Lucy Gellman File Photo
Matos (pictured): Getting the team ready.
New Haven’s Kica Matos is getting ready for Trump immigration raids. She needs New Haven’s help to pay the bill.
Matos heads the National Immigration Law Center, one of the nonprofit advocacy groups at the forefront of efforts to prepare to protect people targeted by the president-elect’s promised mass deportation sweeps of communities and workplaces.
She needs more lawyers to rush to court in response to those raids; she hopes to triple her 18-member legal department. She’s also putting together a “rapid response network so we can be responsive to community needs around the country,” Matos told the Independent Thursday. “That team will consist of organizers, lawyers, social workers and communications experts” who “will be deployed to areas where raids are taking place to support community-led efforts.”
Community leaders have already begun meeting in Fair Haven to form one of those efforts. New Haven has experience preparing for raids and spreading the word fast to fight back: The feds swarmed into New Haven in 2007 to try to punish New Haven for passing local measures to protect immigrants from crime and help them access banking. Matos at the time was the deputy mayor who crafted those policies and helped organize the community in response to federal raids.
Her current organization, the NILC, sued the first Trump administration to protect Tennessee factory workers snared in a raid and to oppose a wealth test for new immigrants. It successfully sued to prevent the Trump I Administration from rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, to protect immigrants who protested federal policies, and to stop a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations.
At that time progressives nationwide were fired up to resist Trump administration policies. Donations flooded into groups fighting back. This time around, groups like NILC are encountering a wave of fatigue and resignation. Post-election donations are up from the same period a year ago, but not near the pace of the period following the 2016 election.
Matos appealed directly to her New Haven neighbors to help her group ramp up for Trump II. Click here to make a donation.
“If the Administration comes for immigrants in our beloved community,” she said, “I will do everything to protect” them.
