Light in the Darkness Much of this action came as a counterweight to Donald Trump. Though Mariel Fiori, founder of La Voz magazine in 2004, laughs when she says that there were “woke white people when I participated in my first immigration march in 2006.” Fiori, who immigrated from Argentina two decades ago, notes that Latinos had been marginalized long before 2016, and even if it took this administration to wake up more community members in the region, she’s profoundly heartened by what she’s witnessed. For instance, she says, “Jewish people really came out strong. They saw what happened in the Holocaust and persecution of Latinos touches them very deeply.” Alagna agrees, and notes that as a first step, right after Trump was elected, he reached out to Muslim, Jewish, and other Christian sects in Kingston and beyond and got 21 regional clergy to petition the Kingston Common Council and the mayor to help push the town to become a sanctuary city. It was merely symbolic, Alagna admits. Sanctuary for a city is conceptual, and even as New York State’s Supreme Court ruled last year that local police cannot detain ICE suspects and that jails cannot hold someone beyond when they would ordinarily be released, an Albany Times Union report this past spring found it’s routine for police in the Capital Region to inquire about immigration status when pulling over drivers for minor infractions—or for no probable cause whatsoever. Preventing local cops or administrators from helping ICE is beyond the jurisdiction of cities, and can only be enshrined by state legislation, which is currently pending. Which leaves it to private citizens to act, Alagna says. “Jesus says to help the least of our brethren, whatever form they come in.” But what does sanctuary look like? “I had in mind this Hunchback of Notre Dame model, of literal sanctuary in our places of worship,” he says, but once UIDN began, with a hastily convened meeting in February 2017, where Alagna was expecting about 20 volunteers and 120 people showed up at his church, his vision grew. “I realized we could build something far more comprehensive. All that energy,” Alagna says of UIDN’s small army of volunteers, “was the grace. The light to be found in this darkness.”
FATHER FRANK ALAGNA OF HOLY CROSS/SANTA CRUZ EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN KINGSTON IS THE COFOUNDER OF THE ULSTER IMMIGRANT DEFENSE NETWORK
76 FEATURE CHRONOGRAM 11/19
The Regional Economy and Immigration Forget Alagna’s sentiment. If you live in the Hudson Valley, what does this attack on immigration mean for our tax base, and for the local economy? From 2017 to the fall of 2019, the Trump administration has instituted a broad crackdown on immigrants, documented as well as undocumented, according to Syracuse University’s massive database (TRAC) that quantifies and counts arrests, incarcerations, and deportations. Since Trump took office, new court filings to begin deportation proceedings have spiked: They were up 23 percent to 340,000 last year, and 2019 will easily crest 400,000. At that pace, 2019 enforcement will be 50 percent higher than it was in 2016. Regionally, ICE has heavily targeted people coming in and out of courthouses, or appearing to testify on behalf of defendants on trial, with arrests up 1,700 percent since 2016 through 2018, according to an early 2019 report by the Immigrant Defense Project. This is a policy that a regional ICE official, Thomas Decker, defended recently, saying ICE is targeting felons. However, Syracuse’s TRAC shows that despite Trump’s repeated rhetoric of going after gang members, through June 2019, arrests of immigrants with criminal records is a minuscule 2.8 percent, compared with over 16 percent a decade ago, and 25 percent back in 1999. Locally and nationally, ICE is arresting mostly non-criminals, and, as was detailed in a recent New York Times Magazine piece,