A new network is taking shape on the North Fork with the goal of providing support to undocumented immigrants and their families and bearing witness to federal immigration enforcement actions in the local area.
Tentatively called the North Fork Rapid Response Network, the group already numbers about 50 people. It has been organized by Long Island Jobs with Justice, which has organized 10 such networks across Long Island. It is largely a faith-based movement, with 80 percent of its 350 volunteers coming from the faith community, according to organizers.
The new North Fork group will incorporate an informal group of local residents led by Sr. Margaret Smyth that is already doing similar work in the community. Smyth, a Mattituck resident who runs the North Fork Spanish Apostolate out of St. John the Evangelist Church in Riverhead, has volunteered to be the facilitator of the North Fork Rapid Response Network.
Members of the network volunteer to accompany undocumented immigrants to various court proceedings and other encounters with authorities — everything from “check-ins” with immigration officers to proceedings in immigration court in Manhattan or one of the justice courts in the East End towns.
Smyth said she already had 15 or 20 volunteers who have been accompanying local undocumented immigrants to court appearances and immigration check-ins, before the effort by Long Island Jobs with Justice to establish one of its rapid response networks on the North Fork.
Thirty local residents attended a Long Island Jobs with Justice training session Saturday morning at the Sacred Heart Church parish Hall in Cutchogue.
“Accompaniment is first and foremost an act of love and solidarity,” said Richard Koubek, Long Island Jobs with Justice community outreach coordinator told the group gathered in Cutchogue. “It is physical and moral support for the immigrant, as a neighbor and friend,” he said. “It is not legal assistance. It is to be a witness and a shoulder to lean on. It is to demonstrate that the individual is part of our community fabric.”
The group screens people before providing accompaniment, Koubek said. They do not accompany gang members or people accused of violent crimes or domestic abuse, he said.
“It’s important to be a witness and to be able to inform the family,” he said.
Undocumented immigrants taken into custody are brought to regional detention centers and it can be very difficult for family members to find out where they are or what their future holds.
An outgrowth of the accompaniment program is the witness program. Volunteers may sign up to be witnesses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the local community. Long Island Jobs with Justice maintains a hotline (516-387-2043) for reports of ICE activity. Reports are forwarded to community coordinators, who in turn contact volunteers who live or work closest to the reported action. The volunteers, trained by Long Island Jobs with Justice, then go to the scene of the action to watch and document what is going on.
ICE has been active in the local community, the organizers said. But information about ICE actions is not made readily available by the agency. For instance, after the agency in November announced the arrests of 25 Long Island residents — all but one having been previously convicted of a DWAI or DWI offense, ICE said in a press release — an agency spokesperson told a reporter that no further information would be released to the press, including the names of those arrested, the towns where they lived or what the underlying charges were.
ICE removals increased in 2015, but the agency was targeting people with previous deportation orders, convicted felons and mothers and children who entered the U.S. after 2014.
Under President Donald Trump — who during his 2016 campaign pledged to deport all of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — the criteria for deportation have changed. Since January 2017, ICE criteria for deportation include people charged with a criminal offense, people who have committed acts that could be a chargeable offense, people who have willfully misrepresented themselves on a government form and people an immigration officer judges a risk to public safety.
“That’s a pretty broad standard,” Koubek said. Deportations have increased.
People arrested by ICE are housed in the county jail, under an agreement between the county sheriff and the federal agency, which pays the county $200 per inmate per day, Koubek said. There are 150 beds reserved in the jail for ICE detainees.
Koubek said he and other immigrant advocates requested a meeting with Sheriff Errol Toulon after reading a RiverheadLOCAL report that the new sheriff would continue the county’s policy of detaining inmates on ICE administrative warrants, rather than requiring a warrant signed by a judge. A judicial warrant requires a higher standard of proof. An administrative warrant is signed by an ICE officer.
The sheriff told the immigrant advocates about half of the undocumented persons remanded to the jail are the subject of judicial warrants, while the other half are held on adminsitrative warrants. ICE removes from the jail an average of four detainees per week, Koubek said.
These are people who would otherwise ordinarily be released on bail, Koubek said.
“There’s a constant sense of terror among immigrants,” he said.
ICE enforcement seems to have shifted from private residences, where officers cannot force entry without a judicial warrant, to public spaces, where no warrant at all is necessary. ICE is now going into courts, waiting outside churches, going to their places of employment and picking people up off the street, often just a few blocks from their homes, Koubek said.
Under current ICE policy, officers won’t go into churches, schools or hospitals.
Some churches in NYC and Long Island have declared themselves to be “sanctuary churches” and the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island has declared the diocese to be a “sanctuary diocese.” The sanctuary churches will shelter undocumented immigrants and their minor children. Apart from the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, there is only one sanctuary congregation in Suffolk County so far, the Setauket Presbyterian Church, Koubek said. But two synagogues and two Unitarian Universalist congregations are currently going through the process to join the sanctuary movement.
Under federal law it is a crime to conceal, harbor or shield an undocumented immigrant, Koubek acknowledged, but the movement’s lawyers argue that as long as a church announces it is a sanctuary, it is not concealing anything. Some courts, including the federal Second Circuit in New York, have agreed.
“Sanctuary has been a part of our legacy for hundreds of years,” Koubek said. The legacy of the sanctuary movement includes the abolition of slavery and the underground railroad in the 1800s, the resistance against Nazis in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and movements against Latin American dictators in the 1980s.
“Sanctuary is more than hiding people in a church. Sanctuary is being present for them,” Koubek said. That’s what accompaniment and rapid response are all about, he said.
“These are your neighbors, your coworkers, the families of your children’s friends,” Smyth said.
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