Standing up to Trump on immigration policy: kudos to Riverhead school and town officials

We commend the Riverhead Central School District for the position it has taken concerning its duty to ensure the safety of its students and foster a positive learning environment for all. 

We hope this helps assuage the “atmosphere of fear” in the local Hispanic community, as Rural and Migrant Ministry Long Island Coordinator Noemi Sanchez put it in an interview yesterday. 

The fear is real for people regardless of their legal status, thanks to a series of executive orders issued by President Trump on Jan. 20 and 21, and guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as well as statements made by the President himself in interviews since taking office and, of course, during the 2024 campaign, where he repeatedly promised immediate mass deportations. 

There is, understandably, much uncertainty, misinformation and confusion in the community, both Hispanic and non-Hispanic.

Residents who are permanent legal residents (green card holders) are fearful. DACA recipients are fearful, especially after the Jan. 17 ruling by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the DACA rule was inconsistent with the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. The ruling is limited to the State of Texas, for now, but that can change on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the court agrees to hear it.  

Residents granted asylum under two Biden-era programs are terrified since this week’s executive orders essentially pulled the rug out from under them — about 1.4 million people entered the country through these programs since the beginning of 2023. Though they used this legal pathway for entry, Trump refused to recognize their legal status because of his adamant opposition to the programs put in place by his predecessor — programs Trump believed to be unlawful. 

According to reporting this morning in the New York Times, the acting director of the Homeland Security Department signed a memo last night providing “ICE officials with a road map on how to use expansive powers  that were long reserved only for encounters at the southern border to quickly remove migrants,” including the ability to expel migrants who entered under the two Biden programs that allowed temporary entry to the U.S.

We’ve seen comments by local residents on social media — and have received emails expressing the same sentiments — that only serious criminals and members of criminal gangs such as MS-13 will be targeted for immediate deportation. That’s understandable, since that’s what the President has focused on in public remarks and interviews. But the executive orders tell a different story, one that indicates any person who crossed the southern border illegally, including otherwise law-abiding residents —people who have lived and worked in the U.S. for years — are subject to deportation. 

It’s just a question of priorities, as ICE “border czar” Tom Homan made clear during a Fox and Friends interview on Wednesday morning. Asked by co-host  Lawrence Jones “What would a person have to do to get a visit from ICE?” Homan replied, “For him to be in the country illegally. First of all, I mean, there’s nothing in the immigration law that says you gotta be convicted of a serious crime to be removed under the INA [Immigration and Naturalization Act]. So if you’re in the country illegally, ICE can visit you.”

Homan went on to explain that “right now, as we said repeatedly and President Trump’s been clear, we’re concentrating on the worst, first — the public safety threats, the national security threats.” He said that ICE, in the 24 hours prior to the TV interview, had arrested “over 308 serious criminals,” including murderers, rapists and child sexual abusers. “So ICE is doing their job. They’re prioritizing, just as the president said they would,” and  “performing excellent right now out in the field, and they’re going to continue every day,” he said.

If “sanctuary cities refuse to let ICE into their jails,” Homan said, “sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the communities, more people arrested, more collaterals arrested. So that’s a game they want to play — game on,” Homan said. Collaterals are people who are not targeted but happen to be in a location where a targeted individual is located. 

To be clear, this places many undocumented residents in the local community at risk, even though they have not broken any laws after entering the country. They have lived here, worked here, bought homes here, paid income, sales and property taxes here, started businesses here. They are our neighbors, our friends, even family members. Their children attend school with our children. And many have lived here for many years. 

We won’t even touch on the implications for the local economy as these mass deportation plans are carried out, other than to say that they will be severe.

Let’s stay focused on the climate of fear created by the recent dictates from on high. We hope the school district’s stance provides some level of comfort, but that remains to be seen.

Another generator of fear in the local community is the emergency order first issued by former Supervisor Yvette Aguiar in 2023, and renewed every five days since then, first by Aguiar and then by her successor, current Supervisor Tim Hubbard.

The order was based on false information propagated by radio talk show host and failed NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa. Relying on Sliwa’s on-air statements claiming that Mayor Eric Adams was busing migrants to Riverhead to be housed in local hotels and motels, Aguiar signed the emergency order in May 2023. She said at the time that the migrants, who had been sent to NYC by the busload from Texas, were already on buses heading our way. It was all pure fantasy. There were no migrants on buses heading to Riverhead, which the Riverhead chief of police clearly acknowledged. Hubbard, then a council member, said the order was “based off of” Sliwa’s allegations, nothing more. 

Yet Hubbard supported Aguiar’s order in 2023 and continues to renew it since he took office as town supervisor in January 2024. Riverhead Town has been living under a “state of emergency” for nearly two years now, in the absence of any real emergency. The order was, and remains, little more than a political gimmick.

It’s past time for Riverhead’s “state of emergency” to end. It serves no purpose other than to stoke fear in the Hispanic communities as advocates and community leaders told the Town Board in 2023  when they turned out to beg the former supervisor to end it. Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

This does not line up with the town government’s recent efforts to embrace the Hispanic community, by providing translation services, providing documents and signage in Spanish, and soon publishing a Spanish language version of the town’s official website. 

Earlier this month, officials unveiled an initiative led by Council Member Ken Rothwell to conduct outreach to the Hispanic community by creating an advisory committee tasked with helping town government with the job. Comprising mostly Hispanic business leaders, as well as a representative of the school district, the committee will serve as a bridge to the Hispanic community with the hope of unifying the residents of Riverhead, regardless of ethnic heritage, according to Rothwell.

This initiative is important and, honestly, long overdue. We commend Rothwell and the entire Town Board for embarking on this endeavor. 

Given the current political climate and what seems to be the majority opinion in the community — favoring the hard-line Trump administration policies toward immigrants that we believe are draconian and ill-advised — the all-Republican Town Board is in a tough spot. There’s prevailing MAGA politics and, it seems, a lot of pressure from local voters to stay in line. Then there’s the human compassion that we see in the eyes of the supervisor and council members, and the concern for fellow human beings that we believe motivated most of them to seek elected office in the first place.

We commend Supervisor Tim Hubbard and the Town Board for reaffirming existing Riverhead Police Department policy that town police will not get involved in immigration enforcement and related issues— in spite of recent federal executive actions directing greater or enhanced enforcement of certain federal immigration laws.  Hubbard made the announcement in a statement issued Friday afternoon.

Paradoxically, the supervisor today renewed the “state of emergency” executive order yet again. 

As a nation, we must work to fix a long-broken immigration system to allow a path to citizenship for people whose only “crime” was crossing the border without permission. 

To those who would respond “come here legally like our ancestors did,” we urge that you take some time to learn the facts about what was actually required to enter the U.S. when the major waves of immigration populated the country in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In fact, not much at all was required to enter. There was no protracted, complicated application process. No convoluted rules about who was eligible to apply for entry. No years-long waiting period to even be able to file an application. Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were given a cursory health exam and sent on their way.

We are and have always been a nation of immigrants.

Immigrants have always provided valuable, much needed labor to this nation as they pursued the American Dream — usually at subsistence wages and living in overcrowded, substandard housing. The American Dream is not dead and still lives on in the hearts of people from other lands who seek refuge, work and opportunity in the USA. It’s the system that’s practically dead. And it’s time to fix it, but there’s little hope that Washington will muster the necessary political fortitude any time soon.

In the meanwhile, though, we can all — especially, our local elected officials — demand that the system be fixed. Consistently. Clearly. Loudly. And, yes, courageously, in this era in which dissent from the “party line” is often met with threats and even violence. 

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Editorials are the opinion of this publication. This editorial was written by Denise Civiletti and edited by Alek Lewis.

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