RI ACLU to Fight Trump Immigration Issues Town by Town Through Ordinances
Sunday, February 19, 2017
RI ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown told GoLocal on Friday that the advocacy group intends to counteract President Donald Trump's immigration policies on a municipal level.
Just weeks after announcing that the RI ACLU is going to provide a package of polices "that can be adopted to counteract the federal administration’s clear disdain for the immigrant community," Brown told GoLocal News Editor Kate Nagle on GoLocal LIVE how the group intends to act.
Brown on Trump - and Immigration
"As a result of the President's executive orders -- there is a lot of fear in the community about what's going to happen," said Brown.
"A lot of the things we might propose are not necessarily things the state or municipalities have to follow through on [from the President], and I'll give the example of a naturalized [RI] citizen from Guatemala who was twice held up by immigration agents," said Brown. "These detainers are issued by bureaucratic agents -- sometimes they don't do the barest of investigations to see if there's sufficient grounds to hold them as was the case with Ada Morales."
"One of the aspects of the President's orders is to encourage state and local police departments to comply with these detainers. Any time they get one of these civil detainers, the President wants to force police to actually enforce them. And in this lawsuit we filed, the judge found it was unconstitutional," said Brown. "These detainers were holding people based on something less than probable cause."
Actions Planned
"So one thing municipalities can do, and the state can do, is adopt policies or an ordinance, which is something we're putting together, that says we are not going to comply with these types of detainers," said Brown. "If you have a judicial order with it, if the court has said pick this person up, we'll do it. But if it's just some bureaucrat signing a piece of paper, we're going to decide on our own not to do it because we're going to be held liable for violating someone's constitutional rights."
Brown added:
"I think different municipalities have different policies-- one of the ideas to make all municipalities aware of what limits there are and instead of making them policies that can be changed in a day is to have ordinances so they're there and are firm to make people know of what can and can't be done -- i think that will provide protections in a foundational basis rather than relying in informal policies -- and they're all over the map. We think the court decisions tied to the efforts that the President is making, give impetus to municipalities to adopt clear standards.
Once [our] package is done we hope to distribute it to all municipalities -- we've heard from community advocates across the state that want their city and town councils to take action. We'll give this package to them -- and then advocates and sympathetic local officials can address this issues staying ahead of what the President has in mind, instead of turning every state and city agency into immigration officials."
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