As the Trump administration continues to promise stepped-up deportation efforts, members of Cincinnati City Council want to help create a network to provide aid to migrant families who may get caught up in the president’s zero-tolerance immigration policies.
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 helping immigrants and refugees. That network would provide legal aid and immigration rights training, as well as help plan for the care of children and the provision of immediate needs in cases where a parent or other family breadwinner is detained.
“We will all work together to keep our families and children safe and secure, and to ensure due process and legal rights,” law center director Julie LeMaster said at a news conference today announcing the network. “I believe this is an important moment for the community to come together.”
City council included $50,000 in funding for the law center in the last budget. That money will go in part toward the response network. Other groups partnering in the effort include Cincinnati Compass, the League of United Latin American Citizens of Greater Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Police Department, the Jewish Community Relations Council, Heartfelt Tidbits and others.
“It’s not to say there haven’t been efforts within the community, it’s just that they haven’t been coordinated,” LeMaster says. “There hasn’t been that way that people can immediately just plug in.”
The Trump administration has promised to deport millions of people in the United States without proper documentation as migrants fleeing famine and violence in Central America cross the southern border of the United States seeking asylum.
“If you pay our taxes, if you raise your family here, if you are adding to the diversity and vitality of our neighborhoods — and all of our local immigrants and refugees are doing those things — then you are absolutely a member of this community,” Sittenfeld said. “The specter of federal raids now looms at all times. If and when this current federal administration executes those raids here in Cincinnati, we want to be ready, have a plan, and have a rapid response network.”
In Cincinnati, members of the area’s various Central American and Mauritanian communities have been among those detained and in some cases deported, sometimes leaving behind dependent children or other family members. Some local immigrants may be more vulnerable to deportation after a recent policy change by the Trump administration that allows for expedited removal — without the usual judicial process — for immigrants who cannot prove they are documented in the United States or that they have been here for more than two years.
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.
This article appears in Jul 24-31, 2019.
