The Rochester City Council is seeking to fund an initiative to ensure immigrants know their rights amid an era of heightened enforcement.
The Immigrant Justice Initiative is a program through Enlace, formerly known as the Western New York Coalition of Farmworker Serving Agencies. Its mission is “to protect immigrant, migrant and newcomer families from the ongoing risks of detention, deportation, and family separation” through a mix of education and emergency response.
City Council is scheduled to vote this month on spending $125,000 to expand the program in the city. Those dollars will support training 20 community educators to lead courses on immigrant rights. The legislation sets out a plan to hold “know your rights” training for up to 500 people. The funding would also support a volunteer-run hotline for immigration issues and connection with resources.
“There's no sugar coating that we're all concerned about the national climate and the rhetoric,” Council President Miguel Meléndez said.
The legislation follows up on recent City Council action to reaffirm the city’s sanctuary status. In August, City Council members unanimously approved an updated sanctuary city bill, including protections for LGBTQ people. The policy also laid out guidelines for discipline, up to termination, for city employees found to have violated the policy. Previous versions of the policy, adopted in 1986 and 2017, did not include such provisions.
The bill to contract with Enlace was introduced by a majority bloc of City Council, including Meléndez, Bridget Monroe, Mitch Gruber, LaShay Harris and Michael Patterson. That majority sponsorship effectively ensures its passage.
“I think what this does is it provides education, provides support systems in place to say that you do have rights, contrary to whatever is happening at a national level,” Meléndez said. “And we want people to be as informed as possible on where the lines are, even if the lines might be crossed at some point. And, frankly, that we have some investment in the space of protecting people's rights.”
Irene Sanchez is executive director of Enlace. She said that part of the goal is to centralize trustworthy information for the immigrant community. Immigrant outreach in Rochester is often fragmented into different grassroots groups.
“I think that what we're trying to accomplish with this is to engage into a better, cohesive program that would allow immigrant families, their neighbors, and the community at-large to have a stronger social cohesion,” Sanchez said. “So, they can be informed about their constitutional rights and get the right information, information coming directly from trusted legal services organizations, and not from social media.”
Top of mind for Sanchez is the gap in how much people know about the immigration process as a whole. There is wealth of misunderstanding about different types of visas and what legal processes exist for immigrants, she said.
“There are a lot of misconceptions about how long somebody has to be in the country in order to be eligible to get any type of legal status,” she said. “I think that there is a lot of misconceptions about what the process really looks like, and who is somebody with legal status and who does not have legal status.”
Meléndez and Mayor Malik Evans are currently being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice over the city’s sanctuary policy. The city has argued in court that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and that the city has no legal obligation to aid in enforcement under the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The most recent filing in the case was a September memorandum from acting assistant director of the DOJ Alessandra Faso. In it, Faso argued that Rochester’s sanctuary policy is intended to actively obstruct the federal government’s immigration enforcement.
“The Tenth Amendment may allow a state to decline to participate in a federal regulatory program, but it does not permit a state to act as an obstacle to it and thus use the Tenth Amendment as a sword rather than a shield,” the memorandum states.
