Posters Spotted In Queens Say Reporting Immigrants A 'Civic Duty'

SUNNYSIDE, QUEENS — Inflammatory posters telling New Yorkers it's a "civic duty" to report undocumented immigrants drew condemnation from advocates and officials after they were spotted in Sunnyside on Sunday.

City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer said he saw the posters on Skillman Avenue during his Sunday morning run. They implore "all citizens of the United States of America" to report "any and all illegal aliens" to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because "it is your civic duty."

"They have broken the law," the poster read in bold black letters.

While the posters bore the phone number for an ICE tipline, they had no information about who put it up or created the messaging. The white supremacist group Vanguard America claimed responsibility for the signs but did not know who put them up in Queens, according to Van Bramer's office.

Van Bramer, a Democrat, strongly condemned the posters, which appeared amid the Trump administration's continued crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The councilman posted a video to Twitter of himself ripping up one of them.

"The hateful signs were designed to look like official ICE materials as a way to intimidate immigrants and to pit neighbors against one another," Van Bramer said in a statement Tuesday. "The kind of vigilantism it could inspire is dangerous and illegal."

Advocacy groups including Make the Road New York and Sunnyside Community Services gathered with Van Bramer Tuesday morning to decry the posters, which the councilman called "white supremacist trash."

One Make the Road activist hung up a new flyer urging New Yorkers to "stand in support" of immigrant communities, a video tweeted by the group shows.

Public Advocate Letitia James, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general, also denounced the signs, calling them "the lowest form of racist hatred."

"Our city, our state, and our nation were built on the backs of immigrants — and we cannot allow anyone to sow fear and division in our communities," James said in a statement.

This week isn't the first time such posters have popped up. Similar signs appeared in Omaha, Nebraska in July and on college campuses in Washington state and Texas in February 2017, according to news reports.

The University of Maryland was hit last year with posters that looked different but bore a similar message, along with Vanguard America's website, according to The Diamondback, the school's student newspaper.

That website now belongs to another racist group called Patriot Front, which reportedly split from Vanguard America last year. Patriot Front posted photos to Twitter of different posters it hung in New York City last month that also encouraged Americans to report "illegal aliens" to ICE.

(Lead image: City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer ripped up a poster encouraging U.S. citizens to report undocumented immigrants to ICE out of "civic duty." Photo and video from Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer via Twitter)