Days after Cincinnati City Council members, nonprofit groups and immigrant advocates announced support for an emergency network to aid immigrants whose family members could be caught up in deportation raids by federal agents, Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police President Dan Hils posted on social media linking the motion to “socialist rule of totalitarian government.”
A motion introduced by council member P.G. Sittenfeld and supported by the city’s five other Democratic council members would help the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center in Price Hill create a rapid response network with other community organizations already active in helping immigrants and refugees. That network would provide support for the families of those detained and deported via legal aid and immigration rights training, planning for the care of children and the provision of immediate needs in cases where a parent or other family breadwinner is detained.
Cincinnati Police would be among the groups participating in the network should council approve the plan. Cincinnati Police Immigrant Liaison Officer Anthony Johnson, who called some immigrants’ fear of police and deportation “a crisis,” was present at the news conference announcing the proposal.
“When you truly understand the crisis by looking at people’s faces and seeing the pain that you see, you truly understand the importance of why we’re here today,” Johnson said.
But not everyone in CPD is thrilled with the idea. Hils, who has been the police union president since 2015, posted a scathing response to the proposal on “Support The Blue In Cincy,” a pro-police Facebook group.
Hils accused Sittenfeld and council Democrats of attempts at “importing a leftist voting underclass.” Undocumented immigrants subject to federal deportation raids cannot legally vote and confirmed incidents of voter fraud, especially those involving undocumented immigrants, are extremely rare.
Hils also asserted that the surge of immigrants voting would lead to a totalitarian socialist state and that people would “come and take from the wealth God has blessed us with and our parents and grandparents worked so hard for.”
Hils wrote:
“This is absolutely heartbreaking to me. I grew up very patriotic, knowing I was lucky to be born in a country like no other. I am very proud to have served in the military. I have dedicated a career devoted to the rule of law.
In my own home town there are now elected officials who wish to erase the borders that make American sovereign. They wish to obstruct my fellow law enforcement officers from upholding the laws which keep us independent. This is so extremely dangerous and I don’t think any of them have a clue what they are doing. Or maybe they do? This is only about importing a leftist voting underclass. It is simply about power.
If they are successful there will be only a single dominant party that will lead to a socialist land mass no longer defined as an independent nation. People can come and take from the wealth God has blessed us with and our parents and grandparents worked so hard for. When it all collapses in debt and chaos the state run media will blame what few patriotic Americans there are left and the generations of them before.
Generations will suffer under the socialist rule of totalitarian government just as they did in the former Soviet Union. They will suffer as they do in China where the state determines the size of your family and where you work. There will be no dissenting voices, only a ruling class retaining power through the tools of division and jealousy. Freedom will be lost and the America we knew will be a distant memory. As I said, heartbreaking!”
Council will likely take up the motion in early August. Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley and city council in January 2017 declared the city a sanctuary city, but that hasn’t always prevented the detention and deportation of some city residents.
Many immigrants in Cincinnati came from Central American countries like Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador or from places like Mauritania, an African nation where slavery still exists.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 7, 2019.