As a top New Haven official in 2007, Kica Matos helped formulate the city’s general order prohibiting police from working with federal immigration officials to enforce immigration law.
But city law allows collaboration when crimes go beyond crossing the border illegally.
Matos is now president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigration Law Center while still living in the Fair Haven section of New Haven. She said her organization has been preparing to fight back against anti-immigration policies in the second Donald Trump administration.
“We’re going to be using the law, particularly litigation and advocacy, to fight off the extreme anti-immigrant agenda of the administration [and] challenge the constitutionality of some of the administration’s plans,” Matos said. “We have also begun to engage in collaboration with other organizations that focus on either mass mobilization or advocacy to make sure we are coordinating our efforts.”
Mayor Justin Elicker expanded New Haven’s general order to all city employees in 2020.
Now, the law firm of Stephen Miller—a top immigration advisor to the incoming Trump administration—is threatening criminal action against Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont over the state’s immigration policies. Matos—and the vibrant immigrant community in Fair Haven—are taking action to protect themselves.
For the past 23 years, John Lugo and Unidad Latina en Accion have defended the rights of immigrants in New Haven, saving some from deportation. The group is made up mostly of immigrants themselves, supported by U.S. citizens.
“I know the mayor promised he would help our community, but I think the first line of defense for our community is OUR community,” Lugo, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Colombia, said. “We need to understand that if they decide to mobilize ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, we’re the ones who need to know who they are and how we’re going to tell the other people where they are and how we’re going to react when they come to our communities.”
Longstanding federal policy considers schools, clinics, hospitals, courts, houses of worship and rallies to be “sensitive locations” where ICE agents would not enter to make arrests for immigration violations.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to revoke that policy.
Public meetings held by local nonprofits and activist groups in Greater New Haven have drawn hundreds of participants who want to learn how they can support their immigrant neighbors.
One option is a tactic employed during the first Trump administration, according to Charla Nich with Shoreline Indivisible, a Connecticut chapter of a nationwide “grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda,” according to its website.
“We would get a phone call or a text saying, ‘Hey, the word is that ICE is at, you know, Planet Fitness on Route 80 in East Haven,’ and whoever was available would just show up,” Nich said. “We’d just stand back, we would watch, we wouldn’t interfere, we would record, and make that available. We might also call the media.”
It’s not only undocumented immigrants under threat — those with Temporary Protected Status from several countries suffering war, gang violence, or natural disasters who are here legally are also at risk.
Trump has thrown birthright citizenship into doubt, which would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution if it were to be revoked. He’s also suggested denaturalizing immigrants who have become U.S. citizens, like Lugo at Unidad Latina en Accion.
Eric, with Unidad Latina, has been in the U.S. for eight years. He asked that his last name be withheld out of concern for his safety.
He said he’s happy he found work in New Haven in a supportive community.
“I haven’t committed any crime,” Eric, whose three children were born here, said. “But I’m afraid because of what I’ve heard about immigration raids. I think it’s very bad because this country was built by immigrants from all over the world.”