Cambridge city councillors were urged to devise a way to check on the “well-being” of five detainees of the U.S. government by organizers of a demonstration Tuesday in front of City Hall.
About 100 people attended the demonstration in response to the detention of four immigrants who worked at a Central Square restaurant and a woman detained after release from Cambridge police headquarters following her arrest.
“We ask the council to set up a mechanism to regularly and insistently inquire with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] about the detainees’ location and well-being so that they are not ‘disappeared,’” said petitions to the city council and to federal lawmakers.
The rally organized by Indivisible Progressive Mass Cambridge included vice mayor Marc McGovern, city councillors Patty Nolan and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and state representative Mike Connolly. All said they agreed with the purpose and the need to know what happens to people arrested by immigration agents.
“I don’t know what we can and can’t do,” McGovern said, adding that the demonstrators’ request is “reasonable. I worry that no one can find out much.”
“They’re not taking our local laws into account when they’re taking people off the street,” Nolan said, speaking of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“It’s a real challenge,” Connolly said. “It’s very important that we have transparency.” Referring to the fundamental legal right of “habeas corpus, or ‘show me the body,’” Connolly said: “To have an agent of the federal government detain and abduct somebody is deeply concerning.”
He added that staff members in the office of U.S. representative Ayanna Pressley had helped “on immigration matters such as these.”
Cambridge’s five
The woman detained after Cambridge police arrested her in May for misdemeanor shoplifting and assault was Leidy Torres Castano of Revere. The Department of Homeland Security maintains an online site to search for detainees; she was not listed. A department employee who was asked for information said the reporter would need to have the woman’s immigration record number.
Information about the detention of the four restaurant workers came from the business owner, who confirmed their arrest on condition that the restaurant not be identified. The owner did not name the workers or say exactly when and where they were arrested, except that three were taken at an MBTA station in East Boston as part of a stakeout by Ice and one was arrested when agents entered an apartment seeking someone else and other people rushed out.
The owner said Wednesday that three of the workers have been deported to Colombia, including two he previously said were being held under “horrible” conditions at a detention facility in Louisiana. One of the two, who was departed on Monday, had wanted quick action so he could fly from Colombia to Spain to unite with his wife and two children, the owner said. The fourth worker was released on bail and is seeking a work permit, the restaurant owner said. Getting one will cost $15,000 and the owner is considering starting a fundraiser, he said.
“My family thought I was dead”
One of those who attended the demonstration was Sal Khan, 34, of Cambridge, who said he spent more than a month at the Plymouth County Jail immigration detention facility last summer. Khan said MBTA transit police arrested him after he experienced a mental crisis on a bus and they turned him over to Ice. “My family thought I was dead” after he was detained, Khan said.
Khan said he was a reporter in Pakistan and came to the United States to go to a conference. He did not return because he faced death as a gay journalist, he said. DeNovo, the Cambridge legal and mental health services nonprofit, helped free him from detention and win asylum, but he still struggles with fear, he said.
He also faces economic insecurity and works several jobs, Khan said. “Activist work saved my life,” he said.
Strengthening a law
Speaking to the demonstrators, McGovern, Nolan and Sobrinho-Wheeler said councillors were acting to strengthen a city ordinance forbidding city employees from asking anyone for their immigration status, treating someone differently because of it and barring police from cooperating with immigration enforcement officers.
Sobrinho-Wheeler led a June 2 effort to amend the Welcoming Community ordinance, saying he wanted to close a loophole in the law that would let police help Ice if an immigration enforcement action threatened officer or public safety, such as assisting agents by controlling traffic or crowds. Sobrinho-Wheeler also wanted city police to “document” Ice actions and ask agents for their badge numbers.
After a week’s delay because of concerns by the police unions that asking Ice agents for information they are not required to give would put local police in conflict with another law enforcement organization, councillors voted to ask the city manager to propose the changes they want.
Proposed amendments from city
The issue returns at a meeting of the Ordinance Committee scheduled for 1 p.m. Monday; the committee consists of all the councillors. City manager Yi-An Huang had hinted June 9 he would seek some sort of compromise, and the proposed changes reflect that.
The amended ordinance as proposed by Huang says police are “required to ensure public safety” and will “perform actions and services necessary to ensure the safety of all on scene.” The language on crowd and traffic control that councillors wanted to delete would remain in the ordinance.
As for police asking Ice officers for identification, the changes say that if city police are sent to an immigration enforcement action, police higher-ups will try to “verify that the individuals on scene are federal agents conducting federal immigration enforcement.”
“The responding officers of the Cambridge Police Department shall document the activity on scene and document any identification information provided by command staff or federal officers or agents,” the proposed ordinance says.
What police can do
A letter from Megan Bayer, the city solicitor, says police unions were worried that asking Ice agents for identification they are not required to give risked having police be accused of interfering with immigration enforcement. Therefore the changes propose that police leadership try to ensure that the agents are truly Ice officers by using “internal CPD procedures” to contact regional Department of Homeland Security officials when there’s a report of Ice activity in Cambridge, Bayer’s letter said.
Her office “heard” police unions’ concerns and showed the proposed language to the unions but had not heard a response as of June 30 when Bayer wrote the letter.
Asked to comment, Sobrinho-Wheeler said that at a more recent meeting last week, the city promised to remove the references to crowd and traffic control.
“And while [the proposed ordinance] does not require officers to ask for badge numbers because federal agents aren’t required to provide them under federal law, it does require that that local police work to verify and document that any federal enforcement action that they are alerted to. I’m hopeful we can enact that updated language at the upcoming ordinance meeting and ordain it at the summer council meeting,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
The full council’s sole scheduled meeting of the summer is Aug. 4.
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