As Coloradans waits anxiously for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan to begin – remember he has promised to call it Operation Aurora — Denver’s Mayor Mike Johnston has responded to the unknown with a plan that emphasizes our shared humanity and America’s legal framework of rights.
Like Johnston, we too are unsure how seriously to take the threats of Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller, whose anti-immigration sentiments run far deeper than deporting violent criminals and preventing illegal crossings at the border facilitated by coyotes. Miller has said for years now that under Trump’s administration, millions of people will be rounded up and deported in America’s largest immigration enforcement sting.
Just before Christmas, Miller’s group sent a letter to Denver City officials threatening to arrest them if they “harbor” immigrants wanted for deportation.
But Miller’s indiscriminate list of people who are guilty of “immigration crimes” includes people who have lived and worked in America for generations – people whose great-grand children are not only second-generation U.S. citizens but are doctors, teachers, engineers and police officers. People who have never even had a speeding ticket.
Johnston is right to prepare for such a calamity, while praying upon a dim star of hope that Trump has enough sense not to upend entire communities in search of 80-year-olds whose only crime was coming to America without proper paperwork decades ago.
The plan is simple:
1. Cooperate with ICE officials when they are going after criminals in Denver’s jail who are scheduled for release. Denver has always given ICE officials a heads up if someone wanted for deportation proceedings is in their custody and told them the date and time of the person’s release. Denver could improve in this area as could ICE as we have seen over the years.
2. But Johnston has made it clear that Denver will not aid ICE in a mass deportation sting that drives terror into the hearts of Colorado immigrants regardless of their legal status. Denver police will not detain people for ICE and will not support non-criminal immigration enforcement actions.
3. Coloradans will be protected at “sensitive locations” like schools, hospitals and churches. And Coloradans with some form of legal status — DACA, TPS, expired Visas, or pending asylum cases — will be protected. Likely this will be done through legal challenges should ICE attempt to detain mothers in the drop-off line at school or victims of crimes as they are discharged from the hospital.
4. Create a network that can care for the children of those who have been detained both for short-term emergency placement in foster care until a next of kin can be identified in the United States or for long-term care until a parent’s deportation case is adjudicated and they are released from custody or sent abroad.
We are not opposed to the deportation of violent criminals who do not have a legal status to remain in the United States, but Coloradans must prepare for the possibility that ICE agents will be detaining fathers and mothers with no criminal history who are taking their children to Elitches for the day. How will we respond when ICE agents start picking up every person standing on the side of the road asking for money and demanding they prove their immigration status?
It’s nice to know that Johnston has a plan to defend those individual’s due process rights before deportation by engaging with the attorney general and outside legal counsel.
“We have allies who would do the legal work on this. I think we are going to be plaintiffs. We are not planning to spend a great deal of Denver taxpayer dollars on it, but we are going to make sure to raise Denver voices to say we think it’s wrong,” Johnston told the board. “If Denver is one of the early locations where they start these deportations, we
We wish we could offer assurances to Coloradans with tenuous legal status – those with DACA, TPS or pending asylum cases, that everything is going to be OK.
But unfortunately we are at the whims of an administration that has expressed very little concern for the humanitarian crisis caused by mass deportations, so the best we can do is express support for a plan that could ease the suffering should Trump decide to deport millions of people.
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