Schenectady — At a press conference in Albany on Tuesday, Acting U.S. Attorney for New York’s Northern District John Sarcone had a message for immigrants in the Capital Region, and beyond.
“Contact Homeland Security, go to their website, and ask to participate in the program where they’re offering a thousand dollars and free flights home,” he said. “That’s my advice. Don’t do this to your families.”
On Thursday, CBS6 spoke with immigration advocates and community organizations, getting their perspective on that message
“What it said to me, he’s trying to instill fear into our communities by warning people not to come here and also he said that those people shouldn’t have been here in to begin with,” Richard Horan, Co-Coordinator of Capital District Border Watch, said. “In my experience, working with migrants, they come here because they are fleeing terrible situations where where their life is in danger, and the reason they come here is to seek asylum.”
Capital District Border Watch is part of a coalition of groups and organizations which provides care, education, communication and watch for community members, often sending alerts about the presence of ICE in a neighborhood.
“I think the biggest need we have is for volunteers, because we need so many people to carry out the this work,” Horan says. “One of the biggest needs we have is to get the word out to the community about what’s happening, about their rights, and about what what people can do and and to raise awareness about really what’s going on.”
Their Facebook page has more information.
Columbia County Sanctuary Movement has also been doing similar work, and finding similar challenges. Though, Co-Founder Bryan MacCormack telling CBS6 on Thursday they’ll be in stable financial shape over the next fiscal year.
“Similar to many immigrant rights organizations and nonprofits in general, we’re experiencing a lot of cuts in federal and state funding, as well as philanthropic retreat from the giving community,” he said. “I’m happy to announce that on the grassroots level, our donors and our members and our community are showing up more than ever, and so CCSM, while we have had to downsize a little bit, we are stabilized for this fiscal year and committed to continuing the impactful work that we do.”
He says their needs haven’t changed much with the new administration’s policies, rather the same needs have “grown and intensified”.
“Certainly a need for the normal services that we provide, from economic mutual aid to food,” he says. “Mutual aid, legal services have traditionally been very important and underfunded, under capacity service provided in our region, so it’s something that we’re working with other providers to tackle together. But there certainly are not enough legal service service providers in our region. And with the amount of increased enforcement activity and detentions, there is more of a need for that service provision, especially when it comes to detained dockets.”
He says he believes the targeting of individuals at workplaces, like the raid in Cayuga County, will increase, citing the administration’s own words.
“150,000 unemployed, able-bodied Americans who’ve lived here, whose families have lived here, who paid their taxes, paid their property taxes, paid their rents, and they could easily be filling up those jobs,” Sarcone said at the press conference on Tuesday.
MacCormack reacting to that concept, saying that narrative in inaccurate.
“I’ve also heard a lot of rhetoric around people Americans jobs being taken,” he says. “It’s a classic argument from the Right around immigration, and it’s been put to bed every single time that there’s been a program that has tried to offer the same exact jobs to American citizens. American citizens, to a large extent, are a privileged lot of people who do not accept the excruciating labor and violation of their labor rights in the farm fields, in the factories, et cetera, but they are completely fine underpaying other workers to do that same work. Or in many cases, employers are following minimum wage requirements and paying folks to do that as well. But this narrative is obviously inaccurate, and we know that immigrants are providing important labor, documented and undocumented in some of the most vital sectors of the economy, especially locally, with agriculture, with services, with construction.”
We will cover another layer of this story, the economy, on CBS6 News at 10 and 11 on Friday, September 12th.