Making New York ICE-free
reports on a new campaign for immigrant rights in New York City.
FOR MAY Day this year, New York activists are organizing something new. It's called the ICE-FREE NYC campaign, and its goal is to end the collaboration of city agencies with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The campaign will be launched publicly on April 29, with a press conferences in front of ICE offices at 26 Federal Plaza.
As the campaign's website explains, "Currently, the New York Police Department and Department of Corrections (DOC) hand over thousands of New Yorkers to ICE through detainer requests (also known as immigration holds), and recently, we have found that there are sensitive locations like homeless shelters, courts, etc. where people are intercepted and handed over to ICE."
Through public education, the campaign hopes to mobilize New Yorkers to oppose these policies that separate family members from their loved ones and force immigrant communities to live in a constant state of fear and intimidation.
The Migrant Power Alliance (MPA) spearheaded this campaign. The MPA was formed a little more than a year ago to give expression to frustration with comprehensive immigration reform legislation in Congress, and with mainstream immigrant rights organizations that supported this legislation.
Although the proposed legislation would ostensibly offer a path to citizenship for some, it would exclude most undocumented immigrants in this country through red tape and criminalization.
The MPA points of unity support a struggle for unconditional full citizenship and human rights, a stop to the criminalization of migrants, an end to militarization of the border and the right to "mobility across continents," recognizing the unconditional rights of future as well as current immigrants in a world in which working people must often uproot themselves in order to survive.
After months of discussion dedicated to putting the campaign together, MPA got ICE-FREE NYC going on April 25, bringing together representatives from grassroots organizations, and individuals who are first- and second-generation immigrants, and energized and eager to get involved.
A representative of the Queens Neighborhood United, which organizes against the effects of gentrification in Queens, spoke about the links between economically vulnerable communities and gentrification's displacement of those communities. In fact, Queens is the borough with the highest number of deportations in the city.
RECENT ACTIONS by the administration of new Mayor Bill de Blasio have given activists hope that the city could be pressured into stopping its collaboration with ICE. For example, de Blasio backs a plan to provide municipal IDs to city residents without federal documentation, so that they can have access basic city services, open bank accounts and lease apartments. In addition, the city council looks poised to grant municipal voting rights to green card holders, increasing non-citizens' political clout here.
But these changes, while promising, are just the beginning--and we must build a strong, activist campaign that fights for full protection for all immigrants living and working in New York City. According to the MPA:
Although the City Council passed legislation in 2011 and 2013 to limit the city's cooperation with ICE, the DOC statistics demonstrate that legislation allows for the city administration to systematically turn thousands of New Yorkers over to ICE custody. By complying, the DOC helps place immigrant New Yorkers into the grip of the country's inhumane detention and deportation system that already deports approximately 400,000 people every year.
Between October 2012 and September 2013, the DOC cooperated with an overwhelming 73 percent of all requests submitted by ICE and held 3,080 individuals beyond the time the individual would have otherwise been released. The DOC turned over 3,074 of those individuals into ICE custody.
Nationally, deportations reached 2 million under the Obama administration this month. This terrible statistic forced some mainstream immigrant rights organizations that are constantly cutting slack to the Democrats to finally criticize Obama publically in national actions under the slogan "2Million2Many."
This is progress, but some radicalizing migrant youth who experience the daily the effects of these assaults, are looking for alternatives to liberals NGOs. The MPA's spirit of unapologetic solidarity with all immigrants and their families--and demand for full equality--presents such an alternative.
