Boston As Sanctuary City? Councilor Floats Idea in Face of Trump Deportation Pledge

BOSTON, MA — As President-elect Donald Trump solidifies the details of his proposed immigration enforcement plans, at least one Boston city councilor is pushing for greater protections within city limits for people in the country illegally.

“I believe the city of Boston should not assist or cooperate with the mass deportations of immigrants. That’s not who our city is, and it’s not what our tax dollars should be used for,” Councilor Tito Jackson told The Boston Herald Sunday night.

He is pushing for Boston to serve as a "sanctuary city," further obstructing federal deportation efforts, including for individuals with a criminal record.

The term does not have a precise legal definition, but is commonly applied to cities which prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about an individual's immigration status.

Since 2014, Boston has severed local officers' obligation to participate in the federal government's immigration detainment program, which gives Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials the authority to ask local law enforcement to hold people in custody up to 48 hours, even if they post bail.

The program is meant to give ICE time to investigate a person's immigration status and potentially pick them up for deportation. Under the 2014 Boston Trust Act, officers have no obligation to to do so, unless a court-ordered warrant is involved, or a person has been arrested for a serious crime that makes them an immediate danger to the general public," Boston Magazine reported at the time.

Jackson told the Herald Sunday he wants the city to ensure undocumented immigrants "actually have a path to citizenship, versus further victimizing people in these communities, who are often the victims of violent crimes as well as taken advantage of in the shadows," adding he knew a friend deported for a "criminal conviction" that was merely possession of marijuana.

>>> Read the full story in the Herald here.

The Department of Homeland Security and non-governmental trackers have identified roughly 300 sanctuary cities nationwide, including Cambridge and Somerville locally.

The cities to varying degrees obstruct enforcement efforts by ICE, which would initially be tasked with deporting up to 3 million immigrants currently in the country illegally and with a criminal record, according to the president-elect's plans.

In the first interview since his election, Trump told 60 Minutes Sunday night:

What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records — gang members, drug dealers — we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million. We're getting them out of our country or we're going to incarcerate. But we're getting them out of our country, they're here illegally.
"After the border is secured, and after everything gets normalized, we're going to make a determination on the people that you're talking about — who are terrific people, they're terrific people. But we're going to make a determination ... but before we make that determination, Leslie, it's very important, we're going to secure our border."

For comparison, President Obama's administration deported 1.5 million over his first four years in office, according to ICE. Only about 42 percent of those deported in Obama's first term were convicted criminals, according to that same data. In the following years, that balance shifted toward convicted criminals, and the overall total number of deportations decreased, ICE numbers show.

Photo by Gage Skidmore, Flickr/Creative Commons