Paul Bass Photos
Vanesa Suarez, attorney general candidate William Tong address rally.
New Haveners Mia Delgado, Ambar Santiago-Rojas, Jade Santiago-Rojas, and Jim Lopez demonstrate against “caging” children.
As President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to stop separating detained immigrant children from their parents, New Haveners rallied to demand that he stop detaining and deporting them, period.
Immigrant rights organizers joined Democratic attorney general candidate William Tong for the 1 p.m. rally on the steps of First & Summerfield United Methodist Church, a sanctuary congregation across from the Green.
The rally originally was planned to protest the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of separating parents from children when agents detain families at the border. In the hour before the rally, Trump announced, in the wake of bipartisan outrage, that he would order an end to that separation practice. The rally then became a call for a broader rollback of Trump’s deportation crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which doesn’t distinguish between immigrants who have committed crimes and everyone else.
“I don’t think what he has done makes much difference,” Tong, a state representative, said of Trump. “He did something incredibly cruel and unjust. Backpedaling now doesn’t change that.”
He noted that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown is still separating parents from children all over the country — including at First & Summerfield, where Nelson Pinos has spent the last seven months in sanctuary to avoid deportation.
“We should abolish ICE! Migration should not be criminalized!” declared emcee Vanesa Suarez of Unidad Latina en Acción, which organized the rally along with the Connecticut Bail Fund and the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance.
“Close detention centers. Free the children. Free parents.”
ULA argued that the new order actually makes the problem worse because it could end up keeping immigrant families in “cages” longer and because it has no plan to help the children already been separated. (A full statement appears lower down in this story.)
Tong spoke of how his father came here from China a half-century ago without legal permission and started a business. “We had a Republican president. We had a compassionate immigration policy that allowed my father to stay,” he recalled.
He noted that as the first member of his family born in the U.S., “I’m an ancor baby. I am a product of ‘chain migration.’ We are not criminals.” If elected, he promised, he would created a civil rights division within the attorney general’s office that would include a unit focused on immigrant rights. He also promised to push to strengthen the state’s TRUST Act to bar cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE on deportation efforts such as detainer requests.
Tong is one of three Democrats vying for the Democratic attorney general nomination in an Aug. 14 primary. He noted that the endorsed Republican candidate, Sue Hatfield, said a day earlier (in an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program) that she supports the president’s immmigration policy, including at that time the separation of parents and children; she added that she would seek a more comprehensive solution and that the handling of children requires more “discussion.”
Teen Immigrants Speak Out
The rally featured several young New Haven immigrants, such as Carlos Romario (pictured), describing their experiences. Romario, who proclaimed to cheers that he is “undocumented and unafraid,” came here from Ecuador two years ago. He is now a junior at Wilbur Cross High School. He said his sister was stunned and frightened to see ICE agents at the courthouse when she had to go there for a motor vehicle matter; she eventually fled back to Ecuador because, he said, she felt harassed. “My sister meant the world to me. Now I am alone,” he said.
Perhaps the most moving moment of the hour-long rally came when Hazel Mencos (at right in photo), who is now 17, told the story of being detained by federal agents four years ago. Eventually sobbing as she spoke, she told the story in Spanish. Vanesa Suarez translated the story into English. It went like this:
I was 13 years old and I was in the desert with my aunt. We had stopped to rest when immigration grabbed us.
They began asking me for papers. I was left alone. They put me in a car with bars and at that moment I began to feel like I was in a cage.
They put me in an icebox, an immigration cell that was very cold. They put us in there to punish us I was completely alone in that room. In another room was my aunt with other women. In another room were men.
Many times I went into an emotional crisis. I was 13 years old. I couldn’t give myself strength and there were no adults to tell me, ‘You’re going to be OK.’
I was very cold. They didn’t give me any aluminum, like the ones that you see in the pictures now. I was there dirty and hungry because they didn’t give us food. They put me and my aunt in a bus. It was the last time I spoke to my aunt. In the bus we went close to the border of Mexico because there were Mexicans in that bus who were being deported.
They put me in another icebox. My aunt wasn’t there. Later I learned that she had been deported. I spent four or five days in the other icebox. They only let you make one call to a person in the U.S. If the person doesn’t answer, they don’t give you another opportunity to call.
They don’t care if your parents are worried, or if your parents don’t know if you are dead in the desert. I called my mother, who lives in Connecticut. It was Mother’s Day, and I told her that that I had been detained. In the icebox all the women were dirty. We couldn’t shower. They gave us frozen food, which was inhumane, because in that moment we were all malnourished from walking in the desert.
Ted Littleford
The children who are in cages want their voices to be heard. They are alone.
If I can raise my voice now, I will do it and I hope that those children in cages someday will read the news and know that many people on the outside did something for them to be liberated.
Right now I am angry because there’s people that say, ‘Why don’t kids stay in their countries?’ Many blame the children or their parents. The children shouldn’t feel guilty because poverty and the violence is the government’s fault. Many blame the parents, but I think that the parents are only looking for their kids to not suffer, for their kids to not die.
Many times there aren’t other options, and the only option is to migrate to another country. Families don’t migrate until they know that if they stay they’ll die. Sometimes the parents are threatened with death. Sometimes for being part of an activist organization you are threatened with murder because the government doesn’t protect them. They flee because they want their children to survive.
The rally concluded with calls to protest Trump’s immigration policies, and with a salute to sanctuary denizen Nelson Pinos, who emerged from the church to the edge of the top steps to offer a wave of thanks.
The Executive Order
Following is the text of an ULA statement on Trump’s executive order:
Trump’s Executive Order makes the detention crisis worse. Keeping families together — in cages — for months or even years is not a solution. Building more prisons to cage families is not a solution. Furthermore, Housing & Human Services has announced that they will do nothing to reunite the parents who have already been separated from their children.
A breakdown of Trump’s Executive Order by section:
Section 1. codifies Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” directive until new immigration legislation is passed. This means that the government will prosecute all migrants for the bogus crime of “illegal entry” or “re-entry,” which condemns them to prison sentences of up to 20 years. This also means that Trump is holding migrants hostage in an attempt to force Congress to pass regressive immigration legislation.
2. Limits the definition of family to parent-child. Siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. are not considered family.
3. Puts families in cages run by Department of Homeland Security. Previously, children and detained families had to be held in facilities contracted by the Department of Health and Human Services.
3c. Directs the military to build new prisons for migrant families.
3d. Allows all federal departments to offer their buildings as prisons.
Source: the Executive Order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/affording-congress-opportunity-address-family-separation/
Also, the New York Times reports that HHS has said “There will be no grandfathering of existing cases” — i.e., the already separated kids will not be reunited with their parents any sooner.