Laura Glesby Photo
Harp at the rally.
After facing heckling from protesters, Mayor Toni Harp agreed to meet with immigrant rights activists in support of passing a sanctuary city ordinance in New Haven.
Harp was an invited speaker at a rally outside City Hall on Wednesday evening prompted by President Trump’s promises of increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in coming weeks. Immigrants, community organizers, faith leaders, police officers, and city officials spoke to the crowd over the course of the two-hour rally. The officials, including Harp and top cops and state Attorney General William Tong, vowed to support undocumented immigrants and opposed the raids.
As Harp began to speak, the crowd interrupted her with chants. They related to a proposal supported over the past year, and resisted by elected officials, to codify New Haven’s pro-immigration policies — including a directive against police questioning people about their immigration backgrounds — into an official “sanctuary city” designation.
“What do we want? A real sanctuary ordinance. When do we want it? Now,” members of the crowd shouted while Harp spoke.
The sanctuary city ordinance would need to be passed by the Board of Alders, Harp told the crowd. “But I will work with you to work with them to get it to happen,” she said.
“We have been a sanctuary city for years and I have supported it from the start,” Harp added later.
She read from a statement she had issued after boycotting a meeting with Trump and other mayors in 2018; the statement protested Trump’s citations of 23 sanctuary cities across the country, not including New Haven.
“The federal government hasn’t asked us to enforce their environmental laws. It hasn’t asked us to enforce their labor laws,” she said, affirming her stance against the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
The crowd, including Lauren Garrett (front right), spills off the sidewalk at Church Street.
Last year, according to Fatima Rojas, a volunteer with Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA) who co-led the rally, Harp declined to meet with activists hoping to obtain her support for a legal ordinance upholding New Haven’s sanctuary status. Harp had maintained to the activists at the time that New Haven already was a sanctuary city so there was no need to add an official designation, Rojas said.
“New Haven is a sanctuary city in culture, in enforcement, but not in law,” Rojas argued after the rally.
She acknowledged Harp’s past commitment to creating a de facto sanctuary city in New Haven, saying, “She’s been a great supporter.”
Rojas said that activists have been meeting individually with members of the Board of Alders in order to advocate for the ordinance. “The majority are on board,” she said. ULA plans to meet soon with the board’s president, Tyisha Walker-Myers.
Rojas said she hopes a sanctuary ordinance would legally protect undocumented immigrants from being asked about their status by police officers and city officials. The department created a policy to that effect in 2006.
Earlier in the rally, Connecticut Attorney General Tong and NHPD officials affirmed commitments to protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation.
Tong spoke of his own parents’ journey to the United States, initially arriving on tourist visas. “I’m someone the president would call an ‘anchor baby,’” he said.
Retired Assistant Police Chief Luiz Casanova, later joined by current Acting Police Chief Otoniel Reyes, emphasized the importance of developing a strong relationship with the city’s undocumented communities to the work of the NHPD. Casanova cited his experience as the district manager of Fair Haven, saying that crime in the area reduced by “double digits” after the police made an effort to strengthen ties with undocumented immigrants.
Luiz Casanova and Otoniel Reyes.
Casanova recalled a set of ICE [federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in the area 2007. “The day after the raids, it looked like a nuclear bomb hit Fair Haven,” he said.
“What ICE did at the time was a hit and run,” he added. “They came in and destroyed” community policing efforts, he said.
“I want to assure the New Haven community that the New Haven Police Department is not going to subscribe to the antics of ICE,” Casanova declared.
Lauren Garrett, a member of Hamden’s Legislative Council who is running to become the town’s mayor, spoke as well. She noted that her husband’s mother’s family came to the United States while fleeing the Nazis. “The U.S. took them in because it was the right thing to do,” she said.
Faith leaders and community organizers also spoke at the rally.
Anghy Idrovo of Connecticut Students for Dream said that she and her family immigrated to the United States “full of dreams and hope” when she was twelve years old. She came “carrying a lot of trauma,” she said.
Anghy Idrovo.
She recalled thoughts that raced through her mind on a daily basis when she was in middle school: “What if I come back home and I don’t find my parents? What if I get put in a foster home?”
Barbara Hernandez of Make the Road Connecticut shared a similar experience. “One of my family members has faced deportation proceedings for years,” she said. “I know what it feels like to be worrying every day that my family would be separated.”
“Do Not Look Away.”
Rabbi Herbert Brockman of Hamden called for a moment of silence in memorial of a father and daughter, Óscar and Valeria Ramírez, who died attempting to reach the U.S. border. A photo of their bodies face down in the Rio Grande gained widespread media attention this week.
One protester carried a sign with that photograph, captioned “Do not look away.”