If Trump ends sanctuary rule, CT immigrant children could be snatched from schools, parents from work: ‘Fear is palpable’

Hartford Courant – Monday, December 30, 2024
By Alison Cross

During President Donald Trump’s first term, nine Connecticut residents sought refuge in houses of worship after receiving orders to deport.

They entered sanctuary as a last resort. Some stayed for days, others months. One lived in a church for more than three and half years as lawyers worked appeals through the immigration courts — but the last ditch effort worked.

“Every one of them won judicial relief,” Rabbi Herbert Brockman, who helped lead Connecticut’s New Sanctuary movement alongside Rev. Paul Fleck and other immigrant advocates, said.

Today, Brockman said that all nine have legal status; Some are citizens, others are on the path to citizenship.

But in Trump’s second term, sanctuary may no longer be an option for the millions of immigrants who are living in the country without legal authorization.

NBC News recently reported that the president-elect plans to rescind a “sensitive locations” policy that restricts Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents’ ability to carry out arrests in churches, schools, hospitals and events including funerals, weddings, rallies and other public demonstrations.

“This was one of the worst case scenarios,” Kica Matos, the president of the National Immigration Law Center, said.

For the last year, Matos said the NILC and its partners have been preparing for the immigration policies Trump may reverse or instate as part of his promise to conduct the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.

While Matos said NILC did prepare for the removal of the sensitive locations memo, she never thought the Trump administration would touch it.

“Faith-based institutions were one of the few places of actual refuge for people facing deportation,” Matos said. “This time around, there is no reprieve.”

Immigrant-rights advocates were swift to condemn Trump’s plans and its implications on education, public health and human decency. Many fear that repealing the sensitive location rule would prevent immigrant children from attending school and stop individuals and families from seeking medical care out of fear of deportation.

Matos said the rule’s reversal “severely limits the options of immigrants to seek safety and protection anywhere.”

If Trump repeals the policy, Matos said Connecticut residents should not be surprised if ICE agents arrive at their children’s school, or at their neighborhood church or hospital.

“That is what we should expect with the lifting of the sensitive locations policy,” Matos said. “It won’t just affect immigrants, it will affect all of us.”

Under the current policy, ICE officers and agents are only allowed to carry out enforcement actions in sensitive locations with approval from agency supervisors. Exceptions include situations involving a “national security or terrorism matter … an imminent risk of death, violence, or physical harm to any person or property … the immediate arrest or pursuit of a dangerous felon, terrorist suspect, or any other individual(s) that present an imminent danger to public … (or) imminent risk of destruction of evidence material to an ongoing criminal case.”

Proponents of Trump’s plan argue that repealing the rule would eliminate administrative burdens and prevent criminals from abusing the sensitive locations policy.

“In the pursuit of public safety, I think that everything needs to be on the table,” House Republican Leader Vincent Candelora said in an interview with the Courant Friday. “I don’t think we should be potentially creating situations where criminals could be harbored in certain locations.”

While Candelora acknowledged the sympathetic views people hold towards immigrant communities, he stressed that churches and schools are not in a position to have the “proper investigatory authority … to determine whether these people are actually safe to be living in our communities.”

“Our borders have been so unsecure over the last four years that it really has been an evolution of immigration. I think originally we saw a lot of people seeking refuge in the United States, and now I think the open border has led to crime rings, cartels, sex trafficking, drug activity that has not just hurt the immigrants themselves, but certainly are impacting our own residents,” Candelora said. “Beginning the process of getting rid of our criminal immigrants will actually begin, I think, a better process of being able to reform immigration and have people that are here have a pathway to citizenship.”

Studies have shown that undocumented immigrants commit felonies and violent crimes at a fraction of the rate of both documented immigrants and U.S. citizens.

According to ICE data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 54% of the individuals deported from Connecticut between 2003 and 2023 had clean criminal records with no misdemeanor or felony convictions.

During this period, ICE deported 2,164 people from the state, according to the data. Just 1% of these removals occurred under Trump’s first term. Over 90% took place while President George W. Bush was in office. The other 9% occurred under President Barack Obama. In the first three years of President Joe Biden’s administration, only four deportations were recorded in Connecticut.

ICE removals in Connecticut peaked in 2007, recording 500 in a single year.

At the time, Matos was serving as deputy mayor in New Haven’s city hall.

She remembers the period of arrests and raids as one of “fear and panic and instability” that came to a head in the early hours of June 6, 2007, when “ICE went into eight homes” in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood “and arrested 32 people.”

“I got a phone call from somebody in the community who was hysterical telling me, ‘Oh my God … there’s ICE in town and they’ve taken away a bunch of families,’” Matos said.

At the time Matos said witnesses “didn’t know what was happening.”

Neighbors awoke to hear doors being broken down. Children watched as deportation officers dragged away their loved ones.

“They saw people being handcuffed and put into trucks and then they just disappeared into the darkness,” Matos said. “We didn’t know who had been arrested, who had been taken away.”

A New York Times article from the day after the raid reported that “Fair Haven resembled a ghost town, with residents huddling inside their houses, afraid that they, too, could be arrested at any moment.”

“There was this entire expectation that they were going to be back,” Matos recalled.

Matos said the event “destabilized” the relationship between the city’s immigrant population and the New Haven Police Department.

“They had to deal with an immigrant community that could not distinguish the difference between the uniform of a police officer from New Haven and the uniform of an ICE officer. And so that created mistrust,” Matos said. “It also started a lot of rumors … We would get texts from people saying ICE is in the supermarket. ICE is in the Park. ICE is here. ICE is there … Every time they saw something that frightened them, they would immediately jump to (thinking) that must be ICE activity.”

Other ICE sweeps were documented in Hartford and Danbury. During Trump’s first term in office, more raids were threatened, but despite community concern, they never materialized in Connecticut.

Today, Matos said fears from Trump’s first administration have resurfaced.

Matos said children are “filled with this dread and fear that at any point in time, their parent is going to be deported.”

“There are already stories, anecdotal evidence of kids who don’t want to go to school, who don’t want their parents out of their immediate sight,” Matos said.

Among the 6.3 million U.S. households that are home to unauthorized immigrants, a 2024 report from the Pew Research Center found that nearly 70% are classified as “mixed status,” meaning that legal residents or U.S. citizens are also part of the household.

The same study estimated that 4.4 million U.S.-born citizens under the age of 18 live with at least one parent who lacks legal status.

Maggie Mitchell Salem, the executive director of Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, a New Haven and Hartford-based nonprofit known as IRIS, described the difficult decisions mothers and fathers face as they ready their families for their potential deportation.

“There are literally conversations happening now where groups like mine are talking to their undocumented clients about who they would trust to leave their children with,” Salem said in an interview with the Courant after Trump’s election.

In November, Quinnipiac University Professor Sheila Hayre, an expert in immigration law, said families were already preparing standby guardianship paperwork for their children.

“The fear is palpable,” she said.

Hayre highlighted the kinds of emergency plans families made under previous administrations, as she recalled the story of one student whose mother kept a credit card hidden under the refrigerator during the Obama era.

“I just knew that every day when I got home from school if she wasn’t there, this was the plan. For at least a week or a couple of days, this is how we’d survive if she just got deported one day,” Hayre remembered the student saying.

Matos said people need to reconsider the notion that Trump’s mass deportation efforts will have no effect on American citizens.

“Your next-door neighbor, your child’s best friend’s parent, the person who you happen to sit next to in your church pew, the person who is waiting in the emergency room along with you … that person could be undocumented, which means that you too will be a witness to the horrors of deportation,” Matos said.

“People don’t have scarlet letters saying ‘I’m undocumented,’” Matos added. “You probably will never know that this person that you’ve been friends with for the longest time was undocumented until they get arrested and deported.”

When Tabitha Sookdeo immigrated to the U.S. from Sint Maarten with her family as a teen, she said “nobody knew that we didn’t have papers.”

Sookdeo, who was born in Guyana and is now the executive director of Connecticut Students for a DREAM, said she eventually gained legal status in 2017 after marrying her partner who is a U.S. citizen. But, at the beginning of the Trump administration, Sookdeo was still undocumented.

“I don’t quite have words to describe the fear that I felt. I think I felt less fear for myself and more fear for my parents and for my younger siblings,” Sookdeo said. “I remember my dad having physical manifestations of stress because of the Trump administration.”

Today, Sookdeo said “similar feelings . ..are coming up.”

After the election, Sookdeo said she helped give a presentation to C4D’s high school-age members to help them understand the election results and what a second Trump term could mean for their families.

When the time came to explain changes to deportation policy and what could happen to the sensitive locations policy, Sookdeo said she felt sick to her stomach and broke into a sweat.

“I remember looking at my colleague and saying, ‘OK, is this the time? Is this a moment where I now tell them very honestly about what can happen?’” Sookdeo said. “I didn’t want to be the person to have to give the bad news.”

During the talk, Sookdeo said you could feel the student’s body language shift.

“You just saw some light leave their eyes,” Sookdeo said. “Many of our members have had traumatic journeys to get to the United States because they’re seeking protection. I’ve heard the horror stories of some of our members being in detention beforehand in trying to come to America, of crossing the Darien Gap. They’re already coming from a precarious situation of trauma and to then know that they’re in America where they should be able to find safety but that they might be faced again with traumatic situations, it’s awful. It truly is.”

Although many members of the immigrant community are struggling with challenges and feelings of defeat, Sookdeo said “people are ready.”

“They’re ready to figure out how to best defend our communities because we’ve been through it one time already,” Sookdeo said. “Even though it’s sad at the same time we are ready to go and we’re resilient … I just hope that we, as residents of Connecticut, hold true to our values and that we come together.”

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