Immigration talk in New Haven focuses on sanctuary cities

J.R. Romano, chairman of the Republican Party of Connecticut, right, speaks to crowd attending discussion on sanctuary cities at Gateway Community College Monday. John Dankosky of WNPR is at left.Mary O'Leary - New haven Register less J.R. Romano, chairman of the Republican Party of Connecticut, right, speaks to crowd attending discussion on sanctuary cities at Gateway Community College Monday. John Dankosky of WNPR is at left.Mary O'Leary - ... more Photo: Digital First Media Photo: Digital First Media Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Immigration talk in New Haven focuses on sanctuary cities 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN >> The dialogue on what constitutes a sanctuary city seesawed back and forth Monday from visceral, personal reflections to a call to talk out disagreements on immigration one on one.

J.R. Romano, chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, was the lightning rod as he tried to explain the perspective of those who want stricter enforcement of deportation of undocumented residents to an audience that was working to protect them.

“A friend of mine worked his tail off to get into Yale. He didn’t get in. His spot was given to someone else. To him and his family he did everything right and that is unfair,” he said.

Romano said that kind of resentment is what fueled the presidential election with Donald Trump now in the White House.

This brought a response from Douglas Stone, a Yale professor in applied physics, who said only 1 in 27 applicants might get into the Ivy League school. He said he has personally recommended students for acceptance who didn’t make it. .

“I worry that there is a certain type of scapegoating when you say someone took his spot. What could that mean? An illegal immigrant took his spot? Is that what you are saying?” Stone asked.

“The perception to that family and that family’s friends, is that is what happened,” Romano said.

Angel Fernandez Chavero, the son of Mexican immigrants, said he and his sister got into Yale, while another sibling went to the University of California at Berkeley.

“We worked super hard to accomplish our parents’ dreams,” Fernandez said, to clapping from the 100 people at the discussion at Gateway Community College.

Fernandez accused Romano of making “slippery arguments” that blame other people for personal disappointments. He said Romano and other Republicans have also engaged in rhetoric that repeats the Trump accusation against Mexicans that they are murderers.

Romano said he was not maligning Fernandez’s family. “I’m just trying to give the other side of the argument,” he said of people’s perceptions that have to be understood if there is going to be immigration reform.

“There is no other side when it is based on racism and xenophobia,” said Fernandez, who is the acting interim executive director of the Commission on Equal Opportunities in New Haven.

The discussion was hosted by John Dankosky of WNPR radio.

The Trump administration has threatened to take away federal funding for those cities that don’t cooperate in turning over undocumented immigrants to Immigration and Custom Enforcement officials.

Michael Lawlor, Gov. Dannel Malloy’s liaison on criminal justice issues, said the current policy of the state on responding to ICE detainers is legal, as are the police policies in New Haven and Hartford where they do not ask about residents’ legal status.

New Haven’s Acting Police Chief Anthony Campbell said community policing is predicated on trust. “You cannot solve crimes, you cannot help victims if they are afraid to reach out to you,” he said. Campbell said there was a time when he first came on the job that undocumented immigrants were routinely victims of crime because they were so isolated.

“We are guardians of everyone in this community,” Campbell said.

Dankosky asked why a community would call itself a sanctuary city, if that makes it a target of the federal government.

Tomas Reyes, chief of staff to Mayor Toni Harp, said they are not going to get caught up in the title.

“We are going to continue doing what we have been doing and what we have been doing has defined us as a sanctuary city,” Reyes said. “We welcome everyone who comes to our city.”

Immigration advocate Kica Matos was a city official when 33 people were picked up in New Haven in 2007 in an ICE raid.

Before that, Matos led Junta for Progressive Action, and John Lugo founded Unidad Latino En Accion. Both organizations worked to get policies in place to protect and integrate undocumented immigrants into the life of New Haven.

The police order was one change, but the biggest one was the issuance of ID cards for all residents that would allow them to access city services, a project that has been duplicated in a dozen other places. To date 10,000 cards have been distributed in New Haven..

Matos said the use of the term sanctuary city is not just a matter of semantics.

She said after Trump was elected president, she and Lugo were getting calls from immigrants who were “in abject terror” of being deported and inquiring how much violence to anticipate.

Matos said they have gone back into the shadows, afraid to socialize, but the fact that the city is willing to call itself a sanctuary “means the world to these people. The use of language does matter.”

The Rev. James Manship of St. Rose of Lima parish in Fair Haven had a somewhat different perspective.

Like Junta for Progressive Action and ULA, leaders in the parish have been training immigrants on how to respond to ICE and helping parents with guardianships, but they don’t dwell on marches and rallies.

“We don’t need to poke our finger in the eye of the lion,” he said.

His parish represents 18 countries, 15 Mexican states and multiple language groups from other Central American countries.

“They need to know that their church is with them. If I am not delivering for them from the pulpit and from my public life, then I am failing them,” he said.

“… our church is a place of respite and I think that is what New Haven is and Connecticut is. It provides a breathing spot. It provides room that we can come in and stop reacting to all of the stuff around us and get focused again so that rather than reacting, we can act,” Manship said.

It was the parishioners idea to push for driver licenses, he said.

Manship asked why there are not more communities of faith involved in the issue and he concluded that it was because people don’t want to talk about race.

“We don’t want to deal with it,” he said of a state that is segregated by wealth and race.

“We live in our little pockets. We come out and we get this nice feeling and then we go back into our little pockets. That is not the way to build a democracy,” he said.

Manship said through CONECT (Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut) they have been able to reach out to people on the other side.

“It doesn’t happen in forums like this. It happens one on one with people talking to each other.

These ad hominem arguments and this propaganda doesn’t help the public discourse. It doesn’t help our politics,” Manship said.

Muneer Ahmad, a Yale law professor, who runs a clinic on immigrant rights, said it isn’t important whether New Haven calls itself a sanctuary city or not.

“What ICE sees, what people on the right see is our values are different. What we are facing now on a national level is an announcement of retaliation on a basis of values of inclusion,” Ahmad said of U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions restated pledge to target sanctuary cities.

Dankosky asked Ahmad how he responds to people who say undocumented immigrants are breaking the law and that should be taken seriously.

Ahmad said that is “a little bit of a rhetorical dead end.”

He said we have an economy that encourages people to come into the country and take the lowest paying jobs. He said the service industry is hugely dependent on them.

“We derive benefits day in and day out because of undocumented labor and then we turn around and say ‘oh, you broke the law,’ That is the kind of move that keeps the population living in fear,” Ahmad said.

“We’ve got to figure out how do we actually live in a society where we are not willing to let 11 million people live in caste conditions,” the professor said.

Romano also brought up the murder of Casey Chadwick by an undocumented Haitian immigrant in 2015 in Norwich.

“What happened to Casey is real ... the perspective of her friends and family changes because of that. As a collective, as a nation, we have to be honest with that perspective and dealing with the reality and the perspective,” Romano said.

Joseph Foran, a leader of ULA, said the way to respond to such tragedies is with compassion.

“But it is wrong for politicians to scapegoat people who aren’t guilty, people who have nothing to do with crime and responding to tragedies with more tragedy for more families,” Foran said. He said living in a sanctuary city prevents more violence like that from happening.

Dankosky asked Romano how do you change the perspective of people “who take one incident and and then broaden it to millions of people?”

Romano said “that is exactly what happens with gun owners. Someone does something really, really bad and you want to go after everyone.”

He said he understands the hard work the immigrant community does. Romano said he wants to see immigration rules streamlined. He said undocumented immigrants don’t want to leave what they have built here to get in line legally to become citizens, but it is unfair to those who are following the rules.

Colleen Shaddox of East Haddam told Romano “you can’t blow a racist dog whistle and then say it is not my dog whistle.” She said most violent crimes are committed by white men born in the United States.

Statistically, immigrant communities have less crime, Dankosky pointed out. Romano said you can’t ignore crimes committed by immigrants. He said the number one obligation of the Constitution is to protect its citizens.

Manship said Romano was reinforcing incorrect perceptions, rather than correcting them.

A representative of Connecticut Shoreline Indivisable group said the way to change prejudice “is people to people. It takes longer, but it works.” She said it was the responsibility of officials to not only acknowledge misunderstandings, but to re-educate people “not to repeat the same slanders.”

Fernandez ended the hour and a half conversation by encouraging everyone, no matter where they stand “to reflect on what the nature of this country is ... we can all make a difference when we think about that and act upon what we believe. This little city might not mean much in many ways, but our example can still resound across the land ...”