelters,” Sibii said, while neglecting to marshal western Massachusetts resources to help. “Does anybody have a spare room? Does anybody have a job that they could give to somebody?”
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These are the questions Sibii thinks Gov. Maura Healey should be asking immigration activists, groups and individuals to alleviate the strain of immigration in Boston.
“Supposedly immigrant-friendly people in government, in the U.S., are not really seriously putting some serious planning efforts in use, [by] essentially distributing individuals into communities that want them,” he said.
“It’s not happening now, and if it’s not happening in a place like Massachusetts. Imagine a United States under a second Trump where the lens is definitely, ‘They are criminals.’”
Luengo-Garrido and Keigan are both advocates of ICE Out of Massachusetts, a grassroots campaign that aims to “disentangle” collaboration between state law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, Keigan said. ICE Out policies would ensure that “local officers in correctional facilities, police officers can’t be deputized and have our taxpayer dollars in Massachusetts be used to pay to do the work of federal immigration enforcement.” Her organization, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, an immigrant-led organization that provides food distribution and driver’s license assistance, is developing a community defense network to support members in case of detentions.
Luengo-Garrido, however, said that nonprofits will not solve the problem of immigration, and that states must come to the fore in protecting immigrants under Trump II.
“Sometimes I hear advocates talking about the immigration system being broken. It is not broken. It’s working pretty healthy for what they want … which is getting people in and out as fast as they can, and the darker the skin, the faster they want them out.”
Sibii detailed the evolution of immigration in America.
Initially a state-level issue under the authority of the Treasury Department, it has over time been passed off to different federal agencies: first to the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, the Department of Justice during World War II, and since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security after the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was disbanded in 2003.
Sibii called for a “new paradigm” in which immigrants are seen, “institutionally and philosophically,” as future Americans under a new department with the sole duty of overseeing immigration.
“The irony is that everybody seems to care a lot about immigration and yet, unlike other countries, we don’t actually have a full-fledged department of immigration who can deal with every aspect that there is — an aspect of criminality, but also more importantly to me, the aspect of helping incoming immigrants of all kinds, refugees or not, assimilate, whatever that word actually means: find jobs, find communities that are happy to have them, and so on.”
Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com.