Several New Haven residents, including international college students, have been arrested by immigration enforcement at two Connecticut airports in the last month.
The arrests have taken place at Tweed New Haven Airport and Bradley International Airport.
Mayor Justin Elicker (D) said he doesn’t actually know how many people have been apprehended at Tweed. He knows of two, but said the number could be higher. It has been difficult for officials and news outlets alike to get specifics on arrest totals from ICE.
“We've expressed very clearly to the airport authority board that we do not want the airport to cooperate with ICE beyond what it is legally required to do,” Elicker said.
In response, a spokesperson for Tweed said they remain committed to the safety of the public.
“Federal rules require airports to grant unescorted access to qualifying government employees, including federal law enforcement officers (49 CFR § 1542.209(m)(1)). All badges and access privileges remain subject to the airport’s TSA-approved security program,” the spokesperson said.
“Airport procedures allow an officer’s legitimacy to be quickly confirmed while keeping security intact for passengers and employees. We must allow TSA and New Haven Police the ability to quickly assess a potential threat. We cannot leave a security gap where someone carrying a gun and wearing a mask in the parking lot or terminal is simply assumed to be a federal officer,” they continued.
Elicker said undocumented residents should decide for themselves whether to go to the airport.
“I think people need to use their own judgment about anywhere they go now, because we've just seen over and over again, ICE changing their tactics and targeting people where they think they can detain them,” Elicker said.
The arrests came in the wake of major ICE operations in Danbury in late August, and an arrest outside of a courthouse in Meriden.
Elicker was joined at City Hall on Monday morning by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and several immigration lawyers and advocates.
Glenn Formica, a lawyer from the American Immigrant Legal Clinic, accused ICE of targeting undocumented residents without criminal records. He said the authorities were ignoring Fourth Amendment rights to due process, which apply to all people in the United States regardless of citizenship.
“They're just grabbing people and then detaining them access to a reasonable bond for a very long time before they get in front of a new immigration judge,” Formica said.
“These are people, and they are not criminals,” he continued. “God bless us if they were actually treated as criminals, because they would have the right to a prompt bond hearing.”
Before the press conference, Blumenthal had met with several students who had been detained. He said three of the four had been held longer than necessary — one of them, longer than two weeks.
“They had no involvement in any criminal activity. They have lives here. They are members of the community, and they have every reason to expect that they would go on with those lives, except that ICE literally seized them and did it illegally,” Blumenthal said. “These young people would have been better treated and given more justice if they had committed serious felonies, violations of criminal law; they would have been given more due process, access to attorneys, which was denied, release on bail much sooner, which was denied.”
There are no ICE detention centers in Connecticut. When people are apprehended in Connecticut, they can be brought as far as Southern California.
ICE did not reply to a request for comment on this story.
